John Skelton (1464?-1529) is the first great modern English poet. Immensely proud of his poetic calling, he celebrates in his poems the language itself, in all its richness. He wrote in a vigorous vernacular, taking literary English out of the mediev...

A house that should have creaked but did not, the work of Benjamin Britten, an attempt at fostering: the wide range of Keith Bosley's new collection springs from a few central themes – the need for constant negotiation between people, between life an...

The title of the American poet John Matthias's second English volume suggests both continuity and change. The first two sections continue the idiom of "Turns" (1975) and include many poems on English themes. The two concluding sequences chart voyages...

Matthew Mead's third collection of verse follows "Identities" (1967) and "The Administration of Things" (1970). In his own words, his is "a quiet voice for quiet rooms" – but the voice is distinct and compels attention. As Richard Holmes wrote of his...

"Selected Poems" draws on all the books Elizabeth Jennings published before Growing-Points. It represents the poet's own distillation of the first two decades of her writing – the poems which established her as one of the most passionate and precise...

Marvell's oeuvre must be one of the smallest of any major English poet, but that he is a major poet is no longer contested. Very little is known of his life: he was born in 1621, in Yorkshire; he tutored the daughter of the parliamentarian general Th...

This is the late Geoffrey Holloway's third collection of verse, following "To Have Eyes" (Anvil, 1972) and "Rhine Jump" (London Magazine Editions, 1974; a Poetry Book Society Choice). "All I Can Say" is a wide selection of his poems from many years o...

In John Digby's third book, as in "Sailing Away from Night", his poems are complemented with his very distinctive collages – in this book, all based on birds and animals. John Digby's work in collage began as an extension of his surreal poetry; in bo...

Peter Levi's first book since "Collected Poems 1955-1975" contains his poems written between spring 1975 and winter 1977. Of his "Collected Poems 1955-1975", John Heath-Stubbs wrote in The Tablet: "His is certainly one of the most authentic and origi...