William Hazlitt (1778-1830), that most engaging of English prose writers, is provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays, each one sparkling with urbane wit and gossip. Characters from the Regency spring to life: W...

The title sequence of "Making the Beds for the Dead" charts the journey of a virus in "the plague year". Come from outer space, it travels – on a fox's paw, the beak of a kite and a crow and a buzzard – into the very heart of our lives. The poet incl...

Donald Davie mapped some of the most dependable critical routes into the heart Modernism – American, English, Irish and Continental. This book includes his most important essays on the subject, starting with his exemplary definition of "Modernism in...

Justo Jorge Padron is one of Spain's leading poets. Born in Las Palmas, Grand Canary Island, in 1943, he is among the most representative poets of the Spanish Generation of the 1970s. The brilliance of his metaphorical imagination provides the Spanis...

"Manganese" starts with a murder in China in the age of Confucius and ends with a sestina about a difficult family Christmas in front of the television. Plain-spoken narrative is juxtaposed with an enigmatic, densely woven imagery exploring fugitive...

"A Map of the Territory" reflects Nigel Forde's fascination with things in the process of change: music, the momentary insight, twilight rather than night or day. Written over a period of years, the poems meditate on memory and landscape: it is in th...

This is a book full of one God in many aspects, at once strange and intimate, transcendent and physical, Son of the Almighty yet born of woman. The book, sacramentally shaped, follows three "offices" of the church, leading us towards an altar then re...

Charles Tomlinson declares that this book, emerging from the practice, the art and magic of translation, concerns itself with "the way certain fables of metamorphosis have captured the poetic imagination and how translation – literary metamorphosis –...

Music is the motif which underlies the poems in Marius Kociejowski's second book. In "Dinu Lipatti plays Chopin's Sonata in B minor", a musical theme illustrates the solitude of a troubled woman "who is no man's, only music's bride"; elsewhere, music...

Memory, love, history and ideas: Thomas McCarthy has a uniquely direct and engaged approach both to the private and the public, which are inseparable in his poetry. His special blend of wit and lyricism is shown to the full in this selection which dr...