Adam Schwartzman's anthology offers substantial selections of ten outstanding South African poets drawn from more than four decades and from very different traditions and cultures. Far from establishing a canon, the vital and diverse literatures repr...

"Those who care for poetry should besiege the publisher for Sophie Hannah's first book", the "Spectator" declared. In the "Telegraph" P. J. Kavanagh wrote, "Sophie Hannah is a real star". Her broadcasts and public readings have proven extremely popul...

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) is a latter-day Jacobean, the author of blank verse plays and poems which are as bold, wild and fresh as they are archaic in manner. We read his plays less for character and drama than for the miracles that occur in...

The American poet John Peck's poems draw on both modernist and traditional resources, quarrying in the large gaps among contemporary audiences for poetry. The badge of "difficulty" is routinely pinned to his work. Yet it may be that such poetry makes...

Resistance is Futile opens in Mongolia with a poem called "Yoghurt". It is spring in Ulan Bator and Hoo Gerjan is seeking legal advice over a stolen car. This is the first of twelve weird narratives separated by brief, lyric moments: stories of Samue...

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) has been sung by almost everyone whose first language is English, but read by only a few. The time has come to challenge that neglect. This book presents a selection of Watts's poems, showing that he was a consummate artist a...

The place: Palermo, 1783. The barons reject the reforms of the principled viceroy Caracciolo, pursuing their feuds and petty plotting. Their wives indulge in forbidden French novels. And porcine abbot Vella, forty years old, is drawn like a fly to th...

Robert Minhinnick's is amongst the major voices of modern Wales. His "Selected Poems" draws on six collections published between 1978 and 1994. Several uncollected pieces are also included. The earlier poems are diverse: descriptions of work in heavy...

Louise Gluck's award-winning collection of essays is the work of a major poet and a distinguished teacher. She writes of her upbringing, her human and literary antecedents, and she dwells with a scrupulous eye on details of lives and poems, until she...

This collection moves from secrecy to candour, as the poet begins to remember things, people and events that made and marred him. He sets them in order and discloses, in the rapt contemplation of Hokusai, in the stories of John Cheever, in film and m...