This delicious gathering of poems about cats, from the eighth-century Pangur Ban to the present day, encompasses the arcane and the familiar: work by Apollinaire, Browning, Cowper, Day-Lewis, Dickinson, Eliot, Hardy, Hughes, Keats, Lynch, Mac Neice, Milne, Strachey, Verlaine, Seth and Yeats among others, plus unpublished poems by Francis Stuart and Derek Mahon. They represent a wide variety of responses in writers over the centuries, and are selected by one of Ireland's most respected men of letters.