The great Russian poet Alexander Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical traumas, trying to welcome the new order. But there was no space in it for his kind of imagination. His poem "The Twelve" has claims to being the fi...

"Augatora" is not a new word: it is a word lost from language a millennium ago. In Old High German it meant, more or less, "eye gate" ('window' with an inbuilt etymology). The windows in this book open on real and imagined land- and cityscapes. Indi...

We are inside a pre-biotic chemical reaction some 4,500 million years ago, as it suddenly forms a membrane and becomes a prokaryot cell. Then a eukaryot cell. Then a multicellular organism. That's for the first chapter, and from the cell's viewpoint....

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) is a latter-day Jacobean, the author of blank verse plays and poems which are as bold, wild and fresh as they are archaic in manner. We read his plays less for character and drama than for the miracles that occur in...

"Waiting for the Ferry" is Heather Buck's fourth and finest collection of poems. She has quietly built a reputation for the clarity, concentration and direct emotional weight of her poems. Whether writing about nature, faith, childhood, art, places o...

Often reported to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and recently elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bei Dao is China's pre-eminent contemporary poet. The poems in "Landscape Over Zero" reach...

Eavan Boland's new book, her first since the "Collected Poems", is in two parts. The opening sequence entitled "Colony" explores the theme of Irish language and culture. This is followed by a collection of individual poems which open out from autobio...

In the twelve years since Peter Bland's last collection, "The Crusoe Factor", was published by London Magazine "Editions", the poet has not been idle. Setting the best of his earlier work, long unavailable, beside a full volume of new poems, he lets...

"The Language of the Field" is an extensive, witty and authoritative dictionary. It provides etymology, definition and examples of words associated with the fauna (chased and chasers), the country lore and the implements of Field Sports – words which...

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...