If poets were the unacknowledged keepers of a nation's soul, then an anthology of two thousand years of Scottish poets' responses to their country should offer illuminating insights into changing perspectives on Scotland throughout history. What did...

Body language and the body of language – from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers – are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since 1995. The centrepiece is "Skyhorse", an...

Ballads are memorable. This book was finished when the poet was fifty, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school, the generosity of its founders, its green graceful...

For many years Daniel Weissbort was associated with the late Russian emigre poet Joseph Brodsky. "From Russian with Love" offers an account of their relations, in which the author is both translator and confidant to the great poet. In addition to bei...

A striking performer of her own poems, Ros Barber has the gift of recreating her voice – and the voices of others – on the page. The poems in this debut collection demonstrate her wide range in form and subject and her skill in highlighting the extra...

This new edition of "The Garden of Theophrastus" brings back into print one of Germany's finest recent poets, in translations by his close friend Michael Hamburger. Peter Huchel (1903-1981) wrote amidst the political turmoil of twentieth-century Germ...

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a central figure in the artistic life of mid-nineteenth-century Paris and London. His distinct aesthetic, with its emphasis on appreciating a work of art as an arrangement of colours, lines and shapes, can be se...

Frank Kuppner's seventh Carcanet collection, consisting of three books in one, asks the big questions: What is reality a commentary on? Why does non-existence have such a huge opinion of itself? Why don't the eternal silences of space shut up and giv...

Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950) has long been recognised as one of Britain's greatest film directors. His studies of national life, and particularly his three war time films "Listen to Britain", "Fires Were Started", and "A Diary for Timothy", invaluab...

Peter McDonald invokes and explores the pastoral imagination, in love-poems and poems about grief, poems concerning remote history and the more recent past, and poems which find new shapes for our difficult, sometimes contradictory, relations to plac...