"In To the War Poets" John Greening sends dispatches across the decades. In a sequence of verse letters he addresses the poets of the First World War directly, making connections yet always aware of distance: "No larks, / just the passing of traffic"...

The poems in Rory Waterman's debut collection "Tonight the Summer's Over" explore belonging and estrangement with precise resonance. Born in Belfast and brought up in rural Lincolnshire, Waterman turns an unblurred eye on his own childhood, caught be...

Gottfried Benn ranks among the most significant German poets of the twentieth century. His early work, with its shockingly graphic depictions of human suffering and degradation, was associated with the Expressionist movement; the overriding theme of...

This book collects the poems of Thomas Kinsella from his five most recent Peppercanister pamphlets. As he has throughout his writing, here Kinsella sets himself, clear-eyed, to face hard truths: "the waste and the excess" of the living process; agein...

Edgar Allan Poe once claimed the greatest literary works were those that could be read "in one sitting". "Brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect", he argued, once the effect has been established, of course. The stori...

"New Selected Poems" includes the key poems from Eavan Boland's remarkable half century of writing. It began with "23 Poems" in 1962 and it has continued through more than a dozen collections, each finding new dimensions in language, history and in t...

This book, the first published anthology of British surrealist poetry, takes its title from Herbert Read's words when he opened the "Surrealist Poems and Objects" exhibition at the London Gallery at midnight on 24 November 1937. Within a few years th...

"Oracabessa" is a book of risky journeys, mappings and re-mappings, as the poet navigates place, history and imagination. Goodison travels to Spain and Portugal, to Canada ("Winter has landed") and back to the Hope Gardens of her childhood in Jamaica...

Tony Connor's tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic se...

Like many good poets, John Birtwhistle publishes sparingly. In his first collection for more than twenty years, he produces a dazzling array of poems on a range of historical, political and personal subjects. These lucid, witty, tender poems, by turn...