I nearly consigned this book to the flames when I got to page 5, ie, the third poem in the book  actually, an extract from a poem, hitherto unknown to me, by TS Eliot, called The Wasteland. That Sheers and, even worse, Penguin, could let this schoolboy howler through to the paperback edition is incredible, a testament to ignorance and slovenly editing.

Before I recommend it, let me tear into it some more. This is apparently a tie-in from a BBC4 series written and narrated by the disgustingly good-looking Sheers. Nothing wrong with that and, indeed, there's very little that suggests the tie-in, apart from the odd mention in the introduction, which itself has an oddly straight-to-TV-audience tone. But there is something very middlebrow about the book. There's no Geoffrey Hill. There's no Basil Bunting. Those two poets alone, among the greatest ever to have wrestled with the concept of landscape, in general and specifically, could have usefully filled up a quarter of the book.

There is, though, plenty of Clare, Betjeman, Thomases RS and Edward, Wordsworth, Hughes and Hardy, each with five poems. (Funny how Betjeman's snobbery is revealed: as well as "Slough" we have "Shetland 1973", warning of "the briefcased oilmen with their wily talk; / Soon we shall see, ranged all along the voes / Their hard-faced wives in ranch-type bungalows." Do we, then? Did we ever?)

The book is divided into six general sections: London and Cities, Villages and Towns, Mountains and Moorland, Islands, Woods and Forests, and Coast and Sea. Do not attempt to use this book as a kind of gazetteer: you will be frustrated. Sheers recommends "reading each section in order, starting with the first poem and finishing with the last", which shows a touching faith in the way people read anthologies. You can sort of see why he suggests this, though, as Adam O'Riordan's "Manchester" is followed by Philip Larkin's "I Remember, I Remember" (set in Coventry), which is followed by Louis MacNeice's "Birmingham", which is followed by 14 from various poets about London. There's meant to be a "conversation" going on between the poems, you see, which is, I suppose, one reason no dates are given for their composition, unless it's in the title, and why Wordsworth's lines about St Paul's come across as a pointed rebuke to the artlessness of Joanna Baillie's lines on the same building (cf Mary Robinson's "London's Summer Morning", which no amount of wishful thinking is going to turn into a good poem).

There's really no such thing as a worthless poetry anthology, especially if it has an idea behind it, as this one has. And there are many, many things I am glad to have read here that I wouldn't have run across otherwise. Paul Henry's "The Village, a State of Untruth" ("For Please Drive Carefully, read / Enter At Your Own Risk"), UA Fanthorpe's "At Swarkestone" ("A 'So what?' sort of place, / A place that, / like a mirror, makes you see"), and William Fowler's "Sonet. In Orknay", a discovery that accounts for about half the price of the book alone: "so this I see, quhaire ever I remove, / I chainge bot sees, but can not chainge my love." (For some reason, the section on islands is my favourite. Is this because poems themselves are like islands, as opposed to the continental expanses of fiction?)

So, in the end, this is a worthy stab at giving us a poetic portrait of the British Isles. It's as good at representing the urban experience as the rural one, and its selections do not try to portray some imaginary Arcadia: the selection from Crabbe's "The Village" is, like Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village"  unfortunately if understandably not included  very good at puncturing illusions. There actually is, after a while, a sense of a conversation going on here, or, at the very least, the competing claims of various regions for our attention. Even the poems that don't at first sight look as though they belong here at all make you think about their inclusion. For, as Larkin reminded us at the end of "I Remember, I Remember", "Nothing, like something, happens anywhere."