Fading Contact is a middle-period masterwork by the great Serbo-Croat poet who died suddenly at the height of his powers in July 1996. It marks the watershed between the blazing, vivid imagery of his youthful poetry and the measured, complex verse of...

"Fossil Unicorn is Sally" Purcell's first collection for more than ten years and contains the very best of her work from that period. Drawing on folklore and mediaeval sources, these poems are tense yet fluid in rhythm and diction, and alive with a s...

In an essay Louise Gluck says that every end of a book is for her a "conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off", in which she discerns the themes, habits and preoccupations of the previous volume as defining the tasks of the next. The First Five Boo...

Welcoming Robert Pinsky's work, Robert Lowell wrote: "it is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic". "The Figured Wheel" gathers...

Imagine a character of our time whose affinities are with the Silver Poets of Ancient Rome. A person at the pivot of middle age; cosmopolitan, yet jaundiced – a hedonist with greying temples and expanding belly... This is the persona whose voice perm...

"This book", writes Les Murray, "presents to British and European readers selections from the work of five leading Australian poets of the generation before mine". They are, with Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and Gwen Harwood-who are happily available in...

Laura (Riding) Jackson died in 1991 at the age of ninety. "The Poems of Laura Riding" were published in 1938, after which she renounced poetry, an act which still challenges her readers. That volume omitted some two hundred early pieces, all written...

"Forms of Distance" is Bei Dao's second bilingual collection since his enforced exile from China in 1989. Michael Hofmann described the first, Old Snow, as "the work of one of the great poets of our time", and John Cayley wrote in the Times Literary...

Webster's Dictionary defines a "flow-chart" as a "schematic diagram... showing the progress of materials through the various stages of a manufacturing process". In this "Flow Chart", a book-length poem, John Ashbery charts the ebb and flow of life p...

"Fish Magic" introduces the fascinating and individual West German poet Elisabeth Borchers, whose poetry has attracted critical acclaim since its first appearance in 1961. Her poems have the elusive and haunting quality of magic charms. As in the art...