In "Thomas Hardy and British Poetry" (1972) Donald David identified how deep and durable a mark the Dorset poet left on the English sensibility. Hardy's formal approach and his distinctive tonalities have – for better or worse – affected the choices...

This selection from the first thirty years of Donald Davie's poetry reveals an impassioned spirit advancing from Augustan reserve towards the treacherous, rewarding risks of modernism. As a critic, Helen Vendler writes, "he has drawn a map of moderni...

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...

"Edge to Edge" brings together the best of Peter Dale's original work from 1968 to the present. It is an impressive oeuvre which reveals Dale as a quintessentially English poet whose work is characterized by an intense depth of feeling, channeled and...

"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...

Robert Duncan's profound appeal as a writer, and as a mentor to very different kinds of poets, suggests the vigour, various charm and scope of his work. He is certainly a poet aware – in his themes and his expansive techniques – of his radical creati...

Donald Davie is a poet-critic: his admirable essays are free of jargon, full of the clarity and insight of a major practitioner of the poetic art. His writing is in every sense refreshing: a pleasure to read and an inspiration to re-read the writers...

"Forms of Distance" is Bei Dao's second bilingual collection since his enforced exile from China in 1989. Michael Hofmann described the first, Old Snow, as "the work of one of the great poets of our time", and John Cayley wrote in the Times Literary...

"The Covenant" contains Dick Davis's poems written since 1979. It is his third collection, following "In the Distance" (1975) and "Seeing the World" (1980), which received the Royal Society of Literature Award under the W. H. Heinemann Bequest in 198...