In "The Other Mountain" Rowan Williams relives moments of intense trial, when women and men are transformed in spirit, and sometimes in body also. He not only reads the signs as they appear in nature and history: he lives them through language. Imagi...

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world's religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and...

"I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely". In the poems collected in this book, Rowan Williams writes of many things. He visits the Holy Land, commemorates the deaths of...

The poems in Rory Waterman's debut collection "Tonight the Summer's Over" explore belonging and estrangement with precise resonance. Born in Belfast and brought up in rural Lincolnshire, Waterman turns an unblurred eye on his own childhood, caught be...

Fallen warriors, a conquistador, a cat; an 1815 namesake; a father, a mother, a childhood rhyme; a boxer, an explorer, a stuffed Welsh fish... "Frieze" entertains a host of shadows, all the dead who inhabit our lives. It is at once elegy and explorat...

The Lectures on Poetics Series at the University of Frankfurt VI has hosted many illustrious speakers at its lectern, including Ingeborg Bachmann, Theodor Adorno, and Heinrich Boll. At the beginning of 2007, Urs Widmer – described by the "Independent...

An iconic work of Western art, Fragonard's "L'escarpolette", or "The Swing", is often reproduced and its famous foreground image of a young woman losing her slipper mid-swing is widely familiar. In "Reckitt's Blue", John Wilkinson explores that well-...

"A poem must say something that is true, in the same way that a scientific article makes true assertions. And, similarly, these assertions must not be trivial, they should appeal to the emotions of the reader" – Nachoem M. Wijnberg in an interview T...

At the heart of Joshua Weiner's new book is an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. It fuses the poet's point of view with Walt Whitman's to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tri...

This book distils an adult lifetime into the intense magic of poetry. Wallace-Crabbe is a nature poet in the broadest possible sense: his poems, ranging widely in tone and subject-matter, seek above all to convey the richness and variety of our world...