This is an inspirational guide to studying poetry, exciting for beginners and experienced readers alike. A tour de force of succinctness, clarity, and adroit cross referencing, it is not only a tour through every conceivable feature a reader could need - from the sonnet form to synloepha, from sesta rima to syllepsis - but an imaginative and arresting exposition of the way poets have used them, whether Dante or David Jones, Sappho or E E Cummings, Milton or Deryn Rees-Jones. Rhian Williams aims to set readers free by building confidence with genre and form, metre and rhyme, demystifying technicalities and terminology, providing follow up reading, and appealing to curiosity and the sense of experiment. She urges readers to read poems aloud, to listen to sounds, mark rhythms, and imagine themselves inside the poem before moving out to its history and context. After reading this book newcomers to poetry will learn to love reading and writing about it.