"Reynard the Fox" is one of the great poems of the English countryside and rural life. The headlong dash of John Masefield's narrative carries the reader on an exhilarating chase through the meadows and copses of the landscape the poet loved, pursued...

John Ashbery's translations of Pierre Martory's poems offer a unique insight into the work of the French poet, and into the creative dialogue between two poets. Ashbery describes Martory's writing as "touched by the gaiety of Rene Clair's films and t...

Matthew Mead began publishing his poetry in the 1960s. By then he had, as Peter Riley noted, "located a sense of poetry for which he drew widely from Anglo-American writing, avoiding any programmes of allegiance". Over the years he has published five...

"King Driftwood" teems with characters and narratives: treasure hunters, drug dealers, small-town eccentrics – blue-rinsed Mrs Dawes-Llewellyn, John the Song and Mothman, George Bush and Saddam Hussein glimpsed at a phantasmagoric funfair; the mourni...

Christopher Middleton's "Collected Poems" gathers over half a century's inventive, brilliant writing by one of Britain's genuinely Modern poets. Here is an English writer, a European sensibility, of exhilarating originality and passion. His concerns,...

Chris McCully brings Old English poetry to life with exhilarating immediacy. Here is the earliest surviving English poem, "Caedmon's Hymn", as well as one of the last poems to be written in the classical Old English alliterative style; some of the gr...

"The great unshackling of women's voices in poetry has one of its beginnings right here. These sad beautiful poems are full of rendings and breakings and burnings". So writes Eavan Boland in her introduction to her selection of poems of Charlotte M...

Robotic insects, in-growing cutlery, flesh-serving waiters in a zombie cafe... Welcome to the surreal, misshapen universe of Adam Marek's first collection; a bestiary of hybrids from the techno-crazed future and mythical past; a users' guide to the...

The six sequences of "There Is an Anger that Moves" travel from Jamaica to England and back. A mother's heart is broken; men fall in love secretly; people dance until they die. Religion haunts these disbelieving poems which move sometimes to the meas...

Who are the invisible kings? Why do two bears follow them round Britain? And what happens when a gypsy's curse comes miraculously to life? David Morley's new book reveals extraordinary worlds where the real and imagined converge in stories and charms...