Dulce Maria Loynaz (1902-1997) is Cuba's most celebrated poet. Widely published in Spain during the 1950s, Loynaz's poetry was forgotten in Cuba after the Revolution. International recognition came to her late: at the age of ninety she was living in...

Tom Disch's first collection of poems for ten years presents a dazzling variety show of inventive wit. Gavin Ewart called his last title from Anvil "an outstanding book, and very enjoyable". Disch's+Q174 serious gift for humour permeates poems by tur...

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck's new collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter it is both passageway between worlds...

In "The Anti-Basilisk" Christopher Middleton, in the spirit that impelled Shelley to write "The Masque of Anarchy", reveals as crooked the apparently straight and sees what's coming round corners with a clarity that dazzles. Bruno Schulz in 1937 made...

This anthology, the first of its kind, aims to be comprehensive. Valentina Polukhina surveys the entire scene, reading some 1000 collections and manuscripts, and thoroughly investigating what is accessible on the vibrant Russian literary Internet. Th...

This quarter-century opened with Janos Kadar exercising a third decade of political power, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1956. Hungary, however, was instrumental in the changes of 1989, initiating free elections. The transition to democracy w...

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...

A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty" (T...

Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy" (1621) has cast a long, shimmering shadow, on Milton ("L'Allegro and Il Penseroso" in particular), on the wits of Queen Anne's reign and the beginning of George I's, and on Swift. Doctor Johnson praised it...

"Alstonefield: A Poem" is a long poem in ten-line stanzas which explores Riley's preoccupation with a limestone village in Dovedale. Like much of Riley's writing, it has close affinities with Prynne's, Nevertheless, there is more of Cowper in this ve...