Ruth Silcock's third collection continues in cheerful vein about often less than cheerful subjects. She has the knack of combining jaunty traditional forms with sometimes startling or even grim subject matter. Her poems focus on the lives of ordinary...

Muriel Spark was a poet before she was a novelist: "All the Poems" presents the full range of the poetry of one of the most acclaimed modern British writers. Here are villanelles, ballads and epigrams, as well as freer forms, all marked by brilliantl...

Body language and the body of language – from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers – are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since 1995. The centrepiece is "Skyhorse", an...

The prize-winning Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag has one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing. Among her most recent poems are the "Summer Elegies", published to much acclaim in Austria in 2002....

"Manganese" starts with a murder in China in the age of Confucius and ends with a sestina about a difficult family Christmas in front of the television. Plain-spoken narrative is juxtaposed with an enigmatic, densely woven imagery exploring fugitive...

In "The Book of Stones" Adam's Schwartzman explores what it means to live in the new South Africa, to be part of historical processes while sustaining an individual life. The poet returned home in 1999 to live and work in the country he had mythologi...

These poems are the fruit of estrangement, in particular from origins. They draw on James Sutherland Smith's experiences of life in the Middle East and Middle Europe; what is most strange, they tell us, is not to be found in exotic locales, but close...

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was a prolific writer whose independence of outlook marks her out as a strikingly modern figure. Her poetry was admired by Wordsworth, and although her work was later neglected, she is now being recognised as a major poet...

John Skelton (1464?-1529) is the first great modern English poet. Immensely proud of his poetic calling, he celebrates in his poems the language itself, in all its richness. He wrote in a vigorous vernacular, taking literary English out of the mediev...

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) is a haunting poet of the modern city, catching its dangerous, complex beauty in works that first introduced the imagery of the urban underworld into English poetry. He was a champion of the French Symbolists. Yeats,...