Not for sale in Estonia! The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, "Hebdomeros" is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction", no...

Not for sale in Estonia! Aurelia is French poet and novelist Gerard de Nerval's account of his descent into madness – a condition provoked in part by his unrequited passion for an actress named Jenny Colon. One of the original self-styled "bohemian...

"The Ship of Birth" records a father's responses in the time immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a "Ship of Death", so this "Ship of Birth" contains what is significant to the child: the...

Re-inventing Scottish poetry in the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid's war cry was: "Not Burns – Dunbar!" With it, he celebrated William Dunbar (1460?-1520?) as "in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets". His verve,...

This is a book full of one God in many aspects, at once strange and intimate, transcendent and physical, Son of the Almighty yet born of woman. The book, sacramentally shaped, follows three "offices" of the church, leading us towards an altar then re...

Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938), the most influential and controversial Italian poet of the last hundred years, published his masterpiece "Halcyon" in 1903. It is a carefully organized sequence of eighty-eight lyrics which, to gain their full effect,...

One of the greatest poets of the subcontinent, Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) redefined the parameters of Bengali poetry in the wake of the impression left by the work of his more traditional compatriot, Rabindranath Tagore. Idiosyncratic in style and w...

Peter Dale's first full collection in over ten years brings together lyrical poems and monologues in which bleakness and tenderness alternate, conflict and finally coexist. The bitter-sweet shifts of memory are evoked throughout with an understated t...

"How suitable that Dick Davis, who gave us superb English versions of medieval Persian epigrams, should now compose witty, shapely, and polished epigrams that exhibit something like Philip Larkin's mordancy, but with a fine blend of thoughtfulness an...

Donald Davie was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time. His poems do not pre-empt us in the way that protest or political poetry does, though he protests and is political. He was a poet of English perspectives refracted through historical med...