In this, her boldest collection to date, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. Restricting herself in each poem to sixteen lines, set in coup...

"Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud", the latest collection from enigmatic prose poet Killarney Clary, is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems, each evoking a clear moment in time. The details on which Clary chooses to focus suggest a nar...

On April 8, 1945, several American bomber squadrons were informed that their German targets were temporarily unavailable due to cloud cover. As it was too late to turn back, the assembled ordnance of more than two hundred bombers was diverted to near...

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism – blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm – early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In "Humoring the Body", Gail K...

This beautifully illustrated book consists of a series of encounters with writers, artists and musicians living in London, all of whom are exiles or emigres displaced from their cultural and geographical origins. The subjects include poet John Rety (...

In his foreword to this book, Derek Mahon notes that P. J. Kavanagh's poems "elude the obvious categories. He has never been one of a "school"'. A poet of rural England, yet of Irish ancestry, Kavanagh "has always stood slightly apart". He championed...

Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) is recognised as one of Germany's most powerful poets of the post-war era. She lived and worked first in East Germany, then (after political persecution) in the West, making her home finally in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Her p...

Long celebrated as one of "the Three Crowns" of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) experimented widely with the forms of literature. His prolific and innovative writings – which range beyond the novella, from lyric to epic, from biography to my...

When apartheid ended in 1994, a radiant optimism suggested a bright future for the new, unified South Africa. But today, even in the midst of a vibrant economy, the cumulative effect of the country's corrosive past – three hundred years of colonialis...

Widely revered during his lifetime, Robert Frost continues to enchant readers today, nearly a century after the publication of his first volume of poems, "A Boy's Will". This book presents a splendid selection of 64 poems from across Frost's writing...