Contemporary French poetry has long been tagged as being overly cerebral and hermetic. But there exists a very different, thriving tradition which is too often muffled by noisier movements like Surrealism or Minimalism". Into the Deep Street" gives v...

Ford Madox Ford spent his last years in the south of France, near Toulon. In "Provence" (1935), written four years before his death, he explores both the place and the idea of it: "not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind". Suffused...

This sequence of poems in three voices introduces a ghostly eternal triangle whose lines are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. A man and two women explore their memories in conversational poems which, in their combination...

"Rejoicing" is a magnificent, celebratory gathering of Stanley Moss's poetry from six decades. He is one of America's finest poets and this collection demonstrates why. Marilyn Hacker wrote of his work, "Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanit...

When Elaine Feinstein first read the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva in Russian in the 1960s, the encounter transformed her. "What drew me to her initially", she writes, "was the intensity of her emotions, and the honesty with which she exposed them". Her...

Since the 1960s the English poet Matthew Mead and his German wife Ruth have translated selections from poets to whom they were drawn. This is their own choice from the many memorable poems which they have translated. The collection celebrates a fasci...

Wang Wei (701-761 AD) is often spoken of, with his contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu, as one of the three greatest poets in China's 3,000-year poetic history. He was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classic...

Told is about the art of story, not the science. It defines the twenty great principles of storytelling and then shows how they work by weaving them into 30 illustrated short stories that vary in format from poetry to screenplay. From genre to premi...

"Continental Shelf" traces a journey, across continents and from youth to maturity. It moves from memories of childhood in Guyana, through a long elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2006, to the reflective closing sect...

"White Guard", Mikhail Bulgakov's semi-autobiographical first novel, revolves around a Russian family in their home city of Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin, adult siblings who have just lost their mother, find themselves plunged into...