To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and ser...

William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson's poetry: 'He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.' Of all...

I was born in Belgium, I'm Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.' So writes Leonard Nolens in 'Place and Date', which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this sel...

Rod Mengham's new offering comprises two complementary halves, one is a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound, on Dartmoor) and the other is a series of short essays on different cultural habitats. 'Grimspound' is a four-p...

"I wish I were a dancer to let lines fall like that. / But I am dressed like you, roughly for the North" "Roughly for the North" is a tender and complex portrait of an Arctic and sub-arctic world. Full of lush language and imagery, each poem is an a...

"On the night Li Bai tried to embrace the moon / in its fullness on the surface of the Yangtze River, / blossoms scented the air, and beyond the moon / pale stars powdered the sky. That faint shiver / of white near the surface was a dolphin rising. /...

"Dictator" recreates "Gilgamesh" using the 1500 word vocabulary of Globish (from the words "global" and "English") put together by Jean-Paul Nerriere. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to r...

"Nameless Country" gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur 'A.C.' Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his...

Jenny Lewis has produced a versatile and inventive retelling of "Gilgamesh" which brings alive a story that is as resonant today as it was when first composed in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) four millennia ago. In 2012 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fell...

"Notes from the Dream House" is a 'best of' selection of reviews by the celebrated Observer film critic Philip French. Spanning half the history of cinema, his reviews cover a great variety of films, from westerns and gangsters to art movies and musi...