The extraordinary and long-lived appeal of "The Song of Songs" lies in its unmatched lyrical beauty and in its supreme evocation of the moods of sexual love. Perhaps the most famous and popular book of the Bible, it is usually – and yet mistakenly –...

For thirty years Anvil has championed the idea of poetry as a free space for the imagination and spirit of poet and reader alike. In the process the press has gained recognition as one of the liveliest and most varied publishers of British and intern...

Li Po (AD 701-762) and Tu Fu are traditionally celebrated as the two greatest poets in the Chinese canon. David Hinton's translation of Li Po's poetry is no less an achievement than his critically acclaimed "The Selected Poems of Tu Fu", also publish...

"A Season in Granada" brings together poems, essays and excerpts from letters by the great twentieth-century poet Federico Garcia Lorca, including two sequences of poems and an essay previously unpublished in English. The writings form a dazzling, el...

During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the "eminence grise" of postmodernism, championed by W. H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, af...

In the twelve years since Peter Bland's last collection, "The Crusoe Factor", was published by London Magazine "Editions", the poet has not been idle. Setting the best of his earlier work, long unavailable, beside a full volume of new poems, he lets...

Ford Madox Ford wrote poetry during the half-century of his creative life, publishing thirteen books, the first in 1893 under the pseudonym Fenil Haig, the last in 1936 under his own name. This "Selected Poems" shows his development from early, haunt...

This selection from the first thirty years of Donald Davie's poetry reveals an impassioned spirit advancing from Augustan reserve towards the treacherous, rewarding risks of modernism. As a critic, Helen Vendler writes, "he has drawn a map of moderni...

John Lyly (1554?-1606) has come to seem an incidental player in a literary scene dominated by Shakespeare. But as the sixteenth century drew to a close, the relative status of the two writers was less defined. Lyly was the principal court dramatist...

Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is best known for his graceful, lucid if not always practical book "The Compleat Angler". It has stayed in print since it first appeared in 1653. More than just a writer of devout pastoral, Walton is one of the fathers of mo...