Cricket writer, independent publisher, and editor of the London Magazine, Alan Ross was foremost a poet of high elegance, whose 60 years of work, from his commission in the Royal Navy in 1941 to his death in 2001, is selected and introduced in these pages by his friend David Hughes. Alan Ross invented a poetic genre that extended well beyond occasional verse—poetry as a brief, intense form of journalism, easy to read, quick to stir response. To convey public and private events, Ross sketches a shorthand of his own. At their chosen level, half documentary, half commentary, his images cast a cumulative light on the kicks and miseries of 20th century war and love.