Matthew Welton makes tunes out of words. Using the sounds and structures of language, he finds new understandings of what poetic form can do. He refuses to be constrained by convention. The title poem borrows its structure from Roget's Thesaurus to s...

What were the poems that William Wordsworth read, the ones that entered his poetic blood stream, whose rhythms he felt on his pulse? What helped to shape him into the poet he became, what did he copy down, what did he advocate to his friends? What de...

The themes of Donald Ward's poems are traditional – human relationships, religious meditation and, above all, the natural world. Yet their expression is entirely his own, combining a fine lyricism with striking imagery. At first glance familiar, Ward...

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), "the first great English lyric poet", remains one of the most popular writers of Henry VIII's court, and the most romantic, given his entanglement with Anne Boleyn, which resulted – legend has it – in some of his most pa...

"Guest and Host" records the experience of being welcomed into the household of a foreign country. At some distance from the travel-book viewpoint of the outsider-looking-in, Winter is able to capture the country in a deeper light through staying rat...

"Letters to Ted" is a remarkable collection of poems in memory of the late Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, with whom Daniel Weissbort struck up a friendship, both literary and personal, during their student days in 1950s Cambridge. Swift-moving, by turns...

"The District Commissioner's Dreams" is an integrated collection in which Gregory Woods returns to the themes of obsession, possession and violence. In its explorations of masculinity, the opening section draws on struggles for power in ancient and m...

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is the authentic voice of democratic America. After a childhood in Brooklyn, he spent many years in and around Manhattan and Washington, where he witnessed troops returning from the Civil War and tended wounded soldiers in th...

Andrew Waterman's themes encompass love and loss, the human textures of England and the hurt and hope of Ireland, our core existential plight. He ranges from lyric intensity to narrative abundance. In the vivid land- and cityscapes subtle epiphanies...

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) has been sung by almost everyone whose first language is English, but read by only a few. The time has come to challenge that neglect. This book presents a selection of Watts's poems, showing that he was a consummate artist a...