Phaedra is a new verse translation of Racine's Phaedre. As with his acclaimed and often-performed Cyrano de Bergerac (published by Carcanet in 1992), so here Edwin Morgan has chosen to translate this greatest of French classic tragedies, with its mea...

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most promising poets and composers of his generation. In September 1922, however, he was certified insane and committed to a mental asylum. he remained there until his death, fo...

Edwin Morgan's original "Selected Poems" was published in 1985. It became something of a classic, selling in excess of 20,000 copies. But 1985 is a long time in the world of so inventive and irrepressible a writer as Edwin Morgan. He has published a...

"They are perhaps most mysterious, even to me", wrote Rainer Maria Rilke of the Sonnets to Orpheus, "in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me – the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down". Rilke, born in...

Mimi Khalvati's "Selected Poems" draws on her three Carcanet collections, "In White Ink" (1991), "Mirrorwork" (1995) and "Entries on Light" (1997). It provides us with the essential Khalvati, from the ambitiously wrought early formal poems, full of P...

"Augatora" is not a new word: it is a word lost from language a millennium ago. In Old High German it meant, more or less, "eye gate" ('window' with an inbuilt etymology). The windows in this book open on real and imagined land- and cityscapes. Indi...

The Canzoniere of Petrarch (1304-1374) is among Europe's most famous and influential books of lyrics. The focus of this large collection (7,500 lines) is Petrarch's lifelong love for the mysterious Laura, but the themes he treats are many and various...