"At the Burning Abyss" is Franz Fuhmann's magnum opus – a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. P...

Since his first collection of poetry appeared in 1953, Philippe Jaccottet has sought to express the ineffable that lies at the heart of our material world in his essential, elemental poetry. As one of Switzerland's most prominent and prolific men of...

Beloved Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) began his career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titl...

The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and publish...

In "These Days of Prohibition" is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to v...

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1959 for "his lyrical poetry which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our time". Jack Bevan's remarkable translation of Quasimodo's entire poetic oeuvre fills...

Following in the footsteps of minimalist poets such as Aram Saroyan, James Davies finds new ways of making poetry. "Stack", a form of "list poem", offers a range of surprising interventions and modular combinations that reinvent poetry.

Following her 2013 debut "This is Yarrow" (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, "The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx". The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monol...

"Zoology" is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose "heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn", holding us "in the planet of its stare". Within th...

Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a family, to the United States and Canada where she has made her teaching career, but always re-connecting with her Caribbean roots. Sh...