Francois Villon was born in Paris in 1431. His life was blighted by destitution and ill health, robbery and murder, torture and exile. While we do not know what became of Villon after his 32nd year, the poems he produced in just six years capture in...

"He is an exquisite poet, a deliverer of nations... a father of light", said Ezra Pound in 1918 of Jules Laforgue. Among the most innovative of poets in the French language, Laforgue was an important influence on the young T. S. Eliot. Part symbolist...

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...

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...

This is the first major selection to appear in Britain from one of the finest poets of the Silver Age of Russian literature. The rich, exotic poetry of Nikolay Gumilyov (1886-1921) draws on his extensive travels in Europe and Africa. Its deepest conc...

Louise Gluck's award-winning collection of essays is the work of a major poet and a distinguished teacher. She writes of her upbringing, her human and literary antecedents, and she dwells with a scrupulous eye on details of lives and poems, until she...

Professor Saraiva's multi-volume "History of Portugal" is a celebrated scholarly standard work. Yet, when he published a one-volume Historia Concisa, it proved a run-away best seller in Portugal, and the television series that went with it became a c...

To mark National Poetry Day 1997, Nick Rennison, who compiled the "Waterstone's Guide to Poetry", and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, invited a number of contemporary poets to select work by poets of the past, beginning in the late f...

"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...

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 (...