Edgar Allan Poe once claimed the greatest literary works were those that could be read "in one sitting". "Brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect", he argued, once the effect has been established, of course. The stori...

"New Selected Poems" includes the key poems from Eavan Boland's remarkable half century of writing. It began with "23 Poems" in 1962 and it has continued through more than a dozen collections, each finding new dimensions in language, history and in t...

This book, the first published anthology of British surrealist poetry, takes its title from Herbert Read's words when he opened the "Surrealist Poems and Objects" exhibition at the London Gallery at midnight on 24 November 1937. Within a few years th...

"Oracabessa" is a book of risky journeys, mappings and re-mappings, as the poet navigates place, history and imagination. Goodison travels to Spain and Portugal, to Canada ("Winter has landed") and back to the Hope Gardens of her childhood in Jamaica...

In "El Dorado", Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump-cutting from traditional to invented forms, and...

For sale in CIS only! Overlooked by many as mere propaganda, poetry offers an unfettered insight into the wider worldview of the Afghan Taliban. This collection of over two hundred poems draws upon Afghan tradition and the recent past as much as upo...

Tony Connor's tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic se...

Like many good poets, John Birtwhistle publishes sparingly. In his first collection for more than twenty years, he produces a dazzling array of poems on a range of historical, political and personal subjects. These lucid, witty, tender poems, by turn...

Fallen warriors, a conquistador, a cat; an 1815 namesake; a father, a mother, a childhood rhyme; a boxer, an explorer, a stuffed Welsh fish... "Frieze" entertains a host of shadows, all the dead who inhabit our lives. It is at once elegy and explorat...

"You must not take me at my word, / you must take me at my lack of word, / you must take me at my music". In "Nuncle Music", a sequence of monologues "spoken" by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Gareth Reeves presents the psychodrama of an artist fo...