'This is the night mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order...' -- W.H. Auden Wordsworth was the first laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed against them, and against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to holiday hordes ('On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway'). His dismay was echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the train has become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved English poems - Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', or Philip Larkin's 'Whitsun Weddings' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and waiting rooms, while locomotion has inspired some of the most characteristic poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson, Hardy and MacNeice, Betjeman and Auden (whose 'Night Mail' was written to accompany a 1930s GPO documentary about the postal express from Euston to Glasgow). Co-edited by two of our most distinguished poets, Train Songs offers a round tour - from Wordsworth to Hugo Williams and beyond - starting from the poetry of departures and brief encounters, but taking in the American Blues, the troop trains of two world wars, and the addiction to speed which characterised the European revolutions. Trains have carried the freight of history from the Industrial Revolution onwards - the Armstice in 1918 was signed in a railway carriage, the death camps were organised around train timetables - and this new anthology shows how the train in all its forms has exercised a unique hold upon our collective unconscious.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. He is the author of Nil Nil (1993), God's Gift to Women (1997) - winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize - and Landing Light (2003), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Rain, his most recent collection, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2009, the same year that he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Sean O'Brien is a poet, critic, broadcaster, editor and professor of creative writing at Newcastle University. His many books include a verse version of Dante's Inferno, a novel, Afterlife, and six prize-winning poetry collections. The most recent, The Drowned Book, won both the 2007 Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes.