"Take My Word for It" is Nina Cassian's first collection of poems in English. Since being forced in 1985 to abandon her native Romania, where she had published more than 50 books, she has settled in New York. The American poet and critic Stanley Kuni...

HD's war "Trilogy" ranks with Eliot's "Four Quartets", Pound's "Pisan Cantos" and poems like Edith Sitwell's "Still Falls the Rain" as civilian war poetry in a war which tore apart so many of the cities of Europe. The outer violence of the scene touc...

"Touchwood" is Dick Davis's first collection since "Devices and Desires", his "New and Selected Poems" (1989), which Wendy Cope selected as her book of the year in the Sunday Times, calling it "the year's most underrated poetry book". The clarity and...

What kind of truth does modern poetry offer? Michael Hamburger's approach to this question ranges over European and American poetry since Baudelaire and the result is one of the best introductions available to twentieth-century poetry and its anteced...

In "That Stranger, The Blues", James Keery's first book of poems, there is an extraordinary fusion between a poetry of landscapes, indebted to Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, and the radical strategies of the poets of the New York and Cambridge schoo...

"There Was Fire in Vancouver" is Sinead Morrissey's first book of poems. Organised as a journey from communism to spiritual affirmation, from life in Ireland to life abroad, and return, from security and dependence on family in particular, to indepen...

Adam Schwartzman is an African writing of African experiences. His remarkable first collection, formally assured, thematically mature, is marked by a youthful grasp of variously peopled landscapes. The poems are "stories" which build together into a...

"Time Signatures" is Chris McCully's first book of poems. It reflects his fascination – as student, scholar and theorist with the procedures of writing verse, especially with rhythmical and metrical structures. The subject-matter here is drawn from t...

Not only the migrating birds speak in "Translations from the Natural World". The imprisoned species of pigs use their slum language; ravens, cuttlefish, sunflowers and a shell-back tick are among those non-verbal members of our natural world which fi...

Tadeusz Rozewicz is Poland's most popular and influential poet. Born in 1921, he belongs to the generation of writers whose work was indelibly marked by Poland's traumatic and tragic war-time experience. "What I produced is poetry for the horror-stri...