"Rooster", Gerry McGrath's second book of poems, observes with painterly precision the commonplaces of our experience, creating landscapes of emotional range and intensity. Biography, history, geography are interwoven in potent new forms: a lover's f...

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is the poet of the night world, of the inexplicable, the uncanny. His poems do not analyse, they do not explain: they exist with the intensity of hallucinations. In the breathtakingly seductive beauty of "To Helen" – "Like...

In "Red House", her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants l...

With the economy of proverbs and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence "Raptors" depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grot...

"Rough music" is the old English name for a custom of public scapegoating. This is a book full of disturbing musical echoes, in which brilliant renewals of carol, charm, folksong and ballad explore themes of violence, loss and belonging. Fiona Sampso...

Teasing, funny and celebratory – "Rays" is a wry and tender lover's gift. Continuing Richard Price's virtuosic playfulness of form, it improvises on the formal shape of sonnet and canzone, charging them with the energy of blues and rock, glimpsing na...

"Rejoicing" is a magnificent, celebratory gathering of Stanley Moss's poetry from six decades. He is one of America's finest poets and this collection demonstrates why. Marilyn Hacker wrote of his work, "Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanit...

The drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, "was the first word in the world", and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures – the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths...

"Reynard the Fox" is one of the great poems of the English countryside and rural life. The headlong dash of John Masefield's narrative carries the reader on an exhilarating chase through the meadows and copses of the landscape the poet loved, pursued...

Beginning in present-day St Petersburg, "The Russian Jerusalem" explores the landscape of twentieth century Russian literature. In this evocative autobiographical novel, distinguished poet, translator, novelist and biographer Elaine Feinstein moves a...