James Sutherland-Smith has lived and worked in Serbia and Montenegro through the difficult transitions. Old states fragmented and a new Balkan political landscape emerged. He writes, not as an observer, but from within cultures rebuilding after polit...

In the title poem of her second collection, "Salvation Jane" (a purple thistle-like weed), Stoddart suggests that in naming something we empower it to fulfil our idea of its meaning and purpose. The poem typifies, as Vernon Scannell wrote, "the way h...

Not for sale in Estonia! Written in 1928 by one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, and translated the following year by William Carlos Williams (the two had been introduced in Paris by a mutual friend), "Last Nights of Paris" is related to...

A dazzlingly various collection, "Local Honey" juggles its opposites with panache – heart and intellect, melancholy and zest, derangement and perspicacity. Beginning with early stirrings of logical thought in a Palaeolithic cave, the collection range...

In this delightful homage to the now unfashionable Neapolitan poet, two contemporary poets who share a fascination with his work present their selection of fresh versions from his best-known collection. In their introductions they explore the backgro...

By turns sensual and incantatory, "Common Prayer" offers a liturgy for a world in crisis. Meditations on the actuality of sickness and bereavement move outward through narratives of the broken body of Europe's violent twentieth century. Challenging a...

"New Poetries IV" celebrates the distinctiveness and diversity of new poetry in English. The eleven poets included are variously rooted in Europe, America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia; they write with the imaginative energies less of wor...

One of our earliest English critics, Ben Jonson, famously wished that he had written Southwell's "Burning Babe", the most famous poem of the body of spiritual verse written by the Elizabethan priest, poet and martyr S. Robert Southwell SJ (1561-1595)...

"The Last Place on Earth" is a warm, witty celebration of the textures of a life. The vanishing world of a working-class childhood is evoked alongside football in the park and the purposeful calm of ironing; family parties and born-again bikers, joke...

Ruth Silcock's third collection continues in cheerful vein about often less than cheerful subjects. She has the knack of combining jaunty traditional forms with sometimes startling or even grim subject matter. Her poems focus on the lives of ordinary...