Book excerpt: "This new pocketbook selection of 100 essential poems from the trilogy is a Staying Alive travel companion. As well as selecting favourite poems from the trilogy - readers' and writers' choices as well as his own favourites - editor Neil Astley provides background notes on the poets and poems. The essential poems are all about being human, being alive and staying alive: about love and loss; fear and longing; hurt and wonder; war and death; grief and suffering; birth, growing up and family; time, ageing and mortality; memory, self and identity... all of human life in a hundred highly individual, universal poems"--