When "Heroes' Twilight" was originally published in 1965, it offered radical perspectives on the poetry, fiction and autobiographical writing of the First World War, mapping an area of literature which remains raw and challenging. Anthony Powell in t...

The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the "memorability test" with flying colours. What seems simple or simply achieved more often t...

The Count of Lautreamont – a nineteenth-century poet about whom little is known, except that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his transient existence at the age of 24 – is one of the forgotten presences alive...

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's most admired and popular poets. Her delicate, subtle and pointed poetry has gained her a large readership at home, where she has received the highest literary awards. Her poetry is direct, personal and uncompromising...

If the apparently didactic title of Anthony Howell's book belies the poems in it, that is to be expected of a writer for whom little is what it seems. The law adhered to in "Howell's Law" is the law of surprise. And from the start – a lengthy poem in...

In "The Hoop", his first book of poems, John Burnside takes his bearings from Celtic mythology and from landscape, especially that of Gloucestershire. "The things that contribute to how I work are botanical texts and drawings, fairy stories, Celtic a...

"A House Against the Night" collects Harry Guest's poems written mainly during 1969-73 – the latter part of his time in Japan, and the first two years since his return to England.

The second collection of a major American poet. Of her previous collection of poems, "Firstborn", published in England in 1969, John Fuller wrote in The Listener: "Her words are alive and her perceptions have strength. This is a very genuine and enjo...