Recognized as one of the most promising poets and composers of his time, Ivor Gurney's full creative gifts never reached fruition. Gurney trained as a composer with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music, composing his own work as well as sett...

Thomas Blackburn was haunted. His child-hood was dominated by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin, and an over-affectionate mother. Moral and sexual uncertainties form t...

Anthony Howell's choice from his five previous books displays a poet of great variety and accomplishment. From playful short poems to extended narratives, whether in free verse or traditional forms, his skill enlivens his subjects and offers surprise...

"Swarm", Jorie Graham's eighth volume of poetry, is a book-length sequence which sets out to encounter destiny, Eros, and law. The poet confronts a fundamental problem: whom to address, whom there still is to address. She negotiates passionately with...

Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. "Selected Poems" – which includes important prose as well – reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, "written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pac...

Mycology, psycho-analysis, music, mythology, linguistics, Christianity, occultism, Majorca, esoterica... This book for the first time selects the best from the more than five hundred essays which Robert Graves wrote about areas of culture which engag...

The great Russian poet Alexander Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical traumas, trying to welcome the new order. But there was no space in it for his kind of imagination. His poem "The Twelve" has claims to being the fi...

The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 primarily for this work, parts of which he had rendered into the lucid, grave English prose of prayer. Although he wrote over 40 books of poetry, this is...

"Transparently accomplished", as John Kerrigan has written: "his work displays the kind of internal 'itinerary' which (in Mandelstam's language) is the mark of achieved poetry". This book selects the best work from thirty years of that itinerary, a...

Hugh Latimer (1490-1555), with Cranmer and Ridley, is remembered as one of the most notable martyrs of the Reformation. He was utterly fearless in an age of grim persecutions, more noted for candour than tact. Once he had been convinced of the truth...