Cosmopolitan, hybrid and eloquent, modern Canadian poetry is still, for many readers outside Canada, one of the great undiscovered terrains of world literature. "Modern Canadian Poets" sets out to end that neglect, redefining the connections between...

Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) is one of the finest female poets ever to write in Italian. Although she was lauded for her singing during her lifetime, her success and critical reputation as a poet emerged only after her verse was republished in the earl...

Peter Sansom's "Selected Poems" brings together twenty years of quintessential Sansom, a poet who has made the local and familiar his own resonant territory. Supermarkets and darts matches, life with teenagers and family funerals, the common ground o...

The ancient Greek poet Hesiod is best known for two poems, the "Theogony" and the "Works and Days". The "Theogony" gives an account of the creation of the universe andthe war between the Titans and Olympians, while "Works and Days" offers plain-speak...

"Rough music" is the old English name for a custom of public scapegoating. This is a book full of disturbing musical echoes, in which brilliant renewals of carol, charm, folksong and ballad explore themes of violence, loss and belonging. Fiona Sampso...

When Pedro Salinas's 1933 collection of love poems, "La voz a ti debida", was introduced to American audiences in Willis Barnstone's 1975 English translation, it was widely regarded as the greatest sequence of love poems written by a man or a woman,...

Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her f...

For a hundred years, "Poetry Review" has been at the heart of British literary life. Founded as "The Poetical Gazette" in May 1909, it has become the country's most widely read poetry magazine, playing a vital role in giving readers access to a gener...

"Smoke and Lilacs" is full of play and shadow, whispered intimations of mortality and glances of humour, elegiac lyric playing against steely classicism, an easy modern vernacular eliding with timeless grace. Sibum's meditative narratives move betwee...

C. K. Stead's "Collected Poems" is a milestone in English-language poetry: half a century's work from fourteen collections, along with early uncollected poems. A New Zealander, Stead's family connections in that country start in the early 1830s, and...