"Bugs" are the insects we live alongside, necessary and unsettling; they're the fears, the ailments and spies that keep us wide awake at night. The stories in Antony Dunn's third collection range from the microscopic lives of parasitic worms to the l...

This sequence of poems in three voices introduces a ghostly eternal triangle whose lines are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. A man and two women explore their memories in conversational poems which, in their combination...

"Continental Shelf" traces a journey, across continents and from youth to maturity. It moves from memories of childhood in Guyana, through a long elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2006, to the reflective closing sect...

"Over", Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta..." In these and other pieces Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflectio...

Thanks to its colourful cast of characters and gritty portrayal of street life in Victorian London, Dickens Oliver Twist has captured readers hearts for over 150 years. Todays children will love it too. Oliver, a poor orphan, escapes the miserable wo...

"A Little Book of Hours" takes as its starting points John Donne's "No man is an island" and St Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is...

Baroque in its extravagance of language, in its delight in the bizarre and the prodigious, Peter Davidson's collection is a cabinet of curiosities, a world of ruined palaces, ghostly gardens and the fragile marvels of a secret past. It moves between...

Bei Dao, described by Michael Hofmann as "one of the great poets of our time", has gained international acclaim for his haunting interior poetic landscapes. Now he brings to the essay the elliptical precision of his poetry, combined with a diarist's...

Dick Davis's seventh collection contains poems as intelligent and graceful as ever – and as immediate in their impact, as rewarding when savoured at leisure. Their complexities engage rather than bemuse the reader as Davis addresses subjects as vario...

Tom Disch's first collection of poems for ten years presents a dazzling variety show of inventive wit. Gavin Ewart called his last title from Anvil "an outstanding book, and very enjoyable". Disch's+Q174 serious gift for humour permeates poems by tur...