In Moya Cannon's new collection, "Hands", the commonplace is transfigured by an attentiveness that jolts us into wonder. The poems sing of deep connections: the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us as human; a web of inte...

In "How Now!" Alan Moore treats themes of love, evil, and personal loss with gentle humour and tough seriousness. He evokes memories of Ireland in the sixties, seventies and eighties, capturing flashes of awareness from childhood, youth and adult yea...

The ancient Greek poet Hesiod is best known for two poems, the "Theogony" and the "Works and Days". The "Theogony" gives an account of the creation of the universe andthe war between the Titans and Olympians, while "Works and Days" offers plain-speak...

Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of Australia's best loved, and essential, poets. Devoted to place, responsive to landscape and to the violence done to the land and its inhabitants, John Kinsella says in his introduction",she looked inwards into Aust...

In these 99 meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking – a pair of scissors, perhaps – is both a small, human v...

To walk through a landscape is to be part of a slow unfolding of time and distance, to commit yourself to an adventure. "The Hundred Thousand Places" is a single poem that travels across seasons, through a variety of Scottish highland and island land...

"The House of Clay" is Peter McDonald's fourth book of poems, containing lyrics which combine intense resonance of narrative and imagery with powerful formal concentration. Autobiographical material, founded on a childhood in Belfast during the troub...

The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell: before cities existed in Australia, Francis McNamara, the convict poet, described the infernal one populated by those who tormented him and his fellow prisoners. Sentenced in 1832...

A striking performer of her own poems, Ros Barber has the gift of recreating her voice – and the voices of others – on the page. The poems in this debut collection demonstrate her wide range in form and subject and her skill in highlighting the extra...

Houses and gardens, remembered or imagined, dominate Neil Powell's sixth Carcanet collection: his grandmother's home in Chelsea, a magical childhood garden in the Surrey hills, an abandoned, fog-shrouded building on the East Anglian coast. There is a...