Edgar Allan Poe once claimed the greatest literary works were those that could be read "in one sitting". "Brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect", he argued, once the effect has been established, of course. The stori...

"In Between Two Windows", his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions an...

To read David Ferry's "Bewilderment" is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry's prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath awa...

"Bevel" is William Letford's first book, but his poems have already earned him a large following thanks to his brilliant performances and through Carcanet's "New Poetries V" anthology. Letford makes poems from the rhythms of speech and the stuff of d...

"Borrowed Landscapes", Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of...

"The Baboons of Hada" introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby's precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricat...

All those beguiled by the work of William Blake recognise the importance of the Bible for his poetic genius, whether as an object of criticism, or an inspiration. This book, the first substantial study for sixty years, attempts to locate Blake within...

Not for sale in Estonia! The eternal mystique of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) stems largely from his practice of writing under "heteronyms". More than just nom de plumes, Pessoa's heteronyms came with distinct biographies, careers,...

"Bugs" are the insects we live alongside, necessary and unsettling; they're the fears, the ailments and spies that keep us wide awake at night. The stories in Antony Dunn's third collection range from the microscopic lives of parasitic worms to the l...

When Elaine Feinstein first read the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva in Russian in the 1960s, the encounter transformed her. "What drew me to her initially", she writes, "was the intensity of her emotions, and the honesty with which she exposed them". Her...