What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system – "suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse", in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in "Poetry and Its Others", Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemp...

For sale in CIS only! Overlooked by many as mere propaganda, poetry offers an unfettered insight into the wider worldview of the Afghan Taliban. This collection of over two hundred poems draws upon Afghan tradition and the recent past as much as upo...

"Imelda thinks she's killed her mother by wishing she was dead. Haunted, she doesn't want to wish the same fate on Justin, her mercurial and controlling twice-widowed father, owner of McConnell's bar and shop. When Imelda's two older sisters, Bertha...

"P L A C E" begins with a poem dated 5 June 2009, located at St Laurent Sur Mer, better known by its code name Omaha Beach, one of the sites of the American landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944. It is the starting point for a book of poems written in...

"Paralogues", which takes its title from the Greek word for "ballads", is the British debut of an original Canadian poet and editor. Evan Jones explores Greek mythology, Roman and Byzantine history, art and travel, from contemporary perspectives. The...

Neil Powell's seventh Carcanet collection explores the deep roots of identity: family histories we inherit, memories we carry, the casual decisions and wrong turnings that add up to make us who we are. At the heart of the book is a compelling narrat...

Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award-winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in "The Poet's Freed...

"Petrarch deserves to be valued as a real man, a careful thinker, a good poet", writes Nicholas Kilmer introducing his enlarged selection of the great Italian poet who lived from 1304 to 1374. Free in form yet holding close to the central impulses of...

"A blighted tree is said to be planet-struck. Similarly epilepsy, paralysis, lunacy and so on are attributed to the malignant influence of planets" – Brewer's "Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" Much of the material in Julian Turner's third collection w...

For more than half a century, Chinese-Western comparative literature has been recognized as a formal academic discipline, but critics and scholars in the field have done little to develop a viable, common basis for comparison between these disparate...