David Hartnett's first collection introduces a poet with an assured voice and a strong and subtle technique. His poems deal with the fragility and tenaciousness of our relationships, both with others and with the natural order, in the present and the...

The lamentation of the dead has been a preoccupation in Peter Levi's recent poetry, as well as the subject of his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1984. Few poets of our time have found ways in which to compose such sustained medita...

Bringing together "Writing on the Wall", composed some ten years after H.D's stay in Vienna, and Advent, a journal she kept at the time of her analysis there, "Tribute to Freud" offers a rare glimpse into the consulting room of the father of psychoan...

One of Scotland's most interesting and highly praised writers, his reputation is built upon a considerable body of work in both English and Gaelic that encompasses a wide range of genres including novels, short stories, plays, and poetry.

This collection of Jeffrey Wainwright's poetry brings together most of his first collection, a Poetry Book Society recommendation, and much of what he has written since that time. The poems confront a wide range of intellectual, personal, and politic...

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...

Peter Levi's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford discusses the lamentation of the dead in written and oral poetry from Homer and the Bible to recent times, by way of Shakespeare, Milton and the Serbian epics. He puts...