Rex Andrews is a versatile poet, much-travelled scholar and creative teacher of language and literature whose poetry is constantly exploring different forms, styles, subjects and emotions. Words for all Seasons is dedicated to a barrister, a bishop and an editor of Punch. John Morthimer Q.C., the RT. Rev. Geoffrey Powell and writer Alan Coren were judges for the 1998 Cancer Research Campaign Competition. When they awarded the poem Spinning Jenny first prize of 3000 entries worldwide, their unexpected encouragement was the spur for writing the majority of poems in this anthology.

Subsequent prize-winning poems include My War Effort (free verse), Way to the White House (Chaucerian roundel), Bon Appetite (extended Clerihew), Earth (rhyming stanzas), and The Silver Thread (Spenserian stanzas). Additionally in this anthology the sonnet, hauku, tanka, somonka, cinquain, villanelle, clerihew, sestina and threnody are all represented - their styles ranging from comic to tragic, from satiric to elegiac and from parodic to poignant.