"Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me", John Ashbery writes early in his new collection. Each sense is wakened up. So are all the spirits. Many whispers, voices chantant dans la coupole: passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, p...

First published in 1948, "The White Goddess" is one of the century's most extraordinary books. A poet's impassioned introduction to the world of poetry, it is also a great scholar's quest for the meaning of European mythology, a polemic about the rel...

Ruth Silcock brings deft narrative skill, compassionate humour and a sharp eye for the oddities of human behaviour to these poems about the neglected, the marginalized and the unnoticed. "46 Nursing Homes" is a sequence which draws on her personal ex...

Helen Vendler wrote in "The New Republic": "Louise Gluck is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional'...

Sarah Kirsch was a leading East German poet before leaving in 1977 for West Germany, where her work was already highly regarded. While she had supported many of the political and social aims of the Communist government in the GDR, she had been active...

Layered with rich insight, this powerful collection of proseprovides an unidealistic stance on homosexualitythat evokes the many landscapes of sensuality and desire.

In F. T. Prince's new poem a visit to Rome brings back memories of fifty years ago, today's graffiti contrasting with Mussolini's slogans. Things seen, a plaque for Stendhal or a chapel with paintings by Caravaggio, are used to suggest young and olde...

An eye for detail informs these poems by Anthony Howell. The book charts his wanderings from Hampshire to Australia, and finally to Sicily. His renewed interest in the description of emotional as well as geographical landscape is one of the pleasures...

Over forty new poems in verse and prose make up "A Wave", John Ashbery's tenth collection. The title poem is a twenty-page meditation on change, loss and adjustment; it is a major poem that takes place alongside "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and...

This first book of poems was originally published in New York in 1966; the English edition appeared in 1969.