Sophie Hannah is one of Britain's best-loved poets, a disarmingly witty, sharp-eyed chronicler of everyday life and its peculiarities. She is also an internationally successful author of psychological crime fiction, and has written the first new Herc...

According to the seventeenth-century herbarium "The Garden of Eden", a "missel-child" is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree – a changeling, perhaps, "whereof many strange things are conceived". Helen Tookey's first full collect...

A chronicle of motherhood and infancy, Brady's "Mutability" marks the excesses of attention and love in this unique relationship, the gradual unfurling of one person into two. In poems and prose, these scripts offer a "model of duplicity", revealing...

"Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside" occupies a distinctive and somewhat notorious place within George Meredith's already unique body of work. Modern Love is now best known for the emotionally intense sonnet cycle which Meredith's own cont...

In this beautifully translated memoir Jacques Reda chooses the height of the mirabelle season in Lorraine for a long-delayed visit to his home town, Luneville. For France's distinguished "poete flaneur" – motorized for such occasions on his antiquate...

Winner of the 2006 Nordic Council's Literature Prize, Swedish writer Goran Sonnevi is undoubtedly one of the most important poets working today. In "Mozart's Third Brain", his thirteenth book of verse, he attempts "a commentary on everything" – polit...

"The only end of writing", Dr Johnson said, "is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it". Misprint offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-...

Cosmopolitan, hybrid and eloquent, modern Canadian poetry is still, for many readers outside Canada, one of the great undiscovered terrains of world literature. "Modern Canadian Poets" sets out to end that neglect, redefining the connections between...

In "Medicine Show", inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and...

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...