Tony Connor's new collection, his first in nine years, continues his powerful, alert investigations into the past and present, rooted in specific times and places. Memories of a Lancashire childhood mix here with tales from contemporary America and a...

Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems have been astonishing popular with children and adults alike since the first publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, and have influenced the work of a host of modern writers, including James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges...

John Clare was an assiduous practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last few years before his institutionalisation in 1837, fist at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of...

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) was one of the most popular English poets of his time. "He must always", said Dryden, "be thought a great poet". His work was held in high esteem by Milton, Johnson (who wrote one of the greatest of his Lives about him), Po...

John Clare (1793-1864): Born the son of a thresher at Helpston, Northamptonshire, John Clare is a rural poet and story teller. He is a poet of spiritual originality, as compelling at his best as Crabbe and Wordsworth as a story teller in verse. He wa...

"The King of Britain's" Daughter was specially commissioned as the text of an oratorio for the 1993 Hay on Wye Festival, and is based on the story in the "Mabinogion" of Branwen, the daughter of Llyr. Family legend associated the story with Fforest,...

Clare records that it was "a very old custom among villagers in summer time to stock a piece of greensward full of field flowers & place it a an ornament in their cottages which ornaments are called Midsummer Cushions". This "cottage custom" suggeste...

This is the first complete edition of the poetry of Norman Cameron (1905-1953) to appear in Britain. As Jonathan Barker writes in his introduction, it is "the product of the shared transatlantic enthusiasm of Warren Hope and myself for the work of a...

In this unusual selection, one of the great poet-critics of the twentieth century encounters and re-appraises the greatest poet-critic of the nineteenth. William Empson, assisted by David Pirie, chooses from Coleridge's vast and uneven ouevre the sal...