No wonder Edwin Morgan is Scotland's best-loved poet. His poems teem with lives and loves and are marked by an unusual love of the present and the future. He finds forms for themes and ideas just out of reach. In his latest collection poems both prof...

In his first new volume of poems since "Poems the Size of Photographs" (2002), Les Murray celebrates the grace and variousness of the world with an unfailing abundance of imagination and linguistic energy. Here is a poet writing at the height of his...

In these poems infused with a scent of unrequited love, the great Bengali poet Jibanananda Das captured his country's soul through evocations of village life and natural beauty. Written in 1934, the sixty-two sonnets – discovered in an exercise-book...

Ruth Silcock's third collection continues in cheerful vein about often less than cheerful subjects. She has the knack of combining jaunty traditional forms with sometimes startling or even grim subject matter. Her poems focus on the lives of ordinary...

For many, the versions from Asian and Oriental poetry made by E. Powys Mathers during and shortly after the First World War rank with those of Arthur Waley or Ezra Pound. This volume, pairing his first two books, Coloured Stars and Black Marigolds, a...

Body language and the body of language – from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers – are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since 1995. The centrepiece is "Skyhorse", an...

Ballads are memorable. This book was finished when the poet was fifty, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school, the generosity of its founders, its green graceful...

Not for sale in Estonia! Pablo Picasso is arguably the most famous and influential artist of the twentieth century. What few in the English speaking world know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to halt all painting and...

In "The Book of Stones" Adam's Schwartzman explores what it means to live in the new South Africa, to be part of historical processes while sustaining an individual life. The poet returned home in 1999 to live and work in the country he had mythologi...

Matthew Welton makes tunes out of words. Using the sounds and structures of language, he finds new understandings of what poetic form can do. He refuses to be constrained by convention. The title poem borrows its structure from Roget's Thesaurus to s...