The 101 poems in Oystercatcher Two, drawn from entries for our inaugural Robert Gray Prize for Poetry and from responses to our call for submissions earlier this year, range widely in theme, mood and form.

You will find here poems of passion and poems of wit, poems of reflection in a private garden, and poems that take us gunrunning in Africa or skydiving and skylarking God-knows-where. Here are poems that bear witness to the mindless cruelty inflicted on our fellow-creatures and poems of awe that celebrate unknowable inner lives. Here, too, are poems that excavate the roots of English in Greece and explore the Yorkshire dialect. And you will find sonnets and haiku, pantoums and ideograms, couplets and tercets and quatrains; prose poems and free verse and patterned forms that have no name.

What unites the collection is a shared commitment to making poems both timeless and timely, intelligent and intelligible, beautiful and urgent.