Paul Valery's most celebrated collection Charmes was first published in 1922. It contains several of his most famous poems, including "ebauche d'un serpent" and "Le cimetiere marin" – in Yvor Winters' view "the two greatest short poems ever written"....

One of the most significant poetic achievements of our time, John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award upon its publication in 1976. The long...

"Inner Voices" gathers for the first time poems from Richard Howard's twelve published collections, presenting a representative selection of the work of a writer termed by the New York Times Book Review "a powerful presence in American poetry for for...

For half a century Oktay Rifat occupied a leading position in the vanguard of Turkish poetry. Despite his popularity and fame he rarely appeared in public, preferring the private life of an ordinary family man and content to work as an attorney while...

Wordsworth's "meanest flower that blows" suggested to him "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears". The lyrics, elegies, songs and ghazals in Mimi Khalvati's new book pay attention to things the imagination generally disregards, an attention t...

Greenfields shows how it was, to grow up in a quiet corner of Scotland, fixing the last decades of the twentieth century in its snapshots. The book reclaims suburbia as a place of unexpected poetry and conjures the bittersweet of such hybrid places....

Henry Reed (1914-1986) is most familiar as the author of "The Naming of Parts", the best-loved and most anthologised poem of the Second World War. He was a poet of much greater scope than that: in addition to publishing "A Map of Verona", his 1946 co...

By turns sensual and incantatory, "Common Prayer" offers a liturgy for a world in crisis. Meditations on the actuality of sickness and bereavement move outward through narratives of the broken body of Europe's violent twentieth century. Challenging a...

"New Poetries IV" celebrates the distinctiveness and diversity of new poetry in English. The eleven poets included are variously rooted in Europe, America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia; they write with the imaginative energies less of wor...

Thomas Kinsella is among the most distinguished modern poets. His work over fifty years has challenged and enriched the poetic landscape. Rooted in locality, Kinsella's poetry employs myth and modernism in explorations that range from intense lyricis...