The work of an original, haunting and experimental woman modernist poet is made available again, for the first in 50 years. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in warti...

The first English selection of Jacques Reda's poems draws on his earliest major collections, widely regarded as among his finest: "Amen", awarded the Priz Max Jacob, 1968; "Recitatif", 1970; and "La Tourne", 1975. These were a formative influence on...

"Truth's nature is to fill a place that belongs to it when the place becomes cleared of a usurping occupant. It slips into place, then, with a quiet of natural fitness, perfectly not-astounding in the rightness of its being there". (Note 4, p. 149)...

"Tatler editor Geordie Greig's Book of the Year", 2004 Sarah Raphael (1960-2001) died young: preparing a show for New York, she contracted pneumonia and never recovered. Her work, large- and small-scale, is now represented in all the leading British...

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), one of the greatest German-language poets, is among the key figures in modern Western literature. "The Neue Gedichte" (New Poems of 1907-8 are some of the freshest and most accessible of his works. For some months duri...

Not for sale in Estonia! Pablo Picasso is arguably the most famous and influential artist of the twentieth century. What few in the English speaking world know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to halt all painting and...

"Alstonefield: A Poem" is a long poem in ten-line stanzas which explores Riley's preoccupation with a limestone village in Dovedale. Like much of Riley's writing, it has close affinities with Prynne's, Nevertheless, there is more of Cowper in this ve...

"The Border Ballads" are rooted in the wild and beautiful lands that lie between England and Scotland, a traditionally lawless area whose inhabitants owed allegiance first to kin and laird, and only then to the authorities in London or Edinburgh. Rec...

In Frederic Raphael's essays we meet familiar faces, known names, but the way he reintroduces them to us, with a ruthless clarity which seeks to conceal nothing, make us revalue them. Doubt is what keeps us from the tyranny of bien pensant sentimenta...

While Rilke has been perhaps more widely translated into English than any other modern poet, the emphasis has always been on "major works" – the "New Poems" volumes, "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus". Yet Rilke produced many more poems which h...