"Death's Jest-Book" is Thomas Lovell Beddoes' long neglected masterwork, a revenge tragedy replete with murder, sorcery and haunting After early acclaim as a lyric poet and dramatist, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) began Death's Jest-Book in 1825...

George Oppen's "New Collected Poems" gathers all of the poet's books published in his lifetime (1908-1984). It adds previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work. One of America's most vigorous modernists, he was a member of th...

In the title poem, set in Rome, a chance meeting with the dying Rudolf Nureyev strikes the poet, himself a dancer, as hallucinatory. Along with the poems prompted by his mother's death, it is one of several unsettling poems in this collection. Yet a...

In this generous selection of nearly half of Hauge's poetic work, Robin Fulton displays the range, variety and distinctive qualities of his poetry. Though deeply rooted in the West Norwegian landscape which he evokes so memorably, Hauge's poetry has...

Five booklets that Ovid first penned now are three; he preferred to emend. So if we don't please you, at least we can ease you presenting two less to offend. Ovid (c. 43 BC-AD17), a daring, original and passionate poet, has been an enduring influenc...

This is a book full of one God in many aspects, at once strange and intimate, transcendent and physical, Son of the Almighty yet born of woman. The book, sacramentally shaped, follows three "offices" of the church, leading us towards an altar then re...

Charles Tomlinson declares that this book, emerging from the practice, the art and magic of translation, concerns itself with "the way certain fables of metamorphosis have captured the poetic imagination and how translation – literary metamorphosis –...

In October 1879, Mallarme's eight year old son Anatole died after months of illness. Mallarme's letters tell nothing of the 210 sheets of pencilled notes towards a poem about this death, and they did not appear in his lifetime. When first published i...

Early one morning in London – on Boxing Day – a minicab driver and his customer discover they have much in common. They are of a certain age, came to Britain at about the same time, in their teens, lived in the same street in Kilburn in the 1950s and...

The themes of Donald Ward's poems are traditional – human relationships, religious meditation and, above all, the natural world. Yet their expression is entirely his own, combining a fine lyricism with striking imagery. At first glance familiar, Ward...