"What Must Happen" is Jeffrey Wainwright's most intimate and elegiac collection of poems to date, recalling lost parents, relations and friends. Shared childhood memories, and the history of hometown Stoke-on-Trent, connect Wainwright's personal them...

The collection begins with the prize winning sequence, Lark and Merlin, an erotic pursuit or deathly dance, across a wilderness of fells and northern hills and ends with a meditation on an estuarial winter. In between there are selections from a hali...

"A few months ago? the novelty mug frightened us all by spontaneously bursting into Viva Las Vegas and I took that? as a sign, did what any? Catholic would do – put up a shrine". from Burnfort, Las Vegas "The Windows of Graceland" gathers the cream...

W. H. Davies (1871-1940) was popularly though reductively known as the "tramp-poet" due to his remarkable journey from vagrancy, in Britain and the United States, to considerable literary success. "Discovered" in part by Edward Thomas, who admired hi...

The clearly-focussed lyrics of Les Murray's "Waiting for the Past" are rich in topographies and the languages peculiar to them – wonga vines, lyre birds, gum trees, shrike thrushes, tallow boughs, boab trees, the octopus in Wylies Baths killed by ste...

During a record-breaking blizzard in Boston, two poets met, one American and one English. This meeting marked the beginning of a life-transforming love affair. The story is told in "The World Before Snow", Tim Liardet's tenth collection, a book of pa...

In this, her boldest collection to date, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. Restricting herself in each poem to sixteen lines, set in coup...

The poems in Eavan Boland's new collection consider questions of inheritance and identity, of what is handed down and what is lost. Boland's poems are acts of preservation: they are aware of the significance of objects, memories, words, in keeping al...

Jon Stallworthy wrote his first poems during schooldays shadowed by the Second World War and a mother's memories of a brother and friends killed in the First. At school, too, he was introduced to the poems of Wilfred Owen, whose biography he would la...

Wilfred Owen is the poet of pity, the voice of the soldier maimed, blinded, traumatised and killed, not just in the Great War, but in all wars since, so resonant has his message become. Although he saw only five of his poems published in his lifetime...