The title sequence of "Making the Beds for the Dead" charts the journey of a virus in "the plague year". Come from outer space, it travels – on a fox's paw, the beak of a kite and a crow and a buzzard – into the very heart of our lives. The poet incl...

"Walking the Animals" is a sort of travel book: it brings together inner and outer landscapes, the wet skies of the Pennines and the drought of the South African lowveld; landscapes of loss, landscapes of longing. Carola Luther tracks journeys betwee...

In "Letters of Introduction" Kevin Jackson invents a new genre, the Alphabet Essay, providing a playful A to Z of cultural heroes and legends, from William Blake to Marguerite Yourcenar, from Albion to Zen. Here, Kevin Jackson promises, we will enco...

Donald Davie mapped some of the most dependable critical routes into the heart Modernism – American, English, Irish and Continental. This book includes his most important essays on the subject, starting with his exemplary definition of "Modernism in...

For the first time, "The New York Poets" gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competi...

"Wild and Wounded" collects Michael Hamburger's shorter poems since "Intersections" (2000). It is published to mark the 80th birthday of one of Britain's leading poets of the last half-century. The dominant theme in these poems is the passing of time...

The prize-winning Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag has one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing. Among her most recent poems are the "Summer Elegies", published to much acclaim in Austria in 2002....

"In The Golden Fleece" (1944), Robert Graves liberates the tale of Jason and the Argonauts from its status as a children's story and reconstitutes it as a fully fledged epic. He fills his Argo with a colourful, quarrelsome and accident-prone crew, wh...

Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy" (1621) has cast a long, shimmering shadow, on Milton ("L'Allegro and Il Penseroso" in particular), on the wits of Queen Anne's reign and the beginning of George I's, and on Swift. Doctor Johnson praised it...

Apollinaire's poetry reflects the heady years of artistic and intellectual ferment before the First World War. The most dynamic modernist French poet and the champion of the Cubist painters, he is remembered as much for his more traditional lyric poe...