Dennis O'Driscoll lends his transformative vision to everyday "bread and butter" routines and the insidious forces that imperil them. From the entertaining mixture of shorter poems which opens his eighth collection, he branches out with "Skywriting",...

Friederike Mayrocker is one of Europe's most exciting avant-garde writers. In a career spanning more than sixty years, this "dadaelian artificer" (Christopher Middleton) has pushed back the limits of convention to reveal the "deep structure" of exist...

"The Revolutionary Art of the Future" is a selection from three hundred poems by Hugh MacDiarmid discovered by John Manson in the archives of the National Library of Scotland in 2003. This is the first time many of them have appeared in print. The...

Sensual pleasure, gentle, violent or comic, is the theme of this anthology of seventeenth-century erotic writing. "Restoration Bawdy" brings vividly to life a "masquerading age". The book draws on high and low culture, and includes courtly poems and...

"Revolutionary Sonnets" is as daring, original and inventive as the name suggest. The work explores themes of violence and love, pretensions and emotion, sex and war and is both sobering, and hysterically funny. For the first time the full range and...

The "rough climate" of the title reflects the encroaching unease that many people feel about the circumstances of their lives. In his seventh collection (and his first for seven years) E.A. Markham draws attention to the euphemisms and other abuses o...

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most promising poets and composers of his generation. In September 1922, however, he was certified insane and committed to a mental asylum. he remained there until his death, fo...

Resistance is Futile opens in Mongolia with a poem called "Yoghurt". It is spring in Ulan Bator and Hoo Gerjan is seeking legal advice over a stolen car. This is the first of twelve weird narratives separated by brief, lyric moments: stories of Samue...

Jon Stallworthy, the son and grandson of New Zealanders, rounded the Horn en route to his birth in London. He began writing poems at seven, during – and about – the Second World War. The conflict and his colonial inheritance gave him a sense of "the...

The third and final volume of McDiarmid's previously uncollected prose covers the decades from 1937 to 1978. This text includes: assessments of the contemporary political and literary scene, from the Spanish Civil War through MacDiarmid's call for an...