"A Little Book of Hours" takes as its starting points John Donne's "No man is an island" and St Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is...

John Ashbery's translations of Pierre Martory's poems offer a unique insight into the work of the French poet, and into the creative dialogue between two poets. Ashbery describes Martory's writing as "touched by the gaiety of Rene Clair's films and t...

In 1822 William Hazlitt, forty-four years old and married, was both tormented and enchanted by Sarah Walker, his landlady's nineteen-year-old daughter. "Liber Amoris" is the chronicle of that obsession, an extraordinary fragment of Romantic autobiogr...

"A Lens in the Palm" speaks from a world of fragmented philosophies and troubled meditations. Haunted by the ghosts of Keats and Spinoza, of Rodin and Turner, the voices that echo through these poems lead us into a place that is at once familiar and...

A dazzlingly various collection, "Local Honey" juggles its opposites with panache – heart and intellect, melancholy and zest, derangement and perspicacity. Beginning with early stirrings of logical thought in a Palaeolithic cave, the collection range...

"The Last Place on Earth" is a warm, witty celebration of the textures of a life. The vanishing world of a working-class childhood is evoked alongside football in the park and the purposeful calm of ironing; family parties and born-again bikers, joke...

"...this 'Almanack'", which all ladies should carry about with them, as the Priest his Breviary, as the Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her Fears, and as the Lion his Roar!" Djuna Barnes wrote her "Ladies Almanack" for fun,...

She is eighty. Facing death, she considers her experiments with narrative, and with the narrative of her life. What is the purpose of the narrative she is creating here, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? At the centre of...

These visually arresting and subtly musical poems range from Scotland and the Hebrides to Paris, the Mediterranean and Israel, capturing resonant details and moments and shaping them into a quizzical coherence. Like the small ghost that circles into...

Lucky Day begins with natural landscapes through which love and lyric flicker and flare. The sparrows, pigeons and magpies of the urban periphery lighten the atmosphere, edging the collection towards the city in the funny elegy "Bird List". The seque...