In her first book since "Friend of Heraclitus" (1993, Poetry Book Society Choice) Patricia Beer confronts some harsh realities: serious illness, the deaths of friends, the encroachments of age. She remembers family with a surreal clarity ("Ballad of...

"Psyche Unbound" is Heather Buck's third collection of poems. Whether writing about war, nature, faith, childhood, art or people, she explores the presences which deepen our daily lives – perceptions of mortality and of the life of the spirit – throu...

Sujata Bhatt's first book of poems, the award-winning "Brunizem", appeared in 1988. In a very short time she has gained recognition as one of the distinct and reckonable new voices. She has things to say about her native India and her native tongue (...

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...

When "Heroes' Twilight" was originally published in 1965, it offered radical perspectives on the poetry, fiction and autobiographical writing of the First World War, mapping an area of literature which remains raw and challenging. Anthony Powell in t...

Benjamin Britten was a great reader of poetry, and poetry profoundly affected his musical genius and style of composition. Friendships and collaborations with writers – Auden and Forster among them – left their mark. No other composer of songs, not e...

Yves Bonnefoy, celebrated translator and critic, is widely considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. Named to the College de France in 1981 to fill the chair left vacant by the death of Roland Barthes, Bonnefoy was...

The second volume of this occasional series introduces another nine talented newcomers. The variety of poetic voices and themes on display reflects backgrounds which range from Scotland to Bristol and from gardening to rock bands. Many have been publ...

In 1829, Alison Brackenbury's first collection for seven years, the poet travels to three continents: there are poems from her Asian, African and European journeys, and the different peopled landscapes that she visits are evoked with her resonant lig...

The Stinking Rose is one of the names for a plant that arouses strong feelings: garlic. No one is neutral about it. Sujata Bhatt explores the various mythologies and the magical and practical aspects of garlic in a sequence of twenty-five parts, is a...