With his poetry debut "Creek Water Journal" (1974), Robert Gray at once established his name as a highly original "imagist". Even Les Murray, who had until then staunchly refused to review the work of a contemporary was moved to declare: "Mr Gray has...

In this essential guide to one of the most difficult yet rewarding poems of the twentieth century, William Cookson (who began corresponding with Pound as a schoolboy in 1957) draws on a deep and intimate knowledge of Pound's life and work. This editi...

The poetry of Lorna Goodison, Derek Walcott says, "is a rooted, organic delight, true in its intonations to the Jamaican language she loves, fresh in its wit and pain and in the high, spiritual gossip of its leaves". The poet is endowed with all th...

J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and cen...

John Heath-Stubbs's new book is more elegiac, but no less firm in its celebrations, than his last, "Sweetapple Earth" (1993). As he reflects in his poem "The Ascent", "The poems in my file are bleak enough, / Written in the knowledge one I loved,/My...

Philip Holmes's third book centres on a sequence of poems about the Swaledale lead mines in Yorkshire and those who lived, worked, stayed or emigrated to America from there. These poems, and three other groups which complete the collection – poems in...