"Nonsense", wrote Mervyn Peake, "can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It's magic". Peake (1911-1968) is one of the great English nonsense poets, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. His verses lead the reader into places where...

An essential volume from the Hebrew language's greatest modern poet. Translator Peter Cole offers a full introduction to the poetry in this collection.

"Arguing with Malarchy" is full of voices. Tender, sinister, sad or cantankerous, they compel us to attend to their realities, the glimpsed depths of their stories, the distances they have travelled. Carola Luther's poems are alert to the ways a life...

"The Glacial Stairway" takes the reader on journeys in verse and prose, over a mountain pass in the Pyrenees, from King's Cross to the School of Oriental and African Studies; to the seasons of eighth-century China by way of a series of twentieth-cent...

"Last Post", the fourth and final volume of Parade's End, is set on a single post-war summer's day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Fo...

In 2006 Tim Liardet's brother died in mysterious circumstances. "The Storm House" is a book-length elegy that is both grief-fugue and exploration of family psychodrama. The two parts of the book form a powerful narrative of sorrow and anger, the even...

Like the creation myths they supersede, the revelations of science are seared into our collective imagination through storytelling. From Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple, vivid accounts of scientific discovery help us understand the principles behi...

"Eye of the Hare" affirms a spirituality for healing a shattered world. In a richly textured collection, layered with Biblical echoes and the music of the Psalms, John F. Deane explores the possibilities of poetry to redress the failures of care towa...

"An Ordinary Dog" is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision. They bear sceptical witness to – what? To the affecting ordinariness of human needs, to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about...

The poems in "The Sleepwalker at Sea" tread a fluid line between dream and wakefulness, memory and loss, presence and longing. Leave a house and it suddenly fills with "the unseen"; consult "The Book of Clues" and discover only 'ghostly hints' of a s...