Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) is one of the best loved Australian poets of the twentieth century – and a fierce prankster, who published poems under half-a-dozen names and identities. By turns poignant, sensuous and mischievous, passionately musical, her...

With Jerusalem as its epicentre, "The Maltese Dreambook" extends Gabriel Levin's quarter-century-long ramble through the Levant, his adopted homeland. On a Greek island, in the desert wastes of southern Jordan and in Malta, whose Stone Age temples se...

Ros Barber's second book forms a meditation on human loss; it is a more personal and autobiographical collection than her first, described by Neil Rollinson as "an honest, unflinching and hugely satisfying debut". Sarah Law described her as "a 'tradi...

In hospital for a scan, Jon Glover became fascinated by the ways in which Magnetic Resonance Imaging creates pictures of the hidden processes of the nervous system. It could express what is already written within the human body, in all organic life a...

MUDs are Multi-User Dimensions, online worlds created by language alone. In a collection that throws Irish poetry into the electronic age, John Redmond explores the Internet and car culture, MUDs and moods. New forms of post-industrial community enab...

As a child of deaf adults (CODA), Pia Taavila first learned to communicate when her deaf father fingerspelled the names of toys in her crib and her mother showed her the signs for objects in picture books. From this primary visual orientation, in com...

Bei Dao, described by Michael Hofmann as "one of the great poets of our time", has gained international acclaim for his haunting interior poetic landscapes. Now he brings to the essay the elliptical precision of his poetry, combined with a diarist's...

China's tradition of rivers-and-mountains poetry is the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with the idea of wilderness. David Hinton traces the tradition in his concise introductions to the nineteen poets featured here, who included virt...

Wordsworth's "meanest flower that blows" suggested to him "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears". The lyrics, elegies, songs and ghazals in Mimi Khalvati's new book pay attention to things the imagination generally disregards, an attention t...

Few novelists have taken films as seriously, or been as closely involved in so many aspects of the film business, as Graham Greene. His experience included producing, performing, script-writing and adaptation. And twenty years before he wrote the scr...