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...

This volume of verse by Jane Austen and her family contains all the known poems by Jane herself and a selection of work by her sister Cassandra, four of her brothers, her uncle James, her nieces Anna and Fanny and her nephew James Edward. It is clear...

"Selected Poems" draws on John Ash's four acclaimed collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. "A little querulous, perhaps?" Carolyn Kizer asked in the New York Times Book Review. "Never mind. This may be the most auspicious debut of its kind s...

After John Ashbery's 216-page poem "Flow Chart" (1991) and the munificence of "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), "Can You Hear, Bird" provides an A to Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for...

After the "monstrous, magnificent sprawl" of John Ashbery's 216-page poem "Flow Chart" (1991) and the further munificence of "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992), his sixteenth collection, "And the Stars were Shining", includes a thirteen-part title poem which...

The great poet-critic of his age, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is now best remembered as a poet for "Dover Beath", "The Scholar Gypsy" and "Thyrsis". Beside these well-loved and widely anthologised poems, this book places a selection of other poems in...

The Count of Lautreamont – a nineteenth-century poet about whom little is known, except that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his transient existence at the age of 24 – is one of the forgotten presences alive...

Webster's Dictionary defines a "flow-chart" as a "schematic diagram... showing the progress of materials through the various stages of a manufacturing process". In this "Flow Chart", a book-length poem, John Ashbery charts the ebb and flow of life p...

Over forty new poems in verse and prose make up "A Wave", John Ashbery's tenth collection. The title poem is a twenty-page meditation on change, loss and adjustment; it is a major poem that takes place alongside "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and...