In "These Days of Prohibition" is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to v...

Selected poems and prose by one of Austria's most controversial satirists of the interwar years.

Stanley Moss dedicates these poems "to departed friends: human, canine, arboreal, avian", setting the tone for a collection that is celebratory, occasional, salutatory. Striking out at "Sunrise", the poems move through sections for "Noon", "Sunset",...

Over the past twenty-five years, the award-winning writer David Morley has become known as one of Britain's most original poets. Known for his energy and linguistic inventiveness, Morley is a master storyteller, whose poems uncover "universes bound t...

Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) is recognised as one of Germany's most powerful poets of the post-war era. She lived and worked first in East Germany, then (after political persecution) in the West, making her home finally in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Her p...

From the opening poem, an extended elegy for the Cold War's ambivalent mix of irresponsibility and prosperity, to a concluding short memoir of Robert Lowell, "The Italian Visitor" is a book about memory. The title sequence, an account of a 1940s' chi...

In "Ice" Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. The poem "Polar" is the poet's point de repere, evo...

"The piano is not an instrument for young ladies Massimo, he said, it is an instrument for gorillas. Only a gorilla has the strength to attack the piano as it should be attacked, only a gorilla has the uninhibited energy to challenge the piano as it...

"Incorrigibly Plural" celebrates the diversity and vitality of Louis MacNeice's writing. Poets and critics illuminate the work of a writer whose achievement and influence is increasingly recognised as central to modern poetry in English. Contribution...

The characters in Mirja Unge's debut collection are all, in their own way, evading something; whether failing to confront the true nature of an encounter, or avoiding responsibilities as a parent, sibling or friend. Abuse, betrayal and neglect lurk b...