Nikos Gatsos's profoundly mysterious and magnetic poem "Amorgos", named after a Greek island he never visited and written during the Nazi occupation, is the single work on which his reputation rests. It is a wonderful incantation on the theme of loss...

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...

Urbane and cosmopolitan, Stanley Moss's poems are the work of a writer once described as "a citizen of the world, both past and present, one who seems to have been everywhere and missed nothing". In strong lyrics and searching narratives he explores...

Gregory Woods takes the epigraph of his second collection from Jean Genet: "more objectivity, more passivity, more indifference, hence poetry". "May I Say Nothing" is a collection of homo-erotic verses on both personal and broader social themes. The...

"I Found This Shirt" is a sack of poems and prose pieces that continue Ian McMillan's obsessive exploration of self, place, history and comedy: from columns for BBC Radio 4, to a poetic journal of a Mexican visit; from poems written especially for Ar...

Louise Gluck interweaves in this book-length sequence an account of the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's Odyssey. Myth and modern life have a lot to teach each other in terms of irony and clarification. Penelope, Circe...

In these taut, sharp poems written mainly in the 1990s, Daniel Weissbort has developed a new way of looking at himself and at the world. Experience, memory, dreams and ordinary life supply the poems with rich and varied subjects. The result is an ale...

If there's an autumnal feeling to the title of Norm Sibum's new book, it is a fruitful season despite early frosts, the loves, unmellow anxieties and reflections of the voices who tell us their stories. Some of the speakers are ancient, some modern,...

Li Po (AD 701-762) and Tu Fu are traditionally celebrated as the two greatest poets in the Chinese canon. David Hinton's translation of Li Po's poetry is no less an achievement than his critically acclaimed "The Selected Poems of Tu Fu", also publish...

Donald Justice's poems have been greatly admired by his fellow writers on both sides of the Atlantic. He was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for his "Selected Poems" and in 1991 the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. "Orpheus Hesitated Beside the Black River...