Solemn, grand, vulnerable – and a little absurd: England in the 1880s. The gentry endures tedious country-bound winter weeks (fashion forbids them from showing their faces in London). Lord Beaconsfield is mourned, and a national legend buried. "The T...

"The Errancy" is a pensive and erotic new collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Dream of the Unified Field". In these poems Jorie Graham approaches a number of numinous characters, each an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political...

Of all Ford Madox Ford's critical works, "The English Novel" (first published in 1930) is his most satisfying. He wrote it while travelling: memory plays a large part. It does not smell of the lamp or the library. Our guide-a major innovative novelis...

"Edge to Edge" brings together the best of Peter Dale's original work from 1968 to the present. It is an impressive oeuvre which reveals Dale as a quintessentially English poet whose work is characterized by an intense depth of feeling, channeled and...

Peter Russell is at his lyrical and satirical best in the "Elegies" of his alter ego "Quintilius", a disaffected and maverick late Latin poet whose scabrous observations on the last decadent days and collapse of the Roman Empire, seen from a provinci...

"Every Changing Shape", published in 1961 and now in paperback for the first time, considers from a Christian poet's perspective how religious or mystical experience informs the imagination. Elizabeth Jennings wrote the book early in her career; it c...

"Ends and Beginnings" is Iain Crichton Smith's most ambitious collection for years. It begins in elegy, with the exiles and deaths about which he writes so memorably, and progresses through place, history and positive change. After a trip to the Gol...

Everything is always strange in the poetry of Frank Kuppner. His first Carcanet book was a single poem, "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty" (1984, Scottish Arts Council Book Award), running to 511 Oriental Quatrains, a kind of Procrustean Bed of Ware ac...

When he was twenty, C. H. Sisson found himself in Hitler's Germany, and a year later in Paris. He was brought face-to-face with a realty of politics largely ignored by English radicals of the 1930s. He returned home at once more European and more viv...

The unique poetic world of Sandor Weores has fascinated readers in Hungary ever since he began to publish poems in 1928, at the Mozartian age of fifteen. Today he is considered one of the greatest poets in his language and one of the major European p...