Illusions and delusions, joys and jokes, mysteries of memory and temporal paradox figure in Andrew McNeillie's new collection. Here are new sequences of bird poems, and tree poems, lines from an autobiography, lines from America, and poems about old...

Does history tell stories? from "Concerning History" Yes, if the poet listens carefully. Elizabeth Jennings listens carefully, through spiritual, emotional and mental turbulence. She has created an abidingly popular body of poetry, using traditional...

"These great people like MacDiarmid are a bit scary", says the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead. And Kathleen Jamie: "Drunk? Men? Thistle? What?... No. No, not for me". It was not ever thus. Dylan Thomas declared: "Every door in any town should be wide o...

Josep Carner's "Nabi" is a masterpiece of modern Catalan poetry. Based on the biblical story of Jonah, it is essentially a Christian poem, though it is scathing about the effects of religious perversion. In the widest sense a poem about the limits of...

Nevermore is an elegy for lost times and threatened things. It celebrates recollection and the "immortality of youth", and youth's passions: for natural history (as in the group of bird poems entitled "Plato's Aviary"), for the naive curiosity and lu...

Edwin Morgan's original "Selected Poems" was published in 1985. It became something of a classic, selling in excess of 20,000 copies. But 1985 is a long time in the world of so inventive and irrepressible a writer as Edwin Morgan. He has published a...

Peter Scupham's eleventh collection brings his customary elegance and skill to bear on themes as diverse as the Battle of Arras, Kilvert's Diary, and an unexpected encounter with his parents on holiday from the underworld. These parables and truthful...

William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) was born in Greenock, Scotland, "beside the sugar house quays" – a setting open to the sea. He remained a Celt, moving from Scotland to Cornwall where he found seascapes without urban clutter, just an occasional ruin...

If there's an autumnal feeling to the title of Norm Sibum's new book, it is a fruitful season despite early frosts, the loves, unmellow anxieties and reflections of the voices who tell us their stories. Some of the speakers are ancient, some modern,...

When Chris McCully's first book of poems, "Time Signatures" (Carcanet, 1993), appeared, the "Observer" described the poet as "a keen fly-fisher, a translator of Old English poetry and an expert prosodist; and these skills have miraculously combined s...