Gregory Woods takes the epigraph of his second collection from Jean Genet: "more objectivity, more passivity, more indifference, hence poetry". "May I Say Nothing" is a collection of homo-erotic verses on both personal and broader social themes. The...

Louise Gluck interweaves in this book-length sequence an account of the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's Odyssey. Myth and modern life have a lot to teach each other in terms of irony and clarification. Penelope, Circe...

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...

Tony Connor's new collection, his first in nine years, continues his powerful, alert investigations into the past and present, rooted in specific times and places. Memories of a Lancashire childhood mix here with tales from contemporary America and a...

Many of the poems in E. A. Markham's sixth collection reveal a sense of disquiet which ranges in tone from the comic to the sombre. Yet the overall feel of the book is of something intimate, personal and celebratory, which overrides those darker unde...

In "Mirrorwork", her second collection, Mimi Khalvati takes the Islamic art of mirror-mosaic – found in palaces, barber shops, kebab houses – as metaphor. The shorter poems refract one another, the three long sequences act as a mirror triptych, their...

Jack Tolenado, a Sephardic Jew from Egypt and ex-University lecturer in English is writing a history of Moor Park which is also a history of himself and his times, of the Jews and the English. The themes in this book have preoccupied the author for t...

Clare records that it was "a very old custom among villagers in summer time to stock a piece of greensward full of field flowers & place it a an ornament in their cottages which ornaments are called Midsummer Cushions". This "cottage custom" suggeste...

A first collection with a strong atmosphere and a distinctive voice. "Mrs. Carmichael" brings together poems written over the past twenty years. A house collapsing in the night, the wives of the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, social misfits of several ki...

Matthew Mead's third collection of verse follows "Identities" (1967) and "The Administration of Things" (1970). In his own words, his is "a quiet voice for quiet rooms" – but the voice is distinct and compels attention. As Richard Holmes wrote of his...