The 501 quatrains of "Second Best Moments in Chinese History" make it seem at first like a repackaged version of Frank Kuppner's celebrated first collection "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty" (1984). But it isn't: "Please note that this is a completely...

"The Selected Poems", James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from "The Lost Pilot" which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection "Reckon...

The poetry of Sappho, who was born around 620 BC and lived on the Greek island of Lesbos, has inspired and fascinated readers and poets for two and a half thousand years. Today, as in antiquity, she is regarded as Greece's supreme lyric poet. Yet apa...

"Selected Poems" draws on John Ash's four acclaimed collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. "A little querulous, perhaps?" Carolyn Kizer asked in the New York Times Book Review. "Never mind. This may be the most auspicious debut of its kind s...

"It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives", Joseph Brodsky said. And Derek Walcott: "There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in...

Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems have been astonishing popular with children and adults alike since the first publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, and have influenced the work of a host of modern writers, including James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges...

Luis de Gongora is Spain's greatest poet of the Baroque period. He was much admired by Lorca, and Roy Campbell described him as "a symbolist who contains the whole of Mallarme and a lot more besides, a symbolist three hundred years before his time"....

Thanks to T. S. Eliot's "For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order" (1928), the name of the great divine (1555-1626) lives, but his work is little known. This selection, the first for many years, reintroduces Andrewes as a substantial, engagin...

Michelangelo's poems are like the letters of other artists: they range from formal words of thanks to passionate arguments; they flatter patrons, address lovers – and God; they reflect on art and on Michelangelo's own physical and metaphysical studie...

One of John Peck's debts to the Modernists is his sense of continuity between the arts: poetry, music, sculpture and painting are not only analogous as forms of discovery; their process is related at a deeper level, the "cantabile" of making and maki...