The American poet John Peck's poems draw on both modernist and traditional resources, quarrying in the large gaps among contemporary audiences for poetry. The badge of "difficulty" is routinely pinned to his work. Yet it may be that such poetry makes...

"Fossil Unicorn is Sally" Purcell's first collection for more than ten years and contains the very best of her work from that period. Drawing on folklore and mediaeval sources, these poems are tense yet fluid in rhythm and diction, and alive with a s...

Welcoming Robert Pinsky's work, Robert Lowell wrote: "it is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic". "The Figured Wheel" gathers...

One of John Peck's debts to the Modernists is his sense of continuity between the arts: poetry, music, sculpture and painting are not only analogous as forms of discovery; their process is related at a deeper level, the "cantabile" of making and maki...

This comprehensive introductory anthology of poems by forty women writers from Elizabethan to Victorian times includes work by aristocrats and frame-workers, by celebrated figures such as Aphra Behn, the Brontes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christ...

Janos Pilinszky (1921-1981) was a unique and compelling voice among the generation of European poets whose work bore first-hand witness to the horrors of war. The distinction of his poetry, as Ted Hughes argues, is both spiritual and artistic: "the d...

In F. T. Prince's new poem a visit to Rome brings back memories of fifty years ago, today's graffiti contrasting with Mussolini's slogans. Things seen, a plaque for Stendhal or a chapel with paintings by Caravaggio, are used to suggest young and olde...

In "Later On" F. T. Prince brings together three contrasting long poems written since 1980: "The Yuan Chen Variations", which are inspired by the Chinese T'ang Dynasty poet Po Chu-i, "His Dog and Pilgrim", an account of the legend of St Rock told fro...

"Airborn" is a bilingual sequence of sonnets written jointly by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and his English fellow poet and translator Charles Tomlinson. In their forewords the poets explain how the poems came to be written and translated. As Charle...