The Nation's Favourites: Twentieth Century Poems edited by Griff Rhys Jones (BBC, £5.99 in UK)

The British public has rather unpredictable tastes when it comes to poetry, or so this compilation suggests. The Top Ten poems are, in due order, by Jenny Joseph, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas ("Do not go gentle"), Larkin, Auden, Larkin again, Thomas again ("Fern Hill"), Kipling, Betjeman and Betjeman again. Heaney and Ted Hughes also register strongly, but some of the other choices seem as ephemeral as popular music. The old Edwardian anthology favourites are noticeably absent, unless you include Hardy and Housman under that heading. Yeats is rather a fringe figure, relatively speaking, and MacNeice barely makes it with a single poem.