What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How – in the face of the carnage of war, the destruction of the natural world, spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear – does one retain a capacity to be present and responsive? How far do...

This anthology, the first of its kind, aims to be comprehensive. Valentina Polukhina surveys the entire scene, reading some 1000 collections and manuscripts, and thoroughly investigating what is accessible on the vibrant Russian literary Internet. Th...

From a quick-tempered singing grandmother to a performance of The Mikado in an African village: David Kinloch's exploration of his relationship with his father is both unexpected and affectionate. An extended sequence of poems moves from personal mem...

Charles Olson (1910-1970) believed that poetry exists in an "open field" through which the poet transmits energy to the receptive reader. Olson's influence on the development of British and American poetry through his writing and teaching is immense....

"Truth's nature is to fill a place that belongs to it when the place becomes cleared of a usurping occupant. It slips into place, then, with a quiet of natural fitness, perfectly not-astounding in the rightness of its being there". (Note 4, p. 149)...

In "Merchant Prince" Thomas McCarthy presents two groups of poems, set largely in Cork, and a novella set in Italy, in the period from 1769 and 1831. They tell the story of Nathaniel Murphy: his training for the priesthood, the loss of his virginity...

The chronically invalid son of a robust sea-captain and novelist father, Tristan Corbiere (1845-1875) published one book of verse and was virtually unheard of in his lifetime. He is an informal formalist, delighting in clashing registers of diction a...

The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell: before cities existed in Australia, Francis McNamara, the convict poet, described the infernal one populated by those who tormented him and his fellow prisoners. Sentenced in 1832...

This quarter-century opened with Janos Kadar exercising a third decade of political power, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1956. Hungary, however, was instrumental in the changes of 1989, initiating free elections. The transition to democracy w...

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the f...