William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) was born in Greenock, Scotland, "beside the sugar house quays" – a setting open to the sea. He remained a Celt, moving from Scotland to Cornwall where he found seascapes without urban clutter, just an occasional ruin...

If there's an autumnal feeling to the title of Norm Sibum's new book, it is a fruitful season despite early frosts, the loves, unmellow anxieties and reflections of the voices who tell us their stories. Some of the speakers are ancient, some modern,...

When Chris McCully's first book of poems, "Time Signatures" (Carcanet, 1993), appeared, the "Observer" described the poet as "a keen fly-fisher, a translator of Old English poetry and an expert prosodist; and these skills have miraculously combined s...

Yves Bonnefoy, celebrated translator and critic, is widely considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. Named to the College de France in 1981 to fill the chair left vacant by the death of Roland Barthes, Bonnefoy was...

John Clare was an assiduous practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last few years before his institutionalisation in 1837, fist at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of...

They also will discover emotional insights capable of enhancing their own lives: Finding new truths as old as the Greeks.

Thomas McCarthy's third book confirms his standing among the finest Irish poets to emerge in recent years. "The Non-Aligned Storyteller" develops both personal and public themes in eloquent, incisive and moving poems. Reviewing his last collection in...

"Most of what there is to learn about poetry has to be learnt in one's own language. But it is mostly learnt by reading and turning over poems in one's head, and little by deliberate criticism". Peter Levi's essay – meditated, as he says in his prefa...

"Northern Summer" is a representative selection from John Matthias's previous books, together with a group of poems written since 1980. Robert Duncan wrote of his first book, Bucyrus, that in part "Matthias is a Goliard – one of those wandering souls...

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...