The centrepiece of "Silent Highway" is the title-poem which celebrates the role of the river Thames in the life of London. It is written as a sequence that looks at history and the present: from Pocahontas's voyage to the arrival of the "Windrush" br...

Anthony Howell's first collection for several years moves in unusual directions. Guilt and society's victimization of those it punishes are among its subjects: it begins with poems concerned with the harm caused by anorexia and moves on to investigat...

In the title poem, set in Rome, a chance meeting with the dying Rudolf Nureyev strikes the poet, himself a dancer, as hallucinatory. Along with the poems prompted by his mother's death, it is one of several unsettling poems in this collection. Yet a...

Anthony Howell's choice from his five previous books displays a poet of great variety and accomplishment. From playful short poems to extended narratives, whether in free verse or traditional forms, his skill enlivens his subjects and offers surprise...

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...

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...

An eye for detail informs these poems by Anthony Howell. The book charts his wanderings from Hampshire to Australia, and finally to Sicily. His renewed interest in the description of emotional as well as geographical landscape is one of the pleasures...

This book brings together Anthony Howell's previously uncollected poems written between 1964 and 1982. His early collections of poems "Inside the Castle" (1969) and "Imruil" (1970) established him as one of our most talented new voices, a view which...