Fallen warriors, a conquistador, a cat; an 1815 namesake; a father, a mother, a childhood rhyme; a boxer, an explorer, a stuffed Welsh fish... "Frieze" entertains a host of shadows, all the dead who inhabit our lives. It is at once elegy and explorat...

"You must not take me at my word, / you must take me at my lack of word, / you must take me at my music". In "Nuncle Music", a sequence of monologues "spoken" by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Gareth Reeves presents the psychodrama of an artist fo...

This book gathers four decades of writing, published in collections from Brunizem in 1988 to Pure Lizard in 2008. It maps the poet's trajectory, following her exile from her homeland, India, and her mother tongue, Gujarati, to the landscapes and lang...

The poems collected in "No Tear is Commonplace" stage a passionate, curious, and often combative relationship with the world and the forces that shape human life and death. Stanley Moss's range is wide: his poetry recalls the "Adirondack wilderness"...

Beginning with the real-life encounter between the poet John Clare and a Gypsy named Wisdom Smith, David Morley reinvigorates the sonnet sequence to stage the fellowship that develops between the two men. We see the Gypsy and the poet banter, argue a...

We had been instructed to start promptly at six, since the hall was needed again at eight. We pushed through the curtained doorway, like instrumentalists without instruments, and onto the stepped stage. The audience was still coming in. Uncertain of...

The poems in Tara Bergin's debut collection combine sensuous, supple lyricism with the unsettling familiarity of folklore, fairytale and dream. They are inhabited by characters who seem at first widely different from one another, yet share nervous en...

Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-sta...

In 2007 Rebecca Goss's newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein's Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. "Her Birth" is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella's birth, her short life a...

Unreeling like a series of film clips recorded during a stroll through Paris, Raymond Queneau's "Hitting the Streets" is wickedly funny. It is also a bittersweet meditation on the effects of time and memory. "Hitting the Streets" is Queneau's love le...