From its title, which runs to 101 words in full, to its wordless concrete poems; from its World Cup fixture list to its transformations of four-letter words, "We needed coffee but..." is audacious, mischievous, even outrageous. As in his award-winnin...

Charles Tomlinson's "New Collected Poems" gathers a lifetime's work, from the 1950s to 2006. A poet deeply responsive to English landscape, grounded in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Tomlinson is also a writer of international renown, with w...

The characters in David Constantine's remarkable new collection are united by an urge to absent themselves, to abscond from the intolerable pressures of normal life and withdraw into strange ideas, political causes, even private languages. Viewed fro...

Mary Griffiths' knowledge of war began with her parents' stories and a suitcase full of black and white photographs taken by her father during his service in the Second World War. War remained family history and background news until she began to rec...

Contemporary French poetry has long been tagged as being overly cerebral and hermetic. But there exists a very different, thriving tradition which is too often muffled by noisier movements like Surrealism or Minimalism". Into the Deep Street" gives v...

Ford Madox Ford spent his last years in the south of France, near Toulon. In "Provence" (1935), written four years before his death, he explores both the place and the idea of it: "not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind". Suffused...

This sequence of poems in three voices introduces a ghostly eternal triangle whose lines are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. A man and two women explore their memories in conversational poems which, in their combination...

"Rejoicing" is a magnificent, celebratory gathering of Stanley Moss's poetry from six decades. He is one of America's finest poets and this collection demonstrates why. Marilyn Hacker wrote of his work, "Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanit...

When Elaine Feinstein first read the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva in Russian in the 1960s, the encounter transformed her. "What drew me to her initially", she writes, "was the intensity of her emotions, and the honesty with which she exposed them". Her...

Since the 1960s the English poet Matthew Mead and his German wife Ruth have translated selections from poets to whom they were drawn. This is their own choice from the many memorable poems which they have translated. The collection celebrates a fasci...