Everyone wants to subscribe to a deed of heroism, especially if the risks are largely imaginary. The headline announcing a daring deed; in the tourist shop a poster promising a spectacular, sun-drenched corrida, and there is a space between the legen...

"Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me", John Ashbery writes early in his new collection. Each sense is wakened up. So are all the spirits. Many whispers, voices chantant dans la coupole: passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, p...

During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the "eminence grise" of postmodernism, championed by W. H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, af...

Dante's masterpiece is a foundation stone of European poetry. It was a profound influence on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and in our own day has inspired Seamus Heaney. It is simple in style yet complex in its layers of meaning, episodic in manner yet...

This volume of verse by Jane Austen and her family contains all the known poems by Jane herself and a selection of work by her sister Cassandra, four of her brothers, her uncle James, her nieces Anna and Fanny and her nephew James Edward. It is clear...

"Selected Poems" draws on John Ash's four acclaimed collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. "A little querulous, perhaps?" Carolyn Kizer asked in the New York Times Book Review. "Never mind. This may be the most auspicious debut of its kind s...

After John Ashbery's 216-page poem "Flow Chart" (1991) and the munificence of "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), "Can You Hear, Bird" provides an A to Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for...

Thanks to T. S. Eliot's "For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order" (1928), the name of the great divine (1555-1626) lives, but his work is little known. This selection, the first for many years, reintroduces Andrewes as a substantial, engagin...

After the "monstrous, magnificent sprawl" of John Ashbery's 216-page poem "Flow Chart" (1991) and the further munificence of "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992), his sixteenth collection, "And the Stars were Shining", includes a thirteen-part title poem which...

The great poet-critic of his age, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is now best remembered as a poet for "Dover Beath", "The Scholar Gypsy" and "Thyrsis". Beside these well-loved and widely anthologised poems, this book places a selection of other poems in...