Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is the great poet of the Scottish people, their history and land, yet he wrote at a time when Scottish culture and landscapes were changing rapidly under English pressure. Introducing this selection, James Reed, an author...

"Collected Poems" covers some thirty years from 1972 until 2001. His individual collections have usually taken as their subject one predominant theme – the enigmas of prehistory, his wartime childhood, the passing of the Edwardian generation his pare...

"Awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2002 Greta Stoddart's 'At Home in the Dark' is a powerful first collection that sheds light not only on the darkness of home but also reveals much that's unsettling about the further afield. With their clear...

Burns Singer spent the 1950's gaining and losing a reputation. He became an Insider, notably as the writer of Times Literary Supplement leaders, yet considered himself in many respects an Outsider, alienating a whole generation of young editors and f...

Peter Scupham's eleventh collection brings his customary elegance and skill to bear on themes as diverse as the Battle of Arras, Kilvert's Diary, and an unexpected encounter with his parents on holiday from the underworld. These parables and truthful...

This selection, made by Peter Scupham himself, brings together work from his eight individual collections, from his first book, "The Snowing Globe" in 1972 to his latest, "Watching the Perseids" in 1990

Adam Schwartzman's anthology offers substantial selections of ten outstanding South African poets drawn from more than four decades and from very different traditions and cultures. Far from establishing a canon, the vital and diverse literatures repr...

The place: Palermo, 1783. The barons reject the reforms of the principled viceroy Caracciolo, pursuing their feuds and petty plotting. Their wives indulge in forbidden French novels. And porcine abbot Vella, forty years old, is drawn like a fly to th...

Jon Stallworthy, the son and grandson of New Zealanders, rounded the Horn en route to his birth in London. He began writing poems at seven, during – and about – the Second World War. The conflict and his colonial inheritance gave him a sense of "the...

If there's an autumnal feeling to the title of Norm Sibum's new book, it is a fruitful season despite early frosts, the loves, unmellow anxieties and reflections of the voices who tell us their stories. Some of the speakers are ancient, some modern,...