In "These Days of Prohibition" is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to v...

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1959 for "his lyrical poetry which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our time". Jack Bevan's remarkable translation of Quasimodo's entire poetic oeuvre fills...

Following in the footsteps of minimalist poets such as Aram Saroyan, James Davies finds new ways of making poetry. "Stack", a form of "list poem", offers a range of surprising interventions and modular combinations that reinvent poetry.

Following her 2013 debut "This is Yarrow" (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, "The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx". The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monol...

Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Auste...

"Zoology" is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose "heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn", holding us "in the planet of its stare". Within th...

Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a family, to the United States and Canada where she has made her teaching career, but always re-connecting with her Caribbean roots. Sh...

In "The Little Sublime Comedy" John Gallas reanimates one of the great works of world literature for the twenty-first century. Relocated from medieval Italy to modern-day New Zealand, Dante's "Divine Comedy" is given a new lease of life in Gallas's d...

Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut "An Aviary of Small Birds" ("technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak" – Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence,...

Jorie Graham's new book is characteristically exhilarating and inventive, exploring the limits of the human and the dark seductions of the post-human.