"C. H. Sisson is one of the great translators of our time", Jasper Griffin wrote in The Times Literary Supplement. "Latin, French, German, Italian: there can have been few writers who have published translations of Virgil, Racine, Heine and Dante, in...

"Edge to Edge" brings together the best of Peter Dale's original work from 1968 to the present. It is an impressive oeuvre which reveals Dale as a quintessentially English poet whose work is characterized by an intense depth of feeling, channeled and...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is mainly known to the English-speaking world as the author of the poetic drama "Faust". In Europe – as poet, dramatist, novelist, art critic, literary theoretician, travel writer, author of a treatise on light...

Peter Russell is at his lyrical and satirical best in the "Elegies" of his alter ego "Quintilius", a disaffected and maverick late Latin poet whose scabrous observations on the last decadent days and collapse of the Roman Empire, seen from a provinci...

"Touchwood" is Dick Davis's first collection since "Devices and Desires", his "New and Selected Poems" (1989), which Wendy Cope selected as her book of the year in the Sunday Times, calling it "the year's most underrated poetry book". The clarity and...

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...

"Selected Poems" draws on John Ash's four acclaimed collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. "A little querulous, perhaps?" Carolyn Kizer asked in the New York Times Book Review. "Never mind. This may be the most auspicious debut of its kind s...

Welcoming Robert Pinsky's work, Robert Lowell wrote: "it is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic". "The Figured Wheel" gathers...

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...

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...