The poetry of Martinus Nijhoff (1894-1953) was distinguished by clarity of language combined with mystical content. His masterpiece Awater, written in 1934, is the most important Dutch poem of the 20th century. This edition of "Awater" features thre...

Translated by notable American poet Marilyn Hacker, Lebanese-French poet and novelist Venus Khoury-Ghata explores the formal and mythic attractions, congruencies and incompatibilities of the French and Arabic imaginations and poetic traditions in poe...

Surely none of us can have been left quite unaffected by the recent startling and unfortunate disaster of the disappearance of the "Great Poetic Anthology" into the electronic cracks between the major academic institutions which were preparing it – s...

Matthew Mead began publishing his poetry in the 1960s. By then he had, as Peter Riley noted, "located a sense of poetry for which he drew widely from Anglo-American writing, avoiding any programmes of allegiance". Over the years he has published five...

"At the Source" reflects upon a writer's deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Her creative journeys begin from those sources. The book opens with a house, Blaen Cwrt. A river rises, a tributary which will flow on to the Atlantic, and a fami...

When Odysseus Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy's citation singled out "The Axion Esti", first published in 1959, as "one of twentieth-century literature's most concentrated and richly faceted poems". It can be se...

Dulce Maria Loynaz (1902-1997) is Cuba's most celebrated poet. Widely published in Spain during the 1950s, Loynaz's poetry was forgotten in Cuba after the Revolution. International recognition came to her late: at the age of ninety she was living in...

Tom Disch's first collection of poems for ten years presents a dazzling variety show of inventive wit. Gavin Ewart called his last title from Anvil "an outstanding book, and very enjoyable". Disch's+Q174 serious gift for humour permeates poems by tur...

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck's new collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter it is both passageway between worlds...

In "The Anti-Basilisk" Christopher Middleton, in the spirit that impelled Shelley to write "The Masque of Anarchy", reveals as crooked the apparently straight and sees what's coming round corners with a clarity that dazzles. Bruno Schulz in 1937 made...