Sinead Morrissey's fourth collection explores fertility, pregnancy, and the landscape of early childhood in poems that are by turns tender, exuberant and unsettling. Pitched against the envious dead, these diverse narratives of birth and its conseque...

The first part of Thomas McCarthy's book collects his recent short lyrics. Part Two daringly recreates a forgotten period in the Anglo-Irish world: a Big House in the years between the World Wars, a FitzGerald ("Geraldine") family that has tilled the...

Polder begins with extinction. The dust that existed from the first instant of creation is the dust to which in the end all creation will return, "sinking under its weight". The prose-poem "Dust' was written when the poet was being treated for alcoho...

"Rejoicing" is a magnificent, celebratory gathering of Stanley Moss's poetry from six decades. He is one of America's finest poets and this collection demonstrates why. Marilyn Hacker wrote of his work, "Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanit...

"Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets" is the first anthology in decades to present to British readers the remarkable freshness and vitality of New Zealand poetry. Starting in the mid-1980s, it captures turning points in the work of Allen Curnow and...

"Painting Rain" explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape...

"Reynard the Fox" is one of the great poems of the English countryside and rural life. The headlong dash of John Masefield's narrative carries the reader on an exhilarating chase through the meadows and copses of the landscape the poet loved, pursued...

John Ashbery's translations of Pierre Martory's poems offer a unique insight into the work of the French poet, and into the creative dialogue between two poets. Ashbery describes Martory's writing as "touched by the gaiety of Rene Clair's films and t...

Matthew Mead began publishing his poetry in the 1960s. By then he had, as Peter Riley noted, "located a sense of poetry for which he drew widely from Anglo-American writing, avoiding any programmes of allegiance". Over the years he has published five...

"King Driftwood" teems with characters and narratives: treasure hunters, drug dealers, small-town eccentrics – blue-rinsed Mrs Dawes-Llewellyn, John the Song and Mothman, George Bush and Saddam Hussein glimpsed at a phantasmagoric funfair; the mourni...