Michael Hamburger's new collection gathers his shorter poems written since his "Collected Poems 1941-1994" of 1995. His strong and sinuous poems are alert to the intersections of past and present, of continuity and change. His searching form of natur...

Nevermore is an elegy for lost times and threatened things. It celebrates recollection and the "immortality of youth", and youth's passions: for natural history (as in the group of bird poems entitled "Plato's Aviary"), for the naive curiosity and lu...

Anthony Howell's choice from his five previous books displays a poet of great variety and accomplishment. From playful short poems to extended narratives, whether in free verse or traditional forms, his skill enlivens his subjects and offers surprise...

The bewildering range of the Scottish writer Frank Kuppner's work, as evidenced in the ten books he published in the last century, is such that many people did not know where to start. Here, for them, is the obvious place to do so, at least where his...

The poetry of Lorna Goodison, Derek Walcott says, "is a rooted, organic delight, true in its intonations to the Jamaican language she loves, fresh in its wit and pain and in the high, spiritual gossip of its leaves". The poet is endowed with all th...

Everyone wants to subscribe to a deed of heroism, especially if the risks are largely imaginary. The headline announcing a daring deed; in the tourist shop a poster promising a spectacular, sun-drenched corrida, and there is a space between the legen...

"Swarm", Jorie Graham's eighth volume of poetry, is a book-length sequence which sets out to encounter destiny, Eros, and law. The poet confronts a fundamental problem: whom to address, whom there still is to address. She negotiates passionately with...

Edwin Morgan, Scotland's best-loved poet, returns to the stage after his celebrated Phaedra with a powerful and shocking millennial examination of the life of Jesus Christ as a man among men. Jesus, a human figure in an inhuman time, experiences all...

Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. "Selected Poems" – which includes important prose as well – reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, "written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pac...

Karen Press has been a presence in English-language poetry for some time, her work represented in the anthologies "Ten South African Poets" and in "New Poetries II" (1999). Home, however, is her first book to be published outside South Africa. She br...