What kind of truth does modern poetry offer? Michael Hamburger's approach to this question ranges over European and American poetry since Baudelaire and the result is one of the best introductions available to twentieth-century poetry and its anteced...

"Selected Poems" draws on John Ash's four acclaimed collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. "A little querulous, perhaps?" Carolyn Kizer asked in the New York Times Book Review. "Never mind. This may be the most auspicious debut of its kind 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...

John Heath-Stubbs's new book is more elegiac, but no less firm in its celebrations, than his last, "Sweetapple Earth" (1993). As he reflects in his poem "The Ascent", "The poems in my file are bleak enough, / Written in the knowledge one I loved,/My...

When Chris McCully's first book of poems, "Time Signatures" (Carcanet, 1993), appeared, the "Observer" described the poet as "a keen fly-fisher, a translator of Old English poetry and an expert prosodist; and these skills have miraculously combined s...

Ruth Silcock brings deft narrative skill, compassionate humour and a sharp eye for the oddities of human behaviour to these poems about the neglected, the marginalized and the unnoticed. "46 Nursing Homes" is a sequence which draws on her personal ex...

Iain Bamforth's third collection applies carnival licence to various kinds of histories: personal, symbolic, ethnographic, social – even to a history of representations in the 101 epigrams and "autographemes" which make up the Paris sequence "Impedim...

Elizabeth Jennings turned seventy the year this was published. This book of poems is graced by a firm wisdom and achieves moments of religious and individual serenity. "In the Meantime" strives to come to terms with losses, with failure, loves, and m...

"It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives", Joseph Brodsky said. And Derek Walcott: "There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in...

Sophie Hannah's first book "The Hero and the Girl Next Door" (Carcanet, 1995), earned her a remarkably big audience: her broadcasts and public readings throughout the country have proved extremely popular. Her poems entertain with a cunning use of tr...