The opening poem sequence, "Diary of the Last Man", sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its errat...

Over six centuries, Trinity College, Cambridge, has spawned more poets than any other institution. Here are Herbert, Byron, Tennyson, Housman et al : an unparalleled singing school.

Miles Burrows is a poet always in love, and confused – as lovers tend to be – by the inconstant nature of "the other". In this, his second book of poems, published half a century after the first ("A Vulture's Egg", 1966), he is also aware, merrily fo...

HD (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) wrote "Hermetic Definition" at the height of her poetic powers. With her celebrated War Trilogy ("The Walls Do Not Fall", "Tribute to the Angels", and "Flowering of the Rod"), it transcends her earlier purist style, ac...

"City Gate, Open Up" is the lyrical autobiography of China's a memoir legendary poet Bei Dao. Exiled from Beijing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Bei Dao returned to his homeland in 2001 for the first time in over twenty years. The...

"Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family a...

"Raking Light" is Eric Langley's debut collection of poems. Characterised by his rigorous fascination with language's latent etymologies and semantic layers, Langley's poems take their cue from the art conservation technique of "raking light", in whi...

Elaine Feinstein's poems are the harvest of a lifetime in literature. This selection, made by the author herself, gathers work from over half a century of published writing, and is completed by a section of new poems. The selection ranges from early...

"Ach! I misspoke. What I mean to say is this..." In Long Pass, Joey Connolly's first collection, the poet – in love, in puzzlement, in frustration or in elegy – keeps catching himself out, starting again. He wants to speak truthfully. He wants to say...

The Jamaican Poet Laureate Mervyn Morris has had an enormous impact on the literature of the Caribbean. "Peelin Orange" shows why with its wonderful mix of Englishes, its wit, its love of people and places, and its sense of transcendence.