Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892-1978), one of the major poets of the twentieth century, is the greatest Scottish poet of any century. He drew on the literary and vernacular traditions of Scottish culture, revitalising the Scots langu...

In these novellas Adelaida Garcia Morales explores sensitive territory, and her narrators observe it with the adolescent's amoral clarity. "In The South", Adriana's sad enigmatic father presents her with his own suicide on her fifteenth birthday. Sh...

The prize-winning Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag has one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing. Among her most recent poems are the "Summer Elegies", published to much acclaim in Austria in 2002....

Apollinaire's poetry reflects the heady years of artistic and intellectual ferment before the First World War. The most dynamic modernist French poet and the champion of the Cubist painters, he is remembered as much for his more traditional lyric poe...

In the decade since the quincentenary of his birth (1994), popular and scholarly understanding of the importance of the life and writings of William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) has risen rapidly, and there is demand for a useful selection of his writings....

"The Ship of Birth" records a father's responses in the time immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a "Ship of Death", so this "Ship of Birth" contains what is significant to the child: the...

The poems in Charles Tomlinson's new collection celebrate the colours and textures of places, and the people and histories that have created them. "Skywriting" forms a journey through the landscapes of Tomlinson's imagination: Mexico, Italy and Japan...

"SeaManShip" is an extraordinary and challenging poem. The "Sea" of the title is a symbol of the natural world, "Man" represents human feelings and intellect, and "Ship" signifies the artificial or man-created. By turns rhapsodic and incantatory, th...

Re-inventing Scottish poetry in the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid's war cry was: "Not Burns – Dunbar!" With it, he celebrated William Dunbar (1460?-1520?) as "in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets". His verve,...

Anne Finch (1661-1720) is one of the earliest English women poets of importance, a friend of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and of Henry Purcell, who set one of her poems to music. A modest and retiring writer during her lifetime, constrained both by...