"Verse &c" collects a substantial body of Oliver Bernard's poetry written since the early 1980s and the publication of "Poems" (1983). His versions of French poets – Rimbaud, Apollinaire – are widely known and praised, but his original work has recen...

Nina Bogin writes of her second collection that she has "drawn together poems that deal with the personal – family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos. U...

Thomas Blackburn was haunted. His child-hood was dominated by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin, and an over-affectionate mother. Moral and sexual uncertainties form t...

The great Russian poet Alexander Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical traumas, trying to welcome the new order. But there was no space in it for his kind of imagination. His poem "The Twelve" has claims to being the fi...

"Augatora" is not a new word: it is a word lost from language a millennium ago. In Old High German it meant, more or less, "eye gate" ('window' with an inbuilt etymology). The windows in this book open on real and imagined land- and cityscapes. Indi...

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) is a latter-day Jacobean, the author of blank verse plays and poems which are as bold, wild and fresh as they are archaic in manner. We read his plays less for character and drama than for the miracles that occur in...

"Waiting for the Ferry" is Heather Buck's fourth and finest collection of poems. She has quietly built a reputation for the clarity, concentration and direct emotional weight of her poems. Whether writing about nature, faith, childhood, art, places o...

Often reported to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and recently elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bei Dao is China's pre-eminent contemporary poet. The poems in "Landscape Over Zero" reach...

Eavan Boland's new book, her first since the "Collected Poems", is in two parts. The opening sequence entitled "Colony" explores the theme of Irish language and culture. This is followed by a collection of individual poems which open out from autobio...

In the twelve years since Peter Bland's last collection, "The Crusoe Factor", was published by London Magazine "Editions", the poet has not been idle. Setting the best of his earlier work, long unavailable, beside a full volume of new poems, he lets...