Wang Wei (701-761 AD) is often spoken of, with his contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu, as one of the three greatest poets in China's 3,000-year poetic history. He was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classic...

"Continental Shelf" traces a journey, across continents and from youth to maturity. It moves from memories of childhood in Guyana, through a long elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2006, to the reflective closing sect...

Translated by notable American poet Marilyn Hacker, Lebanese-French poet and novelist Venus Khoury-Ghata explores the formal and mythic attractions, congruencies and incompatibilities of the French and Arabic imaginations and poetic traditions in poe...

Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) is one of the best loved Australian poets of the twentieth century – and a fierce prankster, who published poems under half-a-dozen names and identities. By turns poignant, sensuous and mischievous, passionately musical, her...

The drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, "was the first word in the world", and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures – the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths...

"One Eye'd Leigh" is a book of portraits, experiments and objects made of words. They find their locations between Cape Town and London, between the dawn of the new millennium and the present day. Guided by a biographical thread, in her first collect...

"Over", Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta..." In these and other pieces Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflectio...

"Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets" is the first anthology in decades to present to British readers the remarkable freshness and vitality of New Zealand poetry. Starting in the mid-1980s, it captures turning points in the work of Allen Curnow and...

How can language retrieve memories and identities? A young man, a first-generation American, explores a true story of three generations of upheaval, migration and homecoming. Rooted in autobiography and in twentieth-century Armenian history, it is al...

"Painting Rain" explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape...