In "Odd Blocks" Kay Ryan, the acclaimed American poet, presents her work to European readers for the first time. The book includes twenty-one new poems, seven of them first published here. Ryan's flamboyant imagination sparks in spare and elegant ver...

"An Ordinary Dog" is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision. They bear sceptical witness to – what? To the affecting ordinariness of human needs, to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about...

Anthony Howell's first collection for several years moves in unusual directions. Guilt and society's victimization of those it punishes are among its subjects: it begins with poems concerned with the harm caused by anorexia and moves on to investigat...

"One Eye'd Leigh" is a book of portraits, experiments and objects made of words. They find their locations between Cape Town and London, between the dawn of the new millennium and the present day. Guided by a biographical thread, in her first collect...

"Over", Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta..." In these and other pieces Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflectio...

Chris McCully brings Old English poetry to life with exhilarating immediacy. Here is the earliest surviving English poem, "Caedmon's Hymn", as well as one of the last poems to be written in the classical Old English alliterative style; some of the gr...

Horace (65-8 BC) is the most beguiling of the great Latin poets. He has left an ineradicable mark on Western literature: Dante placed him alongside Homer and Virgil, and his works have been translated and re-imagined since the Renaissance. Len Krisak...

This anthology brings together for the first time a substantial selection of poems by Augusta Webster (1837-1894), Mathilde Blind (1841-1896) and Amy Levy (1861-1889), three poets whose writing both reflected and helped to shape a time when women wer...

In the great Bengali poet's autobiographical writings we discover what his translators describe as "a heart of love, a mind at its service that can cut like a knife, and in some sense the spirit of a child". The six prose pieces, centering on the poe...

"I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully...