Annie Freud emerges in this bookas one of the most startlingly original poets to have emerged for many years. Such are the imaginative risks she takes that Freud might be called an experimental poet, were her poetry not so effortlessly successfulthese wise, funny, sly, erotic, and lightning-witted poems all find their marks with unerring accuracy. From the astonishing and highly discomfiting dramatic monologue of the title poem, through love poems of great worldly tenderness, to a soliloquy from the inventor of the individual fruit pie, the reader is both challenged and royally entertained from first to last. "The Best Man That Ever Was" is one of the most important poetic debuts of the last decade."