"Code" consists of a group of shorter poems and one of Eavan Boland's major sequences which extends the thematic concerns first traced in "The Journey" 15 years ago. Time passes: the poet's own situation as woman, mother and wife changes. The sense t...

This generous, varied selection of poems by one of France's best-loved and most reviled poets is presented with facing originals, detailed notes, and a lively introduction to the author's life and work. Victor Hugo's novels "Les Miserables" and "The...

Into the settled poetry of New Zealand a disruptive force rumbled in magazines and then burst forth with "Malady" (1970). Here began the revolution of Bill Manhire. He starts thriftily, with imagistic poems whose calm voices are at odds with the ego-...

When Octavio Paz (1914-1998) died, Mexico lost a tribe of writers. He was many poets, from the surrealist disciple of Andre Breton to the admiring imitator of Alexander Pope; now a radical experimentalist, now an autobiographer and confessional write...

Jeremy Over's poetry creates a world of delight and amazement; in the face of language, love and an elusive reality which seems eternally beyond the realm of rational control. His cornucopia spills out pineapples, watermelons, unstitched shoes and fl...

"The Epilogue essays", published when the literary partnership of Laura Riding and Robert Graves was at its height, illustrate their working relationship and the back-ground to their later very different careers. Conceived in the mid-1930s by Laura...

"These great people like MacDiarmid are a bit scary", says the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead. And Kathleen Jamie: "Drunk? Men? Thistle? What?... No. No, not for me". It was not ever thus. Dylan Thomas declared: "Every door in any town should be wide o...

We don't know who, or even if, Homer was. Given threads of internal evidence in the "Odyssey", Robert Graves invents, or discovers, that the author of the poem was a woman, herself part of the epic action. He chooses the beguiling, clear-headed Nausi...

Charles Tomlinson's "Some Americans" was an unusual book, combining memoir and the detailed and intimate critical reading of poets he admires. He writes as a poet reading poets and learns less by analysis than by empathy. Thus William Carlos Williams...

"Un Tour d'Ecosse" provides a vision of Scotland from the handlebars of the ecologically friendly machine the French call "la petite reine". Here are poems of loss and desire, poems in Scots and English and poetry in English about Scots. There is an...