Sophie Hannah's sharp pen dissects modern life and relationships with insouciant honesty and ruthless wit, and her love poems evoke timeless feelings with a shrewd simplicity that deepens her range. An edge of desolation, tenderness – an occasional f...

For half a century Oktay Rifat occupied a leading position in the vanguard of Turkish poetry. Despite his popularity and fame he rarely appeared in public, preferring the private life of an ordinary family man and content to work as an attorney while...

The document known as "The Parthian Stations" is an account of the overland route from Antioch to the borders of India in the first century BC. John Ash's own Parthian Stations begins with his departure from New York to Istanbul. It is a journey, as...

This collection of Trakl's essential poetry contains the two books published in his lifetime, "Gedichte" (Poems, 1913) and "Sebastian im Traum" (Sebastian in a Dream, 1914), together with the later poems published in the magazine "Der Brenner" which...

Paul Celan is among the most important German-language poets of the century, and, in George Steiner's words, "almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945". Language, Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him af...

The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish from its original script, of husband from wife. The book explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we live b...

Eavan Boland has praised Grevel Lindop's "lyric voice that handles images well, that distinguishes – as few poets do – the erotic from the sexual, that moves language in and out of metaphor with skill and grace". The erotic and the sexual are richly...

Edwin Morgan's verse play translation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh brings an ancient story to life in a supple, vigorous idiom that moves easily between ritual, comedy and moments of intense beauty. Here a god-king, a great city builder, learns...

"So he stood in his shoes And he wondered, He wondered, He stood in his Shoes and he wondered" – John Keats Written under the sign of Eros, builder and destroyer of cities, and prefaced by an epigraph from Keats, the poems in "A Place in the World"...

Peter McDonald invokes and explores the pastoral imagination, in love-poems and poems about grief, poems concerning remote history and the more recent past, and poems which find new shapes for our difficult, sometimes contradictory, relations to plac...