Often reported to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and recently elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bei Dao is China's pre-eminent contemporary poet. The poems in "Landscape Over Zero" reach...

Eavan Boland's new book, her first since the "Collected Poems", is in two parts. The opening sequence entitled "Colony" explores the theme of Irish language and culture. This is followed by a collection of individual poems which open out from autobio...

"Late" is both an elegy for and a celebration of life in our century as we approach the end of the millennium. In the spirit and style of Michael Hamburger's much-admired sequences "Variations", "Travelling" and "In Suffolk", it is a narrative medita...

Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been perplexingly absent from British literary history. In America she has been posthumously launched as the electric-age Blake, she has been translated into French and Italian to great acclaim, and in the "Times Literary Sup...

Dennis O'Driscoll's third collection contains some of his most accomplished work to date, written with his characteristic blend of poignancy and dry wit. The book is notable for its engagement with contemporary life in both its benign and brutal aspe...

This special edition of poems by Ivan V. Lalic was jointly published by Anvil Press Poetry and Turret Books to mark the occasion of his participation in Poetry Live, May 1987. It is a selection from his book "The Passionate Measure".

E. A. Markham's new collection confirms his standing as one of the most energetic and original poets to emerge in recent years. "He has a very distinctive voice", commented Carol Rumens in "The Observer". 'Writing in Time Out", Valerie Sinason descri...

Martial's name is a byword for caustic and often obscene wit. The fiercest Roman satirist after Juvenal, he was also a poet with a more reflective nature, whose acute observations of life are tinged with a keen awareness of death. Peter Whigham's sel...

Peter Levi's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford discusses the lamentation of the dead in written and oral poetry from Homer and the Bible to recent times, by way of Shakespeare, Milton and the Serbian epics. He puts...

"Lost and Found" contains Harry Guest's work written during 1975-1982. "At their best Harry Guest's poems are outstanding for their precise imagery and expression of a refinement of sensibility towards atmosphere and emotion", John Cotton wrote in "P...