"In First Things When" Robert Rehder views the modern world – our world – with a cool wit. Insights deadly despite a self-deprecating ruefulness spark into view. Rehder's poems inhabit the invented, rootless places that modern society creates: superm...

The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Ticks and Crosses" covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios...

"Call It Thought" spans more than forty years of writing by an American poet whose career has encompassed a large portion of modern literary culture. As a student, Stephen Rodefer conversed with Robert Frost; he studied with Olson, Creeley, Ed Dorn a...

MUDs are Multi-User Dimensions, online worlds created by language alone. In a collection that throws Irish poetry into the electronic age, John Redmond explores the Internet and car culture, MUDs and moods. New forms of post-industrial community enab...

In 1939, following her marriage, the poet Lynette Roberts went to live in a small village in Wales. This experience, both enriching and isolating, became the source of some of her extraordinary poetry. Her diary observes daily life in a Welsh villag...

"Yellow Studio", Stephen Romer's fourth collection of poems, returns to the erotic intensities of "Tribute" (1998), counterpointed by the rueful satire that comes with age and a disbelief at having reached 'mid-life'. In this many-angled book the poe...

Henry Reed (1914-1986) is most familiar as the author of "The Naming of Parts", the best-loved and most anthologised poem of the Second World War. He was a poet of much greater scope than that: in addition to publishing "A Map of Verona", his 1946 co...

For half a century Oktay Rifat occupied a leading position in the vanguard of Turkish poetry. Despite his popularity and fame he rarely appeared in public, preferring the private life of an ordinary family man and content to work as an attorney while...

A beautiful little manuscript in the Bodleian Library, which was purchased for GBP 6 at auction in 1887, was discovered afterwards to belong to none other than Margaret, Queen of Scotland and was, according to her biographer, her favourite book. The...

The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Personal Terms", was greeted in the TLS as "a small masterpiece". With the publication of "Cuts and Bruises", the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement. C...