"How do you convince the English-speaking public that Pushkin's genius is as great as the Russians claim?" This question, arising at the bicentenary of Pushkin's birth, is the catalyst for a collection of new translations, versions of and responses t...

Annals of the Five Senses (1923) was the first book to be published by C. M. Grieve, the man who became known as Hugh MacDiarmid. It is a collection of intense psychological studies which put us in mind of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Written...

Martina Evans's new collection mines the rich seam running between rural Ireland and urban England, between personal and folk memory, and between fiction and reality. These are poems that simultaneously engage with the real world, while keeping a lin...

Nikos Gatsos's profoundly mysterious and magnetic poem "Amorgos", named after a Greek island he never visited and written during the Nazi occupation, is the single work on which his reputation rests. It is a wonderful incantation on the theme of loss...

Urbane and cosmopolitan, Stanley Moss's poems are the work of a writer once described as "a citizen of the world, both past and present, one who seems to have been everywhere and missed nothing". In strong lyrics and searching narratives he explores...

In her first book since "Friend of Heraclitus" (1993, Poetry Book Society Choice) Patricia Beer confronts some harsh realities: serious illness, the deaths of friends, the encroachments of age. She remembers family with a surreal clarity ("Ballad of...

"The Anarchist Banker", which starts in the nineteenth century, and the second volume, "Professor Pfiglzz and His Strange Companion", present English readers for the first time with a generous sampling of the best classic and new Portuguese writing....

Substantial pieces on Scottish themes are assembled in this volume, from "Albyn" (1927) to "A Political Speech" delivered at Glasgow University in 1972. The editor has focused on MacDiarmid's view of powerful figures in Scottish culture, notably Davi...

The second volume of this occasional series introduces another nine talented newcomers. The variety of poetic voices and themes on display reflects backgrounds which range from Scotland to Bristol and from gardening to rock bands. Many have been publ...

After the "monstrous, magnificent sprawl" of John Ashbery's 216-page poem "Flow Chart" (1991) and the further munificence of "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992), his sixteenth collection, "And the Stars were Shining", includes a thirteen-part title poem which...