Paul Celan (1920-1970) stands as one of the greatest post-war European poets, a writer whose painful struggle with the possibilities and limitations of German, his native language, has helped to define the response of poetry in the aftermath of the H...

"The marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride". Wordsworth's lines on Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) contributed to a legend that became better known than Chatterton's work itself. His story is moving: a sensitive, unhappy boy, h...

"The Wedding Spy" is in truth a double agent, written by a poet who has spent half of her life in the United States and half in the United Kingdom. She understands both countries, but belongs to neither and therefore has an outsider's perspective whe...

The leisure in which Brian Cox now writes his poems is hard-earned. Poetry, always his chief passion as reader and teacher, was forced to the edges of his life during the years in which he followed his other vocation in the world of education. When,...

Josep Carner's "Nabi" is a masterpiece of modern Catalan poetry. Based on the biblical story of Jonah, it is essentially a Christian poem, though it is scathing about the effects of religious perversion. In the widest sense a poem about the limits of...

Paul Celan is the greatest German-language poet after Rilke. His "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings" evolved an inimitable originality. He dominates literature in the aftermath of the Holocaust by means of his attempt to redeem the human to...

In this essential guide to one of the most difficult yet rewarding poems of the twentieth century, William Cookson (who began corresponding with Pound as a schoolboy in 1957) draws on a deep and intimate knowledge of Pound's life and work. This editi...

"A Champion for the Poor" brings together for the first time John Clare's longest poem, "The Parish" – in a new and corrected text – and his forceful satires "The Hue & Cry" and "The Summons". Some previously unpublished poems are included, too. Ther...

The poems in Gillian Clarke's "Five Fields" break new ground. Known as a poet of rural themes and of Wales, in this book she engages with the city in its human and material diversity. Having spent time as Writer in residence at the Bridgewater Hall,...

"Take My Word for It" is Nina Cassian's first collection of poems in English. Since being forced in 1985 to abandon her native Romania, where she had published more than 50 books, she has settled in New York. The American poet and critic Stanley Kuni...