"Fossil Unicorn is Sally" Purcell's first collection for more than ten years and contains the very best of her work from that period. Drawing on folklore and mediaeval sources, these poems are tense yet fluid in rhythm and diction, and alive with a s...

First published in 1948, "The White Goddess" is one of the century's most extraordinary books. A poet's impassioned introduction to the world of poetry, it is also a great scholar's quest for the meaning of European mythology, a polemic about the rel...

Ivor Gurney's poetic career was unusual. It began in 1917 and 1919 with two small volumes of verse, "Severn and Somme" and "War's Embers". After that, though he planned further books, none appeared until Edmund Blunden's 1954 "Selected Poems". By the...

Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been perplexingly absent from British literary history. In America she has been posthumously launched as the electric-age Blake, she has been translated into French and Italian to great acclaim, and in the "Times Literary Sup...

"Psyche Unbound" is Heather Buck's third collection of poems. Whether writing about war, nature, faith, childhood, art or people, she explores the presences which deepen our daily lives – perceptions of mortality and of the life of the spirit – throu...

Of all Ford Madox Ford's critical works, "The English Novel" (first published in 1930) is his most satisfying. He wrote it while travelling: memory plays a large part. It does not smell of the lamp or the library. Our guide-a major innovative novelis...

Ford Madox Ford wrote poetry during the half-century of his creative life, publishing thirteen books, the first in 1893 under the pseudonym Fenil Haig, the last in 1936 under his own name. This "Selected Poems" shows his development from early, haunt...

Sujata Bhatt's first book of poems, the award-winning "Brunizem", appeared in 1988. In a very short time she has gained recognition as one of the distinct and reckonable new voices. She has things to say about her native India and her native tongue (...

This selection from the first thirty years of Donald Davie's poetry reveals an impassioned spirit advancing from Augustan reserve towards the treacherous, rewarding risks of modernism. As a critic, Helen Vendler writes, "he has drawn a map of moderni...

John Lyly (1554?-1606) has come to seem an incidental player in a literary scene dominated by Shakespeare. But as the sixteenth century drew to a close, the relative status of the two writers was less defined. Lyly was the principal court dramatist...