Poetry for Pleasure is an anthology representative of the great wealth of English poetry written between the sixteenth century and the present day. The book is arranged in fifteen sections, each devoted to a different theme. The first two of these comprise verse written mainly for, or about, the young or the very young. Subsequent sections deal with such varied subjects as country pleasures, love and friendship, music and dancing, the sea, time, age, sleep, and death. In fact they cover almost the whole range of human experience. Inevitably, a number of poems will be familiar to most readers, but some will be new to many.

New prose poems by Gary Young, author of No Other Life.

Yusef Komunyakaa is best known for "Neon Vernacular", which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam. "Pleasure Dome" gathers over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa'swork, 25 early uncollected poems and 18 new poems.