The Stinking Rose is one of the names for a plant that arouses strong feelings: garlic. No one is neutral about it. Sujata Bhatt explores the various mythologies and the magical and practical aspects of garlic in a sequence of twenty-five parts, is a...

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) was one of the most popular English poets of his time. "He must always", said Dryden, "be thought a great poet". His work was held in high esteem by Milton, Johnson (who wrote one of the greatest of his Lives about him), Po...

Elaine Feinstein is a poet of lyrical directness. That clear, passionate voice which she brought to her celebrated translations of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry is her own. She writes about love, loss, jealousy, the fear of abandonment. Her powerful rhy...

In the first English translation of Still Alive, the renowned Polish essayist and theater critic Jan Kott recounts his perilous odyssey through the endless political crises of Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth-century, illuminating not only the fat...

In 1970 Laura (Riding) Jackson published with Faber her "Selected Poems: in five sets", presenting a clutch of poems readers for the first time in the three decades since she renounced poetry, an act which challenges her readers still. In 1980 a new...

The great poet-critic of his age, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is now best remembered as a poet for "Dover Beath", "The Scholar Gypsy" and "Thyrsis". Beside these well-loved and widely anthologised poems, this book places a selection of other poems in...

You are just an ordinary New Zealander. You have strength, intelligence and good luck, though you are not particularly good at languages. Your family and friends like you, and there is one special friend who thinks you're really swell. Yours is a wel...

Robert Duncan's profound appeal as a writer, and as a mentor to very different kinds of poets, suggests the vigour, various charm and scope of his work. He is certainly a poet aware – in his themes and his expansive techniques – of his radical creati...

Beneath the respectable of Wales, with its patriarchal religion, Caradoc's stories exposed greed and corruption, domestic and sexual violence. "My Neighbours" (1920) focused on the London-Welsh business world with its equation of godliness with piety...

This "Selected Poems" by award-winning Australian poet Vicki Raymond is her first British publication, though her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. She is an unusually gifted poet in traditional forms, with a telling sense of humo...