Ros Barber's second book forms a meditation on human loss; it is a more personal and autobiographical collection than her first, described by Neil Rollinson as "an honest, unflinching and hugely satisfying debut". Sarah Law described her as "a 'tradi...

"Call It Thought" spans more than forty years of writing by an American poet whose career has encompassed a large portion of modern literary culture. As a student, Stephen Rodefer conversed with Robert Frost; he studied with Olson, Creeley, Ed Dorn a...

John Ashbery's translations of Pierre Martory's poems offer a unique insight into the work of the French poet, and into the creative dialogue between two poets. Ashbery describes Martory's writing as "touched by the gaiety of Rene Clair's films and t...

In hospital for a scan, Jon Glover became fascinated by the ways in which Magnetic Resonance Imaging creates pictures of the hidden processes of the nervous system. It could express what is already written within the human body, in all organic life a...

In the title poem of her second collection, "Salvation Jane" (a purple thistle-like weed), Stoddart suggests that in naming something we empower it to fulfil our idea of its meaning and purpose. The poem typifies, as Vernon Scannell wrote, "the way h...

Matthew Mead began publishing his poetry in the 1960s. By then he had, as Peter Riley noted, "located a sense of poetry for which he drew widely from Anglo-American writing, avoiding any programmes of allegiance". Over the years he has published five...

"King Driftwood" teems with characters and narratives: treasure hunters, drug dealers, small-town eccentrics – blue-rinsed Mrs Dawes-Llewellyn, John the Song and Mothman, George Bush and Saddam Hussein glimpsed at a phantasmagoric funfair; the mourni...

In Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's poetry the body, myth, the soul, nature and language are deeply entangled concepts. Yet her poetry is passionate and direct: "I am not interested in distorting reality when I play with language". With translations by suc...

Bengali is the world's seventh most popular language in terms of the number who use it, but few have made the journey from the West to its cultural or spiritual interior. Its intellectual tradition is without equal in present-day India. Rabindranath...

"I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me – or else that I didn't live much longer!" Clarity or Death! takes its title from this letter of Wittgenstein's. That desire for clarity in our knowledge of t...