The centrepiece of "Silent Highway" is the title-poem which celebrates the role of the river Thames in the life of London. It is written as a sequence that looks at history and the present: from Pocahontas's voyage to the arrival of the "Windrush" br...

Catullus is a companion of lovers and of those whom love has disappointed. He is also a satirical and epigrammatic writer who savagely consoles with laughter. "Carmina" captures in English both the mordant, scathing wit and also the concise tendernes...

"The Bay Psalm Book" was the first book to be printed in North America, twenty years after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. Now extremely rare – only eleven copies survive – it is also the most expensive book in the world, fetchin...

Displaced from his home more than twenty years ago as Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia descended into war, Serbian author David Albahari found safety in Canada, where this novel was written. In "Globetrotter", Albahari deals with the bewilderments of exile...

"An Aviary of Small Birds" is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. Here, birth paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after long labour, the baby's heart gives out. Howeve...

After the completion of "Dear Life", his highly praised ninth collection of poems, Dennis O'Driscoll kept his finished poems in a computer file called "Newest Poems", subtitled "Since completion of Dear Life" and "April 2011-". This book reproduces i...

Martina Evans's fifth collection moves from the impact of American culture and rock'n'roll in the 1960s on her home town, a small Catholic community in rural Ireland, to life in contemporary London. Her poems spring from memories, anecdotes of local...

In this, her boldest collection to date, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. Restricting herself in each poem to sixteen lines, set in coup...

Gumiguru is the tenth month of the Shona calendar – a month of dryness and heat before the first rains fall and rejuvenate the land. Togara Muzanenhamo's second collection is a cycle of poems distilling the experiences of a decade into one calendar y...

Andre du Bouchet, a great innovator of twentieth-century letters, has yet to be fully recognized by a wide circle of international readers. This inviting volume sets out to remedy the oversight, introducing a selection of Du Bouchet's poetry and pros...