I have made no secret where my allegiance lies: I’m a cat lady, through and through. But poets have done their best to turn my head! When I edited The Book of Dog Poems, I wrote the introduction below. Dog people, come tell me, am I speaking your language?

“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs,” Charles de Gaulle is purported to have said. If you have shared your life with a dog, you’ll understand. It’s hard to imagine even the most committed lover or the most adoring family member shouting with dizzy joy and excitement every time you come home from the shops. Yet your dog will never let your arrival pass without wild celebration, or roll its eyes when you suggest spending time together. To live with a dog is to have not just a friend, but a dedicated and enthusiastic cheerleader in your corner.

The verses in The Book of Dog Poems celebrate dogs of all ages – from the frisking puppy to the grizzled and venerable hound. They imagine a dog’s eye view of the world – the tasty puddles, the stories written in scent, the pity felt – as Chesterton’s dog Quoodle says – for the noselessness of poor man, who can’t smell the birds’ breath.

The almost infinite variety of dogs, too, is found within these pages, from the chic and cherished ‘petits chiens de Paris’ immortalised by Helen Burke to the rangy wolfish loner roaming the town’s wild outskirts, maddened by the moon. Their expressions are both keenly observed and lovingly relayed, including the curious attention of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘Dog’, head cocked quizzically like ‘a living questionmark’.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and D H Lawrence are among the writers who are – often somewhat rudely – awoken by their pets. Lawrence’s incorrigible Bibbles tears in ‘like a little black whirlwind’. Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley’s poem ‘We Meet At Morn, My Dog and I’ beautifully describes an early morning scenario many dog owners will recognise: the tail drumming on the bedroom door, the half-shout, and the desperate scuffle before his pet flings itself into the room. Owner and dog greet each other – one yawning and the other in an ecstasy of excitement, swearing ‘fresh love and fealty’ for the day ahead.

Writers have here captured the mad rapture of a dog galloping, racing ‘across morning-wet grass, high-fiving the day’ as in Lisa Oliver’s ‘Flight’. W H Auden once said, “In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag”. One of the reasons our dogs inspire such happiness is their deep and physical expressions of delight. Their naked enthusiasm is a balm in a cynical and sardonic age, in which we sometimes feel we have shed simple joy with childhood. The ecstasy they radiate is infectious. Harold Monro’s wonderful ‘Dog’ lists a litany of easy pleasures: the thrill of a walk, then heading home to the further joy of food to be bolted, drowsing to the chat of your people and sinking, untroubled, into the ‘bed-delicious hours of night’. Dogs remind us – as in Mark Doty’s ‘Golden Retrievals’ – to live with both feet in the present, to taste and savour the day without fretting about yesterday or tomorrow, to cherish the here and now.

The pleasure of exercising the dog has its place in these pages, too. There are roads to ramble and woods to wander, puddles and ponds to taste and a world of exciting smells to track in the countryside, and fire hydrants and flea markets to tempt the sophisticated urban canine.

Not all these dogs are well trained. There is plenty of mischief in these mutts. Dorothy Parker, Rupert Brooke, Jo Shapcott and Dylan Thomas celebrate the naughty dogs, the dirty dogs, the snappers and the scrappers, the destroyers of shoes and newly made beds and nippers of calves. But here, too, are working dogs like the trusty huskies, strong and solid and ready to run.

Dogs remind us that to be with those we love is the most holy of pleasures. The agony of being apart is expressed, beautifully, in several of these poems, as is the utterly joyous nature of the subsequent reunion, for both parties. The loyalty of the pet who awaits long, lonely years like Pope’s loyal Argus is matched by that of the suburban pup to whom the working day seems a desolate century, and both are transfigured with wagging happiness to be reunited with their people.

We close this collection with farewells. Poets have, for hundreds and hundreds of years, been moved to remember their canine companions with some of the most moving verse ever written. The death of such a staunch friend and constant companion is no small sorrow, the poets tell us. It’s right to mourn them as they deserve.

I hope there will be a cocked head, an excited squeak, a trailing tongue or a bright eye here you recognise. Our dogs can’t know how many passionate pages they have unwittingly inspired, but as long as there are walks and woods and puddles and petting and, afterwards, warm feet to sprawl on while you read about them, it will have been a good dog day.

 The Book of Dog Poems is illustrated throughout with Sarah Maycock’s beautiful pictures.