"An Ordinary Dog" is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision. They bear sceptical witness to – what? To the affecting ordinariness of human needs, to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about...

David Ward started writing poetry in his late thirties. His poems are the work of an historian who knows how environments and events, on a family or a national scale, shape and change us, and how we live with moral and psychological consequences of a...

One hundred years after his death, Tolstoy still inspires controversy with his notoriously complex narrative strategies. This book explores how and why Tolstoy has mystified interpreters and offers a look at his most famous works of fiction.

Eleanor Wilner's poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and pr...

These lines, from the title poem of "Waterloo Teeth", set an historical aftermath in vivid motion. John Whale's first book of poems explores our capacity to articulate the pain and pleasure of such experiences – our own, and those of others distant f...

Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of Australia's best loved, and essential, poets. Devoted to place, responsive to landscape and to the violence done to the land and its inhabitants, John Kinsella says in his introduction",she looked inwards into Aust...

Robert Wells writes poems of memory, a memory so intense it conjures places, objects and desires with their original force and freshness. The high points of a life are celebrated, and personal memories and the common memories of a culture are brought...

From its title, which runs to 101 words in full, to its wordless concrete poems; from its World Cup fixture list to its transformations of four-letter words, "We needed coffee but..." is audacious, mischievous, even outrageous. As in his award-winnin...

Wang Wei (701-761 AD) is often spoken of, with his contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu, as one of the three greatest poets in China's 3,000-year poetic history. He was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classic...

"I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me – or else that I didn't live much longer!" Clarity or Death! takes its title from this letter of Wittgenstein's. That desire for clarity in our knowledge of t...