A dazzlingly various collection, "Local Honey" juggles its opposites with panache – heart and intellect, melancholy and zest, derangement and perspicacity. Beginning with early stirrings of logical thought in a Palaeolithic cave, the collection range...

Dick Davis's seventh collection contains poems as intelligent and graceful as ever – and as immediate in their impact, as rewarding when savoured at leisure. Their complexities engage rather than bemuse the reader as Davis addresses subjects as vario...

Paul Valery's most celebrated collection Charmes was first published in 1922. It contains several of his most famous poems, including "ebauche d'un serpent" and "Le cimetiere marin" – in Yvor Winters' view "the two greatest short poems ever written"....

One of the most significant poetic achievements of our time, John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award upon its publication in 1976. The long...

"Inner Voices" gathers for the first time poems from Richard Howard's twelve published collections, presenting a representative selection of the work of a writer termed by the New York Times Book Review "a powerful presence in American poetry for for...

For half a century Oktay Rifat occupied a leading position in the vanguard of Turkish poetry. Despite his popularity and fame he rarely appeared in public, preferring the private life of an ordinary family man and content to work as an attorney while...

Wordsworth's "meanest flower that blows" suggested to him "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears". The lyrics, elegies, songs and ghazals in Mimi Khalvati's new book pay attention to things the imagination generally disregards, an attention t...

Greenfields shows how it was, to grow up in a quiet corner of Scotland, fixing the last decades of the twentieth century in its snapshots. The book reclaims suburbia as a place of unexpected poetry and conjures the bittersweet of such hybrid places....

Henry Reed (1914-1986) is most familiar as the author of "The Naming of Parts", the best-loved and most anthologised poem of the Second World War. He was a poet of much greater scope than that: in addition to publishing "A Map of Verona", his 1946 co...

By turns sensual and incantatory, "Common Prayer" offers a liturgy for a world in crisis. Meditations on the actuality of sickness and bereavement move outward through narratives of the broken body of Europe's violent twentieth century. Challenging a...