Each "No Fear Shakespeare" contains: The complete text of the original play A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language A complete list of characters with descriptions Plenty of helpful commentary.

One of the greatest poets of the subcontinent, Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) redefined the parameters of Bengali poetry in the wake of the impression left by the work of his more traditional compatriot, Rabindranath Tagore. Idiosyncratic in style and w...

The lyric and satirical muses have kept busy with Les Murray. "Subhuman Redneck Poems", awarded the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize, Dog Fox Field (1991), "Translations from the Natural World" (1993) and "Conscious and Verbal" (1999) are added to his expanded...

Illusions and delusions, joys and jokes, mysteries of memory and temporal paradox figure in Andrew McNeillie's new collection. Here are new sequences of bird poems, and tree poems, lines from an autobiography, lines from America, and poems about old...

Does history tell stories? from "Concerning History" Yes, if the poet listens carefully. Elizabeth Jennings listens carefully, through spiritual, emotional and mental turbulence. She has created an abidingly popular body of poetry, using traditional...

"These great people like MacDiarmid are a bit scary", says the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead. And Kathleen Jamie: "Drunk? Men? Thistle? What?... No. No, not for me". It was not ever thus. Dylan Thomas declared: "Every door in any town should be wide o...

Josep Carner's "Nabi" is a masterpiece of modern Catalan poetry. Based on the biblical story of Jonah, it is essentially a Christian poem, though it is scathing about the effects of religious perversion. In the widest sense a poem about the limits of...

Nevermore is an elegy for lost times and threatened things. It celebrates recollection and the "immortality of youth", and youth's passions: for natural history (as in the group of bird poems entitled "Plato's Aviary"), for the naive curiosity and lu...

Edwin Morgan's original "Selected Poems" was published in 1985. It became something of a classic, selling in excess of 20,000 copies. But 1985 is a long time in the world of so inventive and irrepressible a writer as Edwin Morgan. He has published a...

Peter Scupham's eleventh collection brings his customary elegance and skill to bear on themes as diverse as the Battle of Arras, Kilvert's Diary, and an unexpected encounter with his parents on holiday from the underworld. These parables and truthful...