The drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, "was the first word in the world", and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures – the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths...

"One Eye'd Leigh" is a book of portraits, experiments and objects made of words. They find their locations between Cape Town and London, between the dawn of the new millennium and the present day. Guided by a biographical thread, in her first collect...

"Over", Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta..." In these and other pieces Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflectio...

"Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets" is the first anthology in decades to present to British readers the remarkable freshness and vitality of New Zealand poetry. Starting in the mid-1980s, it captures turning points in the work of Allen Curnow and...

How can language retrieve memories and identities? A young man, a first-generation American, explores a true story of three generations of upheaval, migration and homecoming. Rooted in autobiography and in twentieth-century Armenian history, it is al...

"Painting Rain" explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape...

Here, two men, 5 centuries apart, make contact with each other through poetry, music, and performance. Kumar Gandharva, the great 20th Century Hindustani classical vocalist, sings Kabir, the great 15th Century poet. Kabir composed poetry that evoked...

"The Deaf poet is no oxymoron", declares editor John Lee Clark in his introduction to "Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology". The 95 poems by 35 Deaf American poets in this volume more than confirm his point. From James Nack's early metered narrative p...

"Smoke and Lilacs" is full of play and shadow, whispered intimations of mortality and glances of humour, elegiac lyric playing against steely classicism, an easy modern vernacular eliding with timeless grace. Sibum's meditative narratives move betwee...

"In First Things When" Robert Rehder views the modern world – our world – with a cool wit. Insights deadly despite a self-deprecating ruefulness spark into view. Rehder's poems inhabit the invented, rootless places that modern society creates: superm...