Caroline Bird's two earlier collections were acclaimed for their exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion – "a bit of a Howl for a new generation", wrote the "Hudson Review". "Watering Can" celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The p...

Since the 1960s the English poet Matthew Mead and his German wife Ruth have translated selections from poets to whom they were drawn. This is their own choice from the many memorable poems which they have translated. The collection celebrates a fasci...

"Window for a Small Blue Child" is the story of the poet's experience of in vitro fertilisation, a sequence of poems underscored by the seasons and by the biological clock of a woman in her forties as she navigates the risks and choices, the drugs an...

John Ashbery's new collection speaks from the haunted, ambiguous cities of the twenty-first century. These are the landscapes of the worldly country we have created, both ominous and absurd. Perspectives dissolve into dazzle. The clock is ticking: we...

"Yesterday I lost a country", Dunya Mikhail writes in "The War Works" Hard, a subversive, sobering work by an exiled Iraqi poet, and her first collection to appear in English. Compassionate, engaged and direct, Mikhail's is a voice that transcends bo...

The chronically invalid son of a robust sea-captain and novelist father, Tristan Corbiere (1845-1875) published one book of verse and was virtually unheard of in his lifetime. He is an informal formalist, delighting in clashing registers of diction a...

John Ashbery's new collection of fifty-one poems ends with the substantial piece that gives the book its title. Composed in stanzaic prose, it is a fine specimen of his distinctive courtship mode, wooing the language with language, teasing it and tea...

"Westerns" is the classic account of the emergence, growth and flowering of one of the most perennially popular film genres. When it was first published thirty years ago it was welcomed by reviewers in Europe and the United States as a major work. In...

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a central figure in the artistic life of mid-nineteenth-century Paris and London. His distinct aesthetic, with its emphasis on appreciating a work of art as an arrangement of colours, lines and shapes, can be se...

"Walking the Animals" is a sort of travel book: it brings together inner and outer landscapes, the wet skies of the Pennines and the drought of the South African lowveld; landscapes of loss, landscapes of longing. Carola Luther tracks journeys betwee...