Austin Clarke's first book of poetry was published in 1917, his last in 1971. In a writing life spanning much of the twentieth century, Clarke created from his early, Yeatsian immersion in Gaelic myth and literature a poetry of passionate, idiosyncra...

Continuum follows the path taken in "Take My Word for It", with poems written in her original English. As in her translated Romanian poems, Nina Cassian is a born lyric story-teller. Many of her poems take the form of short fables or even parables, f...

"Call It Thought" spans more than forty years of writing by an American poet whose career has encompassed a large portion of modern literary culture. As a student, Stephen Rodefer conversed with Robert Frost; he studied with Olson, Creeley, Ed Dorn a...

"I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me – or else that I didn't live much longer!" Clarity or Death! takes its title from this letter of Wittgenstein's. That desire for clarity in our knowledge of t...

Christopher Middleton's "Collected Poems" gathers over half a century's inventive, brilliant writing by one of Britain's genuinely Modern poets. Here is an English writer, a European sensibility, of exhilarating originality and passion. His concerns,...

It is forty years since the death of Mervyn Peake (1911-1968), the author of the much-loved "Gormenghast novels". To mark the anniversary this first comprehensive edition of Peake's poetry is published. It includes every black-and-white illustration...

"Carrying the Songs" explores what is lost to time and change, and what endures and is transformed: languages and landscapes, artefacts and songs, carried through a lifetime, across oceans, across centuries. A long-forgotten Gaelic word surfaces from...

Paul Valery's most celebrated collection Charmes was first published in 1922. It contains several of his most famous poems, including "ebauche d'un serpent" and "Le cimetiere marin" – in Yvor Winters' view "the two greatest short poems ever written"....

Henry Reed (1914-1986) is most familiar as the author of "The Naming of Parts", the best-loved and most anthologised poem of the Second World War. He was a poet of much greater scope than that: in addition to publishing "A Map of Verona", his 1946 co...

By turns sensual and incantatory, "Common Prayer" offers a liturgy for a world in crisis. Meditations on the actuality of sickness and bereavement move outward through narratives of the broken body of Europe's violent twentieth century. Challenging a...