Re-inventing Scottish poetry in the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid's war cry was: "Not Burns – Dunbar!" With it, he celebrated William Dunbar (1460?-1520?) as "in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets". His verve,...

This is a book full of one God in many aspects, at once strange and intimate, transcendent and physical, Son of the Almighty yet born of woman. The book, sacramentally shaped, follows three "offices" of the church, leading us towards an altar then re...

Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938), the most influential and controversial Italian poet of the last hundred years, published his masterpiece "Halcyon" in 1903. It is a carefully organized sequence of eighty-eight lyrics which, to gain their full effect,...

One of the greatest poets of the subcontinent, Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) redefined the parameters of Bengali poetry in the wake of the impression left by the work of his more traditional compatriot, Rabindranath Tagore. Idiosyncratic in style and w...

Peter Dale's first full collection in over ten years brings together lyrical poems and monologues in which bleakness and tenderness alternate, conflict and finally coexist. The bitter-sweet shifts of memory are evoked throughout with an understated t...

"How suitable that Dick Davis, who gave us superb English versions of medieval Persian epigrams, should now compose witty, shapely, and polished epigrams that exhibit something like Philip Larkin's mordancy, but with a fine blend of thoughtfulness an...

Donald Davie was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time. His poems do not pre-empt us in the way that protest or political poetry does, though he protests and is political. He was a poet of English perspectives refracted through historical med...

The poems in "Flying Fish" wrestle with our fascination with the sea, our helplessness in the face of love and loss, our fear of age and all that lies beyond. In them we glimpse "the otherlife" of things caught out of their own element. From the flyi...

The poems in "The Blind Stitch" interweave family, marriage, love and friendship into a larger world of public life. Set in Delanty's native Cork, and in America and India, the book is sewn together with two main conceits. One is that of the leper, w...

In Toccata and Fugue John F. Deane selects from the full range of his work a representative core. He emerges as a substantial and original poet, for whom the old verities retain some of their truth and the accelerating fin-de-siecle is not an unmitig...