The commotion of fifty-five new poems: Ashbery at his most vertiginous, witty, irresistible. And the tenses, unstable, invite the past to move in on the present and future.

"We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes", writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale. The book draws on a...

Womack gives us an essential Mayakovsky: "A Cloud In Trousers", "I Love", a film scenario, a play, agit-prop, love poetry, public and private verse. The great poet of the Soviet era remains a great enigma.

"The evening forgives the alleyway", Reginald Gibbons writes in his tenth book of poems – but such startling simplicities are overwhelmed in us by the everyday and the epochal. Across the great range of Gibbons's emblematic, vividly presented scenes,...

"He avoids the pipes. He has his reasons. He has heard the story Of the octopus who was locked into a room For a week to practice. When they let him out the pipes had learned To play the octopus. The thing about musicians is They respond to glory"....

In "The Alexandra Sequence" John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the "mummers play", a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door. The book's title takes its name from an area of Liverpo...

"Below the tree free-riding on the water a shadow plays, beguiling, ripe for idolatry. I believe the tree and note it down as the answer to its own question". Rebecca Watts's debut collection is a witty, warm-hearted guide to the English landscape,...

Matthew Welton is a poet enchanted by form and process. Many of the "Number Poems" abide by subtle patterns or constraints, creating symmetries in the arrangement of sentences, lines, words, or metrical feet. As with good architecture, however, Welto...

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a speciality of the renowned Ghent-Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer boo...

"I only wanted to write about them, / Narrate their fierce audacity, / Their voyages through the channels of the Mediterranean". So begins a poetic journey through the islands of the Mediterranean that served as homes and refuge for the Sephardic Jew...