In the five volumes of poetry he has published since 1989, Peter McDonald explores an intimately known territory that becomes strange: pulled out of shape by history, made unfamiliar by distance, made new by the attentive imagination. McDonald's "Col...

In "Ice" Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. The poem "Polar" is the poet's point de repere, evo...

"Overwintering" is coming through, emerging into the light of a new season. Pippa Little's book explores what survives and grows from the dark energies of winter, night and loss, from the buried past and the imagination's depths. Landscapes speak of...

F. T. Prince's Collected Poems 1935-1992 incorporates all the work that he wished to preserve, from his earliest published poems to late, uncollected pieces. Prince has become best known for his wartime poem "Soldiers Bathing", a meditation on violen...

"Imelda thinks she's killed her mother by wishing she was dead. Haunted, she doesn't want to wish the same fate on Justin, her mercurial and controlling twice-widowed father, owner of McConnell's bar and shop. When Imelda's two older sisters, Bertha...

In a series of ninety-five poems we listen to "the Reasoner", a voice that is by turns ardent, despairing and comic. Petty obsessions rub against attempts at philosophical seriousness; vernacular expression vies with an intent deliberation. Above all...

"In Between Two Windows", his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions an...

"P L A C E" begins with a poem dated 5 June 2009, located at St Laurent Sur Mer, better known by its code name Omaha Beach, one of the sites of the American landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944. It is the starting point for a book of poems written in...

Intelligent clothing, superhero dictators, contagion-carrying computer games, cross-species reproduction... Welcome to the strange and startling world of Adam Marek; a menagerie of futuristic technology, sinister traditions and scientifically-grounde...

The characters in David Constantine's fourth collection are often delicately caught in moments of defiance. Disregarding their age, their family, or the prevailing political winds, they show us a way of marking out a space for resistance and taking a...