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...

"Things Unsaid" is the author's own choice of poems from a writing career that spans nearly half a century. It draws on seven published collections and includes many uncollected and new poems. Tony Connor-s poems – often, as he terms it, quasi-autobi...

In these poems infused with a scent of unrequited love, the great Bengali poet Jibanananda Das captured his country's soul through evocations of village life and natural beauty. Written in 1934, the sixty-two sonnets – discovered in an exercise-book...

"Yesterday I lost a country", Dunya Mikhail writes in "The War Works" Hard, a subversive, sobering work by an exiled Iraqi poet, and her first collection to appear in English. Compassionate, engaged and direct, Mikhail's is a voice that transcends bo...

A "New Selected Poems" of Vernon Watkins – major, neglected poet – 100 years after his birth. Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was called by Kathleen Raine: "the greatest lyric poet of my generation". Dylan Thomas referred to him as: "the most profound an...

In the great Bengali poet's autobiographical writings we discover what his translators describe as "a heart of love, a mind at its service that can cut like a knife, and in some sense the spirit of a child". The six prose pieces, centering on the poe...

Anthony Hecht described Donald Justice as "among other things, the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens". This memorial volume of his complete poetry testifies to his subtle and enduring brilliance. With painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance he end...

Mervyn Morris is one of the most distinctive West Indian poets, his work characterised by economy, wit and humane seriousness. He makes elegant use of Jamaica's linguistic range, with poems in international standard English, Jamaican Creole and mixtu...

Wayne Booth wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time, most notably the 1961 classic "The Rhetoric of Fiction", a book that transformed literary criticism and became the standard reference point for advanced discussions of...

"...this 'Almanack'", which all ladies should carry about with them, as the Priest his Breviary, as the Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her Fears, and as the Lion his Roar!" Djuna Barnes wrote her "Ladies Almanack" for fun,...