In "The Alexandra Sequence" John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the "mummers play", a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door. The book's title takes its name from an area of Liverpo...

Eighth century Tamil poet and founding saint Andal is believed to have been found as a baby underneath a holy basil plant in the temple garden of Srivilliputhur. As a young woman she fell deeply in love with Lord Vishnu, composing fervent poems and s...

Widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation, Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, "The Anchor's Long Chain" is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. En...

"As When" spans the range of Tom Raworth's poetry to date, and includes work omitted from his "Collected Poems" (2003) as well as poems previously only issued as fugitive cards and broadsides. This edition of Tom Raworth's poems is beautifully arrang...

How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and oth...

Milton's God Where I-95 meets The Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered – stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, tattered edges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge, the onl...

"An Aviary of Small Birds" is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. Here, birth paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after long labour, the baby's heart gives out. Howeve...

A splash of sea foam. A sly sparrow. A man dodging the rain. From such mundane, unexpected moments, Spanish poet Claudio Rodriguez crafted his 1965 "Alliance and Condemnation", a collection of poems that temper the joy of existence – the "bounty that...

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...

Widely revered during his lifetime, Robert Frost continues to enchant readers today, nearly a century after the publication of his first volume of poems, "A Boy's Will". This book presents a splendid selection of 64 poems from across Frost's writing...