"Those who care for poetry should besiege the publisher for Sophie Hannah's first book", the "Spectator" declared. In the "Telegraph" P. J. Kavanagh wrote, "Sophie Hannah is a real star". Her broadcasts and public readings have proven extremely popul...

These translations were completed in the 1960s and 1970s. "We were trying to make poems in English which, to whatever extent in different cases proved possible, would provide equivalents to the effects of the Russian and German originals. I emphasize...

"Late" is both an elegy for and a celebration of life in our century as we approach the end of the millennium. In the spirit and style of Michael Hamburger's much-admired sequences "Variations", "Travelling" and "In Suffolk", it is a narrative medita...

What kind of truth does modern poetry offer? Michael Hamburger's approach to this question ranges over European and American poetry since Baudelaire and the result is one of the best introductions available to twentieth-century poetry and its anteced...

John Heath-Stubbs's new book is more elegiac, but no less firm in its celebrations, than his last, "Sweetapple Earth" (1993). As he reflects in his poem "The Ascent", "The poems in my file are bleak enough, / Written in the knowledge one I loved,/My...

Sophie Hannah's first book "The Hero and the Girl Next Door" (Carcanet, 1995), earned her a remarkably big audience: her broadcasts and public readings throughout the country have proved extremely popular. Her poems entertain with a cunning use of tr...

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...

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...

Treatise on the "Arte of Limning" is one of the most important documents in the history of English art. Published in paperback for the first time, this edition provides a transcript of the original manuscript copy facing a modernised version, extensi...