"The Instruments of Art" uses poetry to explore the lives and works of Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh and others, the personal sacrifice involved, the singular vision and inspiration that set them in motion. God's creation, some argue, is a work of a...

This collection travels many paths and by-ways, beside some of which lie burning cars, or a young man speechless on a forest floor, or girls lost far from home. And there is a lighthouse... Travellers pass along these ways, in the darkness, in transi...

"Prince Rupert's drop", a rare curiosity of the glass-making process, is a tear of glass at once immensely resilient yet spectacularly fragile, exploding dramatically when shattered. This tension – between the present beauty and the sense of inevitab...

Donald Davie mapped some of the most dependable critical routes into the heart Modernism – American, English, Irish and Continental. This book includes his most important essays on the subject, starting with his exemplary definition of "Modernism in...

"The Ship of Birth" records a father's responses in the time immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a "Ship of Death", so this "Ship of Birth" contains what is significant to the child: the...

Re-inventing Scottish poetry in the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid's war cry was: "Not Burns – Dunbar!" With it, he celebrated William Dunbar (1460?-1520?) as "in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets". His verve,...

This is a book full of one God in many aspects, at once strange and intimate, transcendent and physical, Son of the Almighty yet born of woman. The book, sacramentally shaped, follows three "offices" of the church, leading us towards an altar then re...

Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938), the most influential and controversial Italian poet of the last hundred years, published his masterpiece "Halcyon" in 1903. It is a carefully organized sequence of eighty-eight lyrics which, to gain their full effect,...

One of the greatest poets of the subcontinent, Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) redefined the parameters of Bengali poetry in the wake of the impression left by the work of his more traditional compatriot, Rabindranath Tagore. Idiosyncratic in style and w...

Peter Dale's first full collection in over ten years brings together lyrical poems and monologues in which bleakness and tenderness alternate, conflict and finally coexist. The bitter-sweet shifts of memory are evoked throughout with an understated t...