What a great concept, but sadly this didn’t work for me. I had a different idea in mind and would’ve loved to have completed poems and not to many analyses and snippets of larger texts to just dip in.
I’f You’re a history buff of interested in literature, this
will probably be much more of your alley :)

This is a must-read for all history and/or poetry lovers. It provides insights into each featured historical periods and poem. I was only expecting an anthology of poems when I requested this and it proved to be an extremely pleasant surprise. Am definitely getting this one when it is published.

I enjoyed this book a lot. It was a bit different from what I expected, but I liked it nonetheless.

Some of the poems in this book are extracts. I did not have an issue with this as an English Literature graduate; I am used to reading and analysing extracts. I think the poems chosen had a good variety too, from race, gender, and more, including child labour. I enjoyed seeing some of my favorites that are a must-read, such as “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from the sixth section. 

I cannot speak for the time frame before and after my area of research as a historian, but I did not see any historical mistakes in the sections 9th-14th, or they weren't big enough for me to notice.

In the explanations, the author gives quite a lot of information, depending on the poem, that ranges from the background of the period, contemporaries such as other countries, and even from the future, which includes other media like movies. I think this helps the reader to research further on the poems that they could be interested in. Obviously, the author cannot fit all of history in this book, but I believe the explanations provide good information that the reader can follow up on.

The free pages for the poems chosen by the readers at the end were a sweet idea. I hope people who buy this book will see it and fill it with their own choices, as I definitely would.

My main problem with the book was its layout. I have tried to read it on my Kindle, but the formatting was not good for it, so I downloaded the PDF version. It was better for the prose, but when it comes to poetry, I am not so sure. I like that the author added the original versions and the modernized versions of certain poems. However, the two columns are very close to each other and a bit hard to follow. I like to see the sentences in the same layout as the way they are written originally, so the way the sentences are cut sometimes bothered me. I was also unsure about the introduction first, then the poem, then the explanation. While I like introductions for preparations, the poems do not feel highlighted because of it. I think seeing the poems first would create more emphasis on the poems, but that would also break the book. As I have stated, I do not think this choice is bad, just maybe would be better to highlight the poems themselves.

The book has so much chance for a general audience with fewer explanations, but with full-page illustrations, and seeing the poems first would be more appealing. However, I think the general audience can still enjoy it, especially if they are casual enjoyers of history or poetry or both.

Nevertheless, I like the idea of this book and enjoyed the poems selected for this book. I think there can even be a second addition to it if the author wishes to do so. 

Thanks to Netgalley UK, Penguin Press UK/Allen Lane and Catherine Clarke for this advanced reader copy.

I love the concept of this book (truly, I'm jealous I didn't think of it myself!): using poetry as 'a time machine' to tell a story of England at various points in our history. But, while this is a readable history of moments from the 8th century to our present, the poetry feels like it's not actually treated as literature, let alone poetry, and just as another textual historical source which acts as a jumping off point for Clarke's historical essays.

For example, much of the poetry that is used here is not, strictly speaking, a poem, meaning a complete text, but a short extract from a much longer work: so we have snippets from Chaucer's 'The Wife of Bath's Tale', extracts from Saxon and Viking chronicles, from long medieval poems like 'Pearl', individual speeches from Shakespeare's plays, stanzas from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' and so on. Important texts like 'September Song' are used to kickstart an exploration of what English people knew about the Holocaust just after the war and while it's fascinating to hear about Richard Dimbleby's documentary about Belsen and Alan Garner as a child sneaking in to his local cinema to watch the film that was rated for adults only, all of this would have been the same whether or not it had been ushered in by 'September Song'.

Clarke explains this book nicely via an interdisciplinary framework of how literature and history might overlap but while literary scholars usually historicise the poetry (or literary texts more broadly) that they're working/writing on, historians too often read poetry 'straight' as if it's documentary evidence rather than full of literary devices there to create mood and meaning. Clarke occasionally draws attention to how a line might be interpreted but there's little here of reading poetry as poetry written in metre, and using assonance, rhythm, rhyme, voice, mood, allegory etc. for literary affect.

I'm probably being professionally picky here and if this book opens up both poetry and English history to a broader audience then I'll be cheering it on!