Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be "good Europeans", avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-c...

Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes. Or does it? A man stands at a window, looking out. Behind him, a room, bare of people and of furniture. Fragments of conversations drop into his head, conversation...

"Following Looking Through Letterboxes", her first collection (2002), Caroline Bird was acclaimed as a vivid and precocious new talent. "Trouble Came to the Turnip" confirms her originality as she strikes out again in new directions, taking nothing f...

In his first new volume of poems since "Poems the Size of Photographs" (2002), Les Murray celebrates the grace and variousness of the world with an unfailing abundance of imagination and linguistic energy. Here is a poet writing at the height of his...

Lorna Goodison's "Goldengrove" is a rich and varied selection of poems from "Travelling Mercies" (2001) and "Controlling the Silver" (2004), together with twenty new, previously unpublished, poems. This is a gathering from a poet at the height of her...

Stories come in many forms, from nursery rhymes and national anthems to poems and praise songs, and from the stories of science to the rituals of religion. They tell us where we come from, and where we belong; how to live and sometimes how to die. Th...

"Slower", Andrew McNeillie's third collection, meditates on personal and natural history, nation states and mental states, violence, religion and poetry. It treats too of personal bereavement, and of love and marriage. The poem sequences at its core...

Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that...

The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Personal Terms", was greeted in the TLS as "a small masterpiece". With the publication of "Cuts and Bruises", the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement. C...

"Things Unsaid" is the author's own choice of poems from a writing career that spans nearly half a century. It draws on seven published collections and includes many uncollected and new poems. Tony Connor-s poems – often, as he terms it, quasi-autobi...