One of the most powerful dramas ever written for the stage, Othello is a story of revenge, illusion, passion, mistrust, jealousy, and murder. If in Iago Shakespeare created the most compelling villain in Western literature, in Othello and Desdemona h...

What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How – in the face of the carnage of war, the destruction of the natural world, spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear – does one retain a capacity to be present and responsive? How far do...

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the f...

The fourth "OxfordPoets" anthology brings together the work of both new and of more established poets and introduces them to a wider readership. Like previous "OxfordPoets" anthologies, it celebrates the vitality of the new writing on the Oxford list...

An Irish monk watching the Black Death edging towards him; a priest at Delphi lamenting the passing of an era; an Assyrian extispicist receiving more inspiration than is good for him – these are some of the voices in James Harpur's third collection....

Gabriel Levin's second collection builds confidently on his highly praised first. In graceful, exacting lyrics, he addresses subjects wrested from a stark, natural world of "fire and as" desert tints, and its diverse, vital heritage, with a rare sens...

Donald Justice's poems have been greatly admired by his fellow writers on both sides of the Atlantic. He was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for his "Selected Poems" and in 1991 the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. "Orpheus Hesitated Beside the Black River...

The concept of mastery straddles a largely unexamined seam in contemporary thought dividing admirable self-control from a reprehensible will to power. Although Joseph Conrad has traditionally been viewed as an admirable master – master mariner, story...

Iain Bamforth's third collection applies carnival licence to various kinds of histories: personal, symbolic, ethnographic, social – even to a history of representations in the 101 epigrams and "autographemes" which make up the Paris sequence "Impedim...

This major retrospective selection of Charles Madge's poetry appeared just over fifty years after the publication of his last Faber collection, "The Father Found" (1941). He continued to write during the forties, and, more intermittently, after becom...