John Polidori (1795-1821) is a fascinating but always shadowy figure of Romanticism, an impetuous, sensitive writer of fierce talent. His encounter with Byron, Shelley and their circle has contributed both to his fame and notoriety on the one hand, a...

Lucky Day begins with natural landscapes through which love and lyric flicker and flare. The sparrows, pigeons and magpies of the urban periphery lighten the atmosphere, edging the collection towards the city in the funny elegy "Bird List". The seque...

"Russia's Dangerous Texts" examines the ways that writers and their works unnerved and irritated Russia's authoritarian rulers both before and after the Revolution. Kathleen F. Parthe identifies ten historically powerful beliefs about literature and...

Not for sale in Estonia! "I transferred to Teive my speculations on certainty, which lunatics have in greater abundance than anyone". Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a multitude of writers: his works were composed by "heteronyms",...

Recounts the legend of Robin Hood, who plundered the king's purse and poached his deer and whose generosity endeared him to the poor.

Houses and gardens, remembered or imagined, dominate Neil Powell's sixth Carcanet collection: his grandmother's home in Chelsea, a magical childhood garden in the Surrey hills, an abandoned, fog-shrouded building on the East Anglian coast. There is a...

Italian/English facing text Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is one of the essential writers of the twentieth century, and "Disaffections" is the first complete collection of his poetry in English. Included in this facing text edition are all the poems Pav...

Justo Jorge Padron is one of Spain's leading poets. Born in Las Palmas, Grand Canary Island, in 1943, he is among the most representative poets of the Spanish Generation of the 1970s. The brilliance of his metaphorical imagination provides the Spanis...

"Author of paradoxes as clear as water and, as water, dizzying:...mysterious man who does not cultivate mystery, mysterious as the mid-day moon, taciturn phantom of the Portuguese mid-day – who is Pessoa?" asks Octavio Paz. This collection of the w...

Containing all her published work along with over 70 uncollected poems, this is the definitive edition of a poet with a growing body of admirers. Clive Wilmer spoke of "the ghostly music" of Sally Purcell's poetry and described her first book as "a m...