"Two Jews were traveling on a train..". Many Eastern European jokes – and several of the charming and often hilarious conversations in this book – begin this way. From all regions of the world and from all walks of life, the characters are young and...

Derek Walcott celebrates Les Murray in these terms: "There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacred-ness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational". Fifteen years ago Carcanet published Les Murray...

With his poetry debut "Creek Water Journal" (1974), Robert Gray at once established his name as a highly original "imagist". Even Les Murray, who had until then staunchly refused to review the work of a contemporary was moved to declare: "Mr Gray has...

Volume 22 in the Peppercanister series, this volume features poems by Thomas Kinsella. It includes the poems "Complaint", "Migrant", "Close of Day" and "House Guest".

An Irish monk watching the Black Death edging towards him; a priest at Delphi lamenting the passing of an era; an Assyrian extispicist receiving more inspiration than is good for him – these are some of the voices in James Harpur's third collection....

In its completed form, "Dithyrambs of Dionysus" was Nietzsche's last book. The nine poems of this cycle were composed during 1883-1888 and assembled for publication shortly before his breakdown in 1889. They represent the ultimate visionary poetic st...

The poems in "The Blind Stitch" interweave family, marriage, love and friendship into a larger world of public life. Set in Delanty's native Cork, and in America and India, the book is sewn together with two main conceits. One is that of the leper, w...

Nina Bogin writes of her second collection that she has "drawn together poems that deal with the personal – family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos. U...

Paul Celan is the greatest German-language poet after Rilke. His "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings" evolved an inimitable originality. He dominates literature in the aftermath of the Holocaust by means of his attempt to redeem the human to...

Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical...