Four times each year, the Poetry Book Society selects the best poetry titles being published and asks the poet to write 500 words on their own work at the time of its publication. The PBS bulletin has published some of the most revealing, candid and insightful statements these poets have ever made. DON'T ASK ME WHAT I MEAN selects the best of these pieces. A genuine Who's Who of late 20th-century verse - Auden, Raine, Gunn, Hughes (who also contributes a remarkable short essay on Sylvia Plath's Ariel), Heaney, R.S. Thomas, Betjeman, Larkin, Merwin, Hecht, Paul Muldoon, Craig Raine, Norman McCaig, Geoffrey Hill, Tom Paulin, Derek Mahon, Sean O'Brien, up to and including contemporary notables such as Simon Armitage, Shapcott, Glyn Maxwell, Lavinia Greenlaw, Carol Ann Duffy, Wendy Cope, Michael Donaghy and Paul Farley.