This new collection of essays on American poetry by Donald Davie (1922-1995) displays again "the scale and range" of one of the great "understanders" of poetry of our century, here fulfilling his chosen role as bridge-builder between poets, poetries...

"Transparently accomplished", as John Kerrigan has written: "his work displays the kind of internal 'itinerary' which (in Mandelstam's language) is the mark of achieved poetry". This book selects the best work from thirty years of that itinerary, a...

Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Gluck has been exploring a form of her own invention, the book-length sequence which combines worldly dramas and ecstatic utterance, a literal world and the worlds of legend and myth that impart meaning or irony to our wa...

Phaedra is a new verse translation of Racine's Phaedre. As with his acclaimed and often-performed Cyrano de Bergerac (published by Carcanet in 1992), so here Edwin Morgan has chosen to translate this greatest of French classic tragedies, with its mea...

There have been many dictionaries explaining to laymen the technical terms of sailing. None of them, until now, has systematically set out to explore their etymology and evolution. "The Language of Sailing" demonstrates how many of the English and Am...

Hugh Latimer (1490-1555), with Cranmer and Ridley, is remembered as one of the most notable martyrs of the Reformation. He was utterly fearless in an age of grim persecutions, more noted for candour than tact. Once he had been convinced of the truth...

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most promising poets and composers of his generation. In September 1922, however, he was certified insane and committed to a mental asylum. he remained there until his death, fo...

Edwin Morgan's original "Selected Poems" was published in 1985. It became something of a classic, selling in excess of 20,000 copies. But 1985 is a long time in the world of so inventive and irrepressible a writer as Edwin Morgan. He has published a...

"They are perhaps most mysterious, even to me", wrote Rainer Maria Rilke of the Sonnets to Orpheus, "in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me – the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down". Rilke, born in...

Mimi Khalvati's "Selected Poems" draws on her three Carcanet collections, "In White Ink" (1991), "Mirrorwork" (1995) and "Entries on Light" (1997). It provides us with the essential Khalvati, from the ambitiously wrought early formal poems, full of P...