When C. H. Sisson was 20, he gave up writing poems. He began once more in his 30s under the stress of war-time, stationed in India. Verse came intermittently, exiguously; the bulk of his early writing in translation ("fishing in other men's waters" h...

Professor Saraiva's multi-volume "History of Portugal" is a celebrated scholarly standard work. Yet, when he published a one-volume Historia Concisa, it proved a run-away best seller in Portugal, and the television series that went with it became a c...

Afrika! is an imaginary space, a "k" and an exclamation mark away from the processes, histories and conflicts that this, Adam Schwartzman's second collection, takes for its subject. It is a space that is at once estranging and, with its wily appropri...

The poetry of Sappho, who was born around 620 BC and lived on the Greek island of Lesbos, has inspired and fascinated readers and poets for two and a half thousand years. Today, as in antiquity, she is regarded as Greece's supreme lyric poet. Yet apa...

"C. H. Sisson is one of the great translators of our time", Jasper Griffin wrote in The Times Literary Supplement. "Latin, French, German, Italian: there can have been few writers who have published translations of Virgil, Racine, Heine and Dante, in...

Ruth Silcock brings deft narrative skill, compassionate humour and a sharp eye for the oddities of human behaviour to these poems about the neglected, the marginalized and the unnoticed. "46 Nursing Homes" is a sequence which draws on her personal ex...

As a child Iain Crichton Smith spoke Gaelic in his village on the island of Lewis. At school in Stornoway he spoke English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two histories entailing exile, a central theme of...

"Poems: Selected traces" over half a century of C. H. Sisson's work, starting with poems written on a troopship and in Bengal and ending on home ground in Somerset. His beginnings were "without facility, and when I was forced into verse it was throug...

Adam Schwartzman is an African writing of African experiences. His remarkable first collection, formally assured, thematically mature, is marked by a youthful grasp of variously peopled landscapes. The poems are "stories" which build together into a...

"Ends and Beginnings" is Iain Crichton Smith's most ambitious collection for years. It begins in elegy, with the exiles and deaths about which he writes so memorably, and progresses through place, history and positive change. After a trip to the Gol...