Tony Connor left school at fourteen and worked as a textile designer in Manchester for many years. He finds his poems among the affections and troubles of everyday experience rather than in the esoteric or the literary. Yet he possesses a subtle sens...

"Airborn" is a bilingual sequence of sonnets written jointly by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and his English fellow poet and translator Charles Tomlinson. In their forewords the poets explain how the poems came to be written and translated. As Charle...

Robert Henryson (?-1508) is the greatest of the English fabulists. His master may have been Aesop, but the voice that speaks the "Moral Fables" is distinctively that of his place – Scotland – and his chosen tradition. His debt to Chaucer, from whom...

"Shelley's conception of love lies at the heart of his radical views on social justice, political liberty, and poetry itself". In bringing together for the first time Shelley's almost unknown prose writings on love, Richard Holmes presents an intelle...

Devices and Desires is Dick Davis's selection from his three earlier books, together with twenty-three new poems. This collection by one of England's most original, yet traditional, poets demonstrates the range of themes which he commands, and the gi...

W. G. Shepherd's second book gathers his poems since "Sun, Oak, Almond, I" (1970). A strong sense of fantasy and humour plays its part in this collection, which ranges from the intriguing experiments of "The Antonine Poems" to the plain and moving na...

John Skelton (1464?-1529) is the first great modern English poet. Immensely proud of his poetic calling, he celebrates in his poems the language itself, in all its richness. He wrote in a vigorous vernacular, taking literary English out of the mediev...

A house that should have creaked but did not, the work of Benjamin Britten, an attempt at fostering: the wide range of Keith Bosley's new collection springs from a few central themes – the need for constant negotiation between people, between life an...