In the title poem, set in Rome, a chance meeting with the dying Rudolf Nureyev strikes the poet, himself a dancer, as hallucinatory. Along with the poems prompted by his mother's death, it is one of several unsettling poems in this collection. Yet a...

"The District Commissioner's Dreams" is an integrated collection in which Gregory Woods returns to the themes of obsession, possession and violence. In its explorations of masculinity, the opening section draws on struggles for power in ancient and m...

"The Deaf Way II: Anthology" brings together stellar contributions by 16 international writers who are deaf or hard of hearing. This remarkable collection features poetry, essays, short stories, and one play, all of which offer thought-provoking pers...

In its completed form, "Dithyrambs of Dionysus" was Nietzsche's last book. The nine poems of this cycle were composed during 1883-1888 and assembled for publication shortly before his breakdown in 1889. They represent the ultimate visionary poetic st...

Dharmakaya: "Truth-body", a beautiful and evocative word from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In her new book, Paula Meehan looks at how memory is lodged in the body, in physical consciousness, as much as in the old movies we run inside our heads. Two...

Daylight evokes old loves, friendships and literary ghosts, and a lifetime in the battered landscape of this century. Elaine Feinstein has "a sureness of rhythm and tone, a caring sentience, a knack of truthfulness, and a feeling as of Russian poets...

Dante's masterpiece is a foundation stone of European poetry. It was a profound influence on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and in our own day has inspired Seamus Heaney. It is simple in style yet complex in its layers of meaning, episodic in manner yet...

Jorie Graham's poetry insists that "the visible world" exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the merely subjective, the merely lyric, she ventures with philosophical rigour into an area "saturated with phenomena", in Helen Vendler's phrase, a pla...

Irish literature exists in two languages. A dual approach is necessary if the tradition, with its historical, political and semantic tensions, is to be understood-indeed, if some of its features are to be appreciated at all. Separate Gaelic and Anglo...

A mixture of stories, poems and autobiography: the donkey survives the fire, and the poet survives in a northern world where the sun does not shine equally or often on all and where Postman Pat pens a suicide note, maddened by his theme tune, but kee...