Donald Davie is a poet-critic: his admirable essays are free of jargon, full of the clarity and insight of a major practitioner of the poetic art. His writing is in every sense refreshing: a pleasure to read and an inspiration to re-read the writers...

"Outside History" was Eavan Boland's first collection of new poems since "The Journey" (1987). Here she explores private themes, but in ways which open out on the wider public sphere. Often the poems arise from the place in which womanhood and natio...

The three sections of Bei Dao's moving book of poems – "Berlin", "Oslo" and "Stockholm" – are poignant reminders of the restless and rootless life of the exile. All the poems in this bilingual collection were written after Tiananmen Square (4 June 19...

"Opia", Alan Moore's first collection of poems, introduces a virtuoso poet capable of an unusual range of forms, tones and images. Central to the book is a sequence of sonnets which unfolds the drama of a doomed love affair, with France and Ireland a...

The earliest poems in John Welch's first full-length collection are short poems written in the late sixties. In the seventies his writing became more consciously experimental, as in the "Grieving Signal" poems, but without losing sight of a proper hu...

This is John Birtwhistle's first collection of poems since "Tidal Models" (1980). Its energy and concentration come out of an interest in a wide variety of formal models – from Chinese lyrics and Imagism to Anglo-Saxon riddles and Surrealism – and an...