`Shadow and Bone' is Peter Levi's first collection of poems since `Private Ground' (1981), apart from two small books of `lamentations' - formal elegies for friends - `The Echoing Green' and `Shakespeare's Birthday'. It is a rich and diverse collection, varied in subject and verse-forms. There are sequences about railway posters and America, poems for friends and fellow scholars or poets, poems about marriage and the natural world, epigrams, a magnificent long poem on the meaning of Christmas, and meditative lyrics.