What were the poems that William Wordsworth read, the ones that entered his poetic blood stream, whose rhythms he felt on his pulse? What helped to shape him into the poet he became, what did he copy down, what did he advocate to his friends? What de...

"The Wedding Spy" is in truth a double agent, written by a poet who has spent half of her life in the United States and half in the United Kingdom. She understands both countries, but belongs to neither and therefore has an outsider's perspective whe...

The Word Pavilion is a dazzling construction: two-tiered, each tier divided into sections which, while they harmonise with one another, constitute structures in them-selves. To a selection of 110 poems from his eight earlier books, Middleton adds the...

Nina Bogin writes of her second collection that she has "drawn together poems that deal with the personal – family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos. U...

The bewildering range of the Scottish writer Frank Kuppner's work, as evidenced in the ten books he published in the last century, is such that many people did not know where to start. Here, for them, is the obvious place to do so, at least where his...

Dennis O'Driscoll's fifth collection contains poems in which his cool and unflinching vision lends a pungent originality to his treatment of love and death as well as to subjects as diverse – and improbable – as economic boom, business travel and Alz...

"Waiting for the Ferry" is Heather Buck's fourth and finest collection of poems. She has quietly built a reputation for the clarity, concentration and direct emotional weight of her poems. Whether writing about nature, faith, childhood, art, places o...

In "Thomas Hardy and British Poetry" (1972) Donald David identified how deep and durable a mark the Dorset poet left on the English sensibility. Hardy's formal approach and his distinctive tonalities have – for better or worse – affected the choices...

In these taut, sharp poems written mainly in the 1990s, Daniel Weissbort has developed a new way of looking at himself and at the world. Experience, memory, dreams and ordinary life supply the poems with rich and varied subjects. The result is an ale...

These translations were completed in the 1960s and 1970s. "We were trying to make poems in English which, to whatever extent in different cases proved possible, would provide equivalents to the effects of the Russian and German originals. I emphasize...