The "De Rerum Natura of Lucretius" (99BC-55BC) is one of the great books of the world, a lucid explanation of physical phenomena that develops into a majestic vision of the ultimate nature of the universe. Lucretius' observations of the particulari...

"He is an exquisite poet, a deliverer of nations... a father of light", said Ezra Pound in 1918 of Jules Laforgue. Among the most innovative of poets in the French language, Laforgue was an important influence on the young T. S. Eliot. Part symbolist...

Peter Levi's final collection contains the moving lyrics he composed, often while walking round the green in the Gloucestershire village where he lived, as well as other poems written since "Reed Music" (1997). Despite his increasing blindness, his p...

"Transparently accomplished", as John Kerrigan has written: "his work displays the kind of internal 'itinerary' which (in Mandelstam's language) is the mark of achieved poetry". This book selects the best work from thirty years of that itinerary, a...

Gabriel Levin's second collection builds confidently on his highly praised first. In graceful, exacting lyrics, he addresses subjects wrested from a stark, natural world of "fire and as" desert tints, and its diverse, vital heritage, with a rare sens...

Li Po (AD 701-762) and Tu Fu are traditionally celebrated as the two greatest poets in the Chinese canon. David Hinton's translation of Li Po's poetry is no less an achievement than his critically acclaimed "The Selected Poems of Tu Fu", also publish...

"A Season in Granada" brings together poems, essays and excerpts from letters by the great twentieth-century poet Federico Garcia Lorca, including two sequences of poems and an essay previously unpublished in English. The writings form a dazzling, el...

Fading Contact is a middle-period masterwork by the great Serbo-Croat poet who died suddenly at the height of his powers in July 1996. It marks the watershed between the blazing, vivid imagery of his youthful poetry and the measured, complex verse of...

"Reed Music" is Peter Levi's first collection of completely new work since "Shadow and Bone" (1989). In these exhilarating poems he combines a watercolourist's gift for the spontaneous evocation of a scene with a very different gift for formal elegy....

Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been perplexingly absent from British literary history. In America she has been posthumously launched as the electric-age Blake, she has been translated into French and Italian to great acclaim, and in the "Times Literary Sup...