Gottfried Benn ranks among the most significant German poets of the twentieth century. His early work, with its shockingly graphic depictions of human suffering and degradation, was associated with the Expressionist movement; the overriding theme of...

"New Selected Poems" includes the key poems from Eavan Boland's remarkable half century of writing. It began with "23 Poems" in 1962 and it has continued through more than a dozen collections, each finding new dimensions in language, history and in t...

Like many good poets, John Birtwhistle publishes sparingly. In his first collection for more than twenty years, he produces a dazzling array of poems on a range of historical, political and personal subjects. These lucid, witty, tender poems, by turn...

This book gathers four decades of writing, published in collections from Brunizem in 1988 to Pure Lizard in 2008. It maps the poet's trajectory, following her exile from her homeland, India, and her mother tongue, Gujarati, to the landscapes and lang...

The poems in Tara Bergin's debut collection combine sensuous, supple lyricism with the unsettling familiarity of folklore, fairytale and dream. They are inhabited by characters who seem at first widely different from one another, yet share nervous en...

Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-sta...

"Leaf Graffiti", Lucy Burnett's first collection, is restless, the poems always moving, playfully exploring the interface between words and things, rural and urban, nature and the human world. Fascinated by sequence, repetition and variation, the poe...

"Then" draws on Alison Brackenbury's lifetime's experience of rural England, its people and its ways, and the threats to its survival. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recurrent floods in Gloucestershire, where she has lived for...

In "The Crossing Fee" Iain Bamforth re-stages the odyssey of the legendary German hero who falls into a lake in the Black Forest and emerges in the China Sea. Circulating between Europe, the Philippines and Indonesia (where Bamforth worked for five y...

Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a "barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions... old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz". Ethiopia Boy plunges the reader into praise poems th...