Stories come in many forms, from nursery rhymes and national anthems to poems and praise songs, and from the stories of science to the rituals of religion. They tell us where we come from, and where we belong; how to live and sometimes how to die. Th...

Mervyn Morris is one of the most distinctive West Indian poets, his work characterised by economy, wit and humane seriousness. He makes elegant use of Jamaica's linguistic range, with poems in international standard English, Jamaican Creole and mixtu...

"The Instruments of Art" uses poetry to explore the lives and works of Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh and others, the personal sacrifice involved, the singular vision and inspiration that set them in motion. God's creation, some argue, is a work of a...

From a quick-tempered singing grandmother to a performance of The Mikado in an African village: David Kinloch's exploration of his relationship with his father is both unexpected and affectionate. An extended sequence of poems moves from personal mem...

These poems are the fruit of estrangement, in particular from origins. They draw on James Sutherland Smith's experiences of life in the Middle East and Middle Europe; what is most strange, they tell us, is not to be found in exotic locales, but close...

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is the authentic voice of democratic America. After a childhood in Brooklyn, he spent many years in and around Manhattan and Washington, where he witnessed troops returning from the Civil War and tended wounded soldiers in th...

In "Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems" is the first major collection to be published by Dom Moraes in the UK for over three decades. The collection shows the development of an urbane, witty, fiercely intelligent poet whose extraordinary life and...

Michael Hamburger's new collection gathers his shorter poems written since his "Collected Poems 1941-1994" of 1995. His strong and sinuous poems are alert to the intersections of past and present, of continuity and change. His searching form of natur...

These novels depict one of the strangest and most terrifying epochs in the history of Europe, as the Roman empire fell into the hands of cruel, mad, incompetent emperors: Tiberius, Caligula, Nero. In these dangerous times, Graves's hero, the schola...

"I Found This Shirt" is a sack of poems and prose pieces that continue Ian McMillan's obsessive exploration of self, place, history and comedy: from columns for BBC Radio 4, to a poetic journal of a Mexican visit; from poems written especially for Ar...