In her third book of poems, Sinead Morrissey builds on the achievement of her award-winning collection, "Between Here and There", by expanding the lyric into new territories and admitting new voices. The theme of imprisonment is variously addressed:...

This is a story of life in the age of Mandelson: politician, aesthete, director of communication. Is it possible to be happy in the age of Mandelson? Moderniser, trouble-shooter, king-maker, architect of New Labour, power-broker, agent, asset, conf...

John Ashbery's new collection of fifty-one poems ends with the substantial piece that gives the book its title. Composed in stanzaic prose, it is a fine specimen of his distinctive courtship mode, wooing the language with language, teasing it and tea...

Lucky Day begins with natural landscapes through which love and lyric flicker and flare. The sparrows, pigeons and magpies of the urban periphery lighten the atmosphere, edging the collection towards the city in the funny elegy "Bird List". The seque...

John Masefield (1878-1967) is one of the great storytellers of English poetry, a spinner of yarns and ballads of tall ships and exotic seas, of the deep-rooted life of the rural England in which he grew up, and of the great narratives of Troy and Art...

"So he stood in his shoes And he wondered, He wondered, He stood in his Shoes and he wondered" – John Keats Written under the sign of Eros, builder and destroyer of cities, and prefaced by an epigraph from Keats, the poems in "A Place in the World"...

Like King David's, the muse of Strange Land, Tim Kendall's voice is angry and loving, plaintive, disdainful, celebratory. This is a twenty-first-century psalter. A first collection with conviction and authority, Strange Land gathers poems of love and...

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate ("any time, any place"). This is not the whole O'Hara: he may h...