Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. In "documentary", she wrote, real things "lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens". If film, for Tait,...

"We Look Like This" anatomizes how history, violence, power, lust and mortality work on us. Burt's formal, muscular language evokes a world of war, want, cruelty and hope, as well as childhood among "tough Jews" in Philadelphia, dominated by his fath...

"New Selected Poems" contains Les Murray's gathering from the full range of his poetry, from poems of the 1960s to work from "Taller When Prone" (2004) and new poems yet to appear in a collection. Les Murray is one of the finest poets writing today...

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is the poet of the night world, of the inexplicable, the uncanny. His poems do not analyse, they do not explain: they exist with the intensity of hallucinations. In the breathtakingly seductive beauty of "To Helen" – "Like...

Andrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a poet, and an energiser of poetry. A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry. As a publish...

"The Collected Poems" is a new and definitive edition of the poetry of one of the best-loved and most enduringly popular modern poets. Almost all of Jennings' published poetry (including work never before collected) and a large selection of her unpu...

Neil Powell's seventh Carcanet collection explores the deep roots of identity: family histories we inherit, memories we carry, the casual decisions and wrong turnings that add up to make us who we are. At the heart of the book is a compelling narrat...

From his first wartime collection evoking a generation's experience of a country made strange by blackouts and air raids, the "vivid allegorical / Reality of gun and hangar", to the consolatory wisdom of the "Last Poems" of 1993, Roy Fuller was a poe...

"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 meteoric and turbulent career of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was crammed into four teenage years, in which he wrote two masterpieces, "The Illuminations" and "A Season in Hell", and some wonderful short poems. At nineteen he then turned his back o...