"I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely". In the poems collected in this book, Rowan Williams writes of many things. He visits the Holy Land, commemorates the deaths of...

"Dear Life" was Dennis O'Driscoll's ninth book of poetry. Like his earlier work, it engages with contemporary issues – the internet era, the compensation culture, global warming – as well as providing fresh perspectives on the timeless topics of work...

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is best known in the West today as the author of the novel "A Hero of Our Time". But at the time of his death, aged only 26, he was widely regarded as Russia's greatest living poet. He achieved almost instant fame in 183...

The companion volume to "Collected French Translations: Prose", this book reflects John Ashbery's lifelong engagement with French poetry. From 1955 Ashbery spent almost a decade in France, working as an art critic, and formed a close relationship wit...

"Reel to Reel", Alan Shapiro's twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not only the human realm of politics and culture but also the natural world, and even the outer spaces of the c...

For Dante and Petrarch, posthumous love was a powerful conviction. Like many of their contemporaries, both poets envisioned their encounters with their beloved in heaven – Dante with Beatrice, Petrarch with Laura. But as Ramie Targoff reveals in this...

"Taking Mesopotamia" was originally inspired by Jenny Lewis's search for her lost father – the young South Wales Borderer who fought in the ill-fated Mesopotamian campaign of World War I. Through reconstructed diary extracts, witness statements, form...

Are we alone? If so, "Particle and Wave" insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elements – a system familiar to many of us from high school chemistry – unfolds in a series of unexpected meanings with connotations public, perso...

With pinpoint accuracy, virtuosity and humour, Caoilinn Hughes aligns scientific and poetic venturing. In this striking debut collection she focuses on moments of discovery, from the first controlled nuclear reaction to the shape of an avalanche as w...

Andrew McNeillie's sixth collection returns to the sea and its immensity as a metaphor for fate. It also revisits the British and Irish archipelago ("For which read a figure for my heart. / For which too read a figure for time's hurt"), following a n...