A curio really. Touchstones 5 is part of a mid-century British educational series designed to introduce students to modern poetry through carefully curated selections and critical framing.

The volume gathers work from major twentieth-century poets—among them T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Ted Hughes—alongside commentary intended to guide close reading.

These books were staples of English classrooms for decades: slim anthologies that quietly shaped how poetry was taught in Britain and across Commonwealth education systems. They sit somewhere between textbook and literary sampler—less a collectible anthology than a small record of how the canon was packaged and transmitted in the 1970s.

Today they read almost like cultural artefacts: snapshots of the pedagogical voice that once introduced generations of readers to modern poetry.