"Late" is both an elegy for and a celebration of life in our century as we approach the end of the millennium. In the spirit and style of Michael Hamburger's much-admired sequences "Variations", "Travelling" and "In Suffolk", it is a narrative medita...

What kind of truth does modern poetry offer? Michael Hamburger's approach to this question ranges over European and American poetry since Baudelaire and the result is one of the best introductions available to twentieth-century poetry and its anteced...

John Heath-Stubbs's new book is more elegiac, but no less firm in its celebrations, than his last, "Sweetapple Earth" (1993). As he reflects in his poem "The Ascent", "The poems in my file are bleak enough, / Written in the knowledge one I loved,/My...

Sophie Hannah's first book "The Hero and the Girl Next Door" (Carcanet, 1995), earned her a remarkably big audience: her broadcasts and public readings throughout the country have proved extremely popular. Her poems entertain with a cunning use of tr...

Imagine a character of our time whose affinities are with the Silver Poets of Ancient Rome. A person at the pivot of middle age; cosmopolitan, yet jaundiced – a hedonist with greying temples and expanding belly... This is the persona whose voice perm...

The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the "memorability test" with flying colours. What seems simple or simply achieved more often t...

During the 1980s Michael Hamburger published both collected and selected editions of his poetry, but "Roots in the Air" is his first collection of new poems to appear for a decade. "Memorably disquieting" was one reviewer's verdict on his last collec...

If the apparently didactic title of Anthony Howell's book belies the poems in it, that is to be expected of a writer for whom little is what it seems. The law adhered to in "Howell's Law" is the law of surprise. And from the start – a lengthy poem in...