Adam Schwartzman is an African writing of African experiences. His remarkable first collection, formally assured, thematically mature, is marked by a youthful grasp of variously peopled landscapes. The poems are "stories" which build together into a...

In 1829, Alison Brackenbury's first collection for seven years, the poet travels to three continents: there are poems from her Asian, African and European journeys, and the different peopled landscapes that she visits are evoked with her resonant lig...

The Stinking Rose is one of the names for a plant that arouses strong feelings: garlic. No one is neutral about it. Sujata Bhatt explores the various mythologies and the magical and practical aspects of garlic in a sequence of twenty-five parts, is a...

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...

In "Mirrorwork", her second collection, Mimi Khalvati takes the Islamic art of mirror-mosaic – found in palaces, barber shops, kebab houses – as metaphor. The shorter poems refract one another, the three long sequences act as a mirror triptych, their...

A mixture of stories, poems and autobiography: the donkey survives the fire, and the poet survives in a northern world where the sun does not shine equally or often on all and where Postman Pat pens a suicide note, maddened by his theme tune, but kee...

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) was one of the most popular English poets of his time. "He must always", said Dryden, "be thought a great poet". His work was held in high esteem by Milton, Johnson (who wrote one of the greatest of his Lives about him), Po...

"Ends and Beginnings" is Iain Crichton Smith's most ambitious collection for years. It begins in elegy, with the exiles and deaths about which he writes so memorably, and progresses through place, history and positive change. After a trip to the Gol...

Elaine Feinstein is a poet of lyrical directness. That clear, passionate voice which she brought to her celebrated translations of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry is her own. She writes about love, loss, jealousy, the fear of abandonment. Her powerful rhy...

This volume concludes the corrected text of the almost 1500 pages of "Hugh MacDiarmid's Complete Poems", with a volume including the full texts of "In Memoriam James Joyce" (1955), "Three Hymns to Lenin" (1957), "The Kind of Poetry I Want" (1961) and...