In "The Anti-Basilisk" Christopher Middleton, in the spirit that impelled Shelley to write "The Masque of Anarchy", reveals as crooked the apparently straight and sees what's coming round corners with a clarity that dazzles. Bruno Schulz in 1937 made...

In "Merchant Prince" Thomas McCarthy presents two groups of poems, set largely in Cork, and a novella set in Italy, in the period from 1769 and 1831. They tell the story of Nathaniel Murphy: his training for the priesthood, the loss of his virginity...

The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell: before cities existed in Australia, Francis McNamara, the convict poet, described the infernal one populated by those who tormented him and his fellow prisoners. Sentenced in 1832...

In her third book of poems, Sinead Morrissey builds on the achievement of her award-winning collection, "Between Here and There", by expanding the lyric into new territories and admitting new voices. The theme of imprisonment is variously addressed:...

John Masefield (1878-1967) is one of the great storytellers of English poetry, a spinner of yarns and ballads of tall ships and exotic seas, of the deep-rooted life of the rural England in which he grew up, and of the great narratives of Troy and Art...

Many tensions are at work in the playfully unconstrained poems of Stanley Moss: ordinary and mythical lives, the political and the personal, high art and low comedy intermingle, achieving an effect that is often surreal and always striking. Here God...

For many, the versions from Asian and Oriental poetry made by E. Powys Mathers during and shortly after the First World War rank with those of Arthur Waley or Ezra Pound. This volume, pairing his first two books, Coloured Stars and Black Marigolds, a...

"The Canals of Mars" begins with a poem elegising the poet's father and welcoming his newborn son. It concludes with a moment in which everything "is finished and about to happen". Patrick McGuinness's poems in this powerful first collection sharply...

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...

Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892-1978), one of the major poets of the twentieth century, is the greatest Scottish poet of any century. He drew on the literary and vernacular traditions of Scottish culture, revitalising the Scots langu...