In a series of ninety-five poems we listen to "the Reasoner", a voice that is by turns ardent, despairing and comic. Petty obsessions rub against attempts at philosophical seriousness; vernacular expression vies with an intent deliberation. Above all...

"The only end of writing", Dr Johnson said, "is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it". Misprint offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-...

Clive Wilmer's "New and Collected Poems" begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's "Hagia Sophia", where the great Byzantine basilica is described in te...

In 1936, twenty-year-old Edward Weismiller became the youngest poet to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Today, more than sixty years later, he retains that distinction. Yale University Press here reintroduces Edward Weismiller-...

"An Ordinary Dog" is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision. They bear sceptical witness to – what? To the affecting ordinariness of human needs, to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about...

David Ward started writing poetry in his late thirties. His poems are the work of an historian who knows how environments and events, on a family or a national scale, shape and change us, and how we live with moral and psychological consequences of a...

Eleanor Wilner's poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and pr...

These lines, from the title poem of "Waterloo Teeth", set an historical aftermath in vivid motion. John Whale's first book of poems explores our capacity to articulate the pain and pleasure of such experiences – our own, and those of others distant f...

Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of Australia's best loved, and essential, poets. Devoted to place, responsive to landscape and to the violence done to the land and its inhabitants, John Kinsella says in his introduction",she looked inwards into Aust...

Robert Wells writes poems of memory, a memory so intense it conjures places, objects and desires with their original force and freshness. The high points of a life are celebrated, and personal memories and the common memories of a culture are brought...