Andrew McNeillie's sixth collection returns to the sea and its immensity as a metaphor for fate. It also revisits the British and Irish archipelago ("For which read a figure for my heart. / For which too read a figure for time's hurt"), following a n...

A young soldier dons Napoleon's hat. An out-of-work man wanders Berlin, dreaming he is Peter the Great. The famous exile Dante finally returns to his native city to "hang his crown of laurels up". Familial and historical apparitions haunt this dazzli...

Henry David Thoreau was a sturdy individualist and a lover of nature. In March, 1845, he built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived until September 1847. Walden is Thoreaus autobiograophical acc...

"We Look Like This" anatomizes how history, violence, power, lust and mortality work on us. Burt's formal, muscular language evokes a world of war, want, cruelty and hope, as well as childhood among "tough Jews" in Philadelphia, dominated by his fath...

In 1936, twenty-year-old Edward Weismiller became the youngest poet to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Today, more than sixty years later, he retains that distinction. Yale University Press here reintroduces Edward Weismiller-...

These lines, from the title poem of "Waterloo Teeth", set an historical aftermath in vivid motion. John Whale's first book of poems explores our capacity to articulate the pain and pleasure of such experiences – our own, and those of others distant f...

Tom Raworth's "Collected Poems" (2003) was acclaimed by the Times Literary Supplement as a milestone: thirty years' work by a major poet of English modernism gathered for the first time. Raworth moves on, radical, inventive and politically engaged. "...

Poetry doesn't matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. Undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Par...

Caroline Bird's two earlier collections were acclaimed for their exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion – "a bit of a Howl for a new generation", wrote the "Hudson Review". "Watering Can" celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The p...

Since the 1960s the English poet Matthew Mead and his German wife Ruth have translated selections from poets to whom they were drawn. This is their own choice from the many memorable poems which they have translated. The collection celebrates a fasci...