Tony Connor's new collection – his seventh in all, and his first since the 1982 "New and Selected Poems" – evokes the spirits of very different places, times and people. The poems move eastwards from America, where he has settled, back to Lancashire...

"Though nature's sternest painter yet the best" – Byron George Crabbe (1754-1832) arrived late on the Augustan scene. Born in the same decade as Burns and Blake, he outlived Keats by more than ten years. His father was a warehouse-keeper in Aldeburg...

In "Poets of Munster" Sean Dunne charts the vigorous and diverse poetry that has been written in Ireland's southernmost province during the last half-century. Twenty-five poets – from Thomas MacGreevy and Frank O'Connor to Thomas McCarthy, from Sean...

"What poetry must do", Jane Cooper has written, "is alert us to a truth, and it must be necessary; once it exists, we realize how much we needed exactly this". "Scaffolding" presents Jane Cooper's new and selected poems gathered over three and a half...

Tony Connor left school at fourteen and worked as a textile designer in Manchester for many years. He finds his poems among the affections and troubles of everyday experience rather than in the esoteric or the literary. Yet he possesses a subtle sens...