Here are the letters between Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great German-speaking poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). Their correspondence lasted from 1954 until Celan's death by suicide. Sachs died the da...

To walk through a landscape is to be part of a slow unfolding of time and distance, to commit yourself to an adventure. "The Hundred Thousand Places" is a single poem that travels across seasons, through a variety of Scottish highland and island land...

The characters in David Constantine's remarkable new collection are united by an urge to absent themselves, to abscond from the intolerable pressures of normal life and withdraw into strange ideas, political causes, even private languages. Viewed fro...

The drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, "was the first word in the world", and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures – the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths...

Austin Clarke's first book of poetry was published in 1917, his last in 1971. In a writing life spanning much of the twentieth century, Clarke created from his early, Yeatsian immersion in Gaelic myth and literature a poetry of passionate, idiosyncra...

Continuum follows the path taken in "Take My Word for It", with poems written in her original English. As in her translated Romanian poems, Nina Cassian is a born lyric story-teller. Many of her poems take the form of short fables or even parables, f...

"At the Source" reflects upon a writer's deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Her creative journeys begin from those sources. The book opens with a house, Blaen Cwrt. A river rises, a tributary which will flow on to the Atlantic, and a fami...

"Carrying the Songs" explores what is lost to time and change, and what endures and is transformed: languages and landscapes, artefacts and songs, carried through a lifetime, across oceans, across centuries. A long-forgotten Gaelic word surfaces from...

A few months before his death, Paul Celan described "Schneepart" as his "strongest and boldest" book. A response to the turbulent events of 1968 – the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the attempted assassination of a student leader in Berlin – the...

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...