The first part of Thomas McCarthy's book collects his recent short lyrics. Part Two daringly recreates a forgotten period in the Anglo-Irish world: a Big House in the years between the World Wars, a FitzGerald ("Geraldine") family that has tilled the...

Peter Pindar (1738-1819), the pen name of John Wolcot, dared to ridicule the foibles, corruptions and misdemeanours of King George III and those in power in his kingdom. His satire was merciless, but Wolcot survived accusations of treason, protected...

This sequence of poems in three voices introduces a ghostly eternal triangle whose lines are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. A man and two women explore their memories in conversational poems which, in their combination...

"A Little Book of Hours" takes as its starting points John Donne's "No man is an island" and St Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is...

John Ashbery's translations of Pierre Martory's poems offer a unique insight into the work of the French poet, and into the creative dialogue between two poets. Ashbery describes Martory's writing as "touched by the gaiety of Rene Clair's films and t...

"A Lens in the Palm" speaks from a world of fragmented philosophies and troubled meditations. Haunted by the ghosts of Keats and Spinoza, of Rodin and Turner, the voices that echo through these poems lead us into a place that is at once familiar and...

Not for sale in Estonia! Written in 1928 by one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, and translated the following year by William Carlos Williams (the two had been introduced in Paris by a mutual friend), "Last Nights of Paris" is related to...

A dazzlingly various collection, "Local Honey" juggles its opposites with panache – heart and intellect, melancholy and zest, derangement and perspicacity. Beginning with early stirrings of logical thought in a Palaeolithic cave, the collection range...

"The Last Place on Earth" is a warm, witty celebration of the textures of a life. The vanishing world of a working-class childhood is evoked alongside football in the park and the purposeful calm of ironing; family parties and born-again bikers, joke...

These visually arresting and subtly musical poems range from Scotland and the Hebrides to Paris, the Mediterranean and Israel, capturing resonant details and moments and shaping them into a quizzical coherence. Like the small ghost that circles into...