"The Country of Perhaps" is a work in two parts. Part I, a collection of lyric poems, explores the nature and the power of human illusion, and shows how that power is generated not from 'cultural forces' but from the demands of individual choice in t...

"After the Hurricane" is the first book from this major Welsh poet since Selected Poems. It is a wonderful collection of vibrant poems that showcase his affinity with the human and natural calamities that influence our environmental and mental ecolog...

The "rough climate" of the title reflects the encroaching unease that many people feel about the circumstances of their lives. In his seventh collection (and his first for seven years) E.A. Markham draws attention to the euphemisms and other abuses o...

In her second book of poems Sinead Morrissey's worlds grow more diverse, encompassing the Orient, the Antipodes, America and an Ireland which recent history has changed and yet not deeply, a country observed through eyes that travel and time have mad...

Into the settled poetry of New Zealand a disruptive force rumbled in magazines and then burst forth with "Malady" (1970). Here began the revolution of Bill Manhire. He starts thriftily, with imagistic poems whose calm voices are at odds with the ego-...

"These great people like MacDiarmid are a bit scary", says the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead. And Kathleen Jamie: "Drunk? Men? Thistle? What?... No. No, not for me". It was not ever thus. Dylan Thomas declared: "Every door in any town should be wide o...

In "Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems" is the first major collection to be published by Dom Moraes in the UK for over three decades. The collection shows the development of an urbane, witty, fiercely intelligent poet whose extraordinary life and...

The Word Pavilion is a dazzling construction: two-tiered, each tier divided into sections which, while they harmonise with one another, constitute structures in them-selves. To a selection of 110 poems from his eight earlier books, Middleton adds the...

Derek Walcott celebrates Les Murray in these terms: "There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacred-ness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational". Fifteen years ago Carcanet published Les Murray...

Nevermore is an elegy for lost times and threatened things. It celebrates recollection and the "immortality of youth", and youth's passions: for natural history (as in the group of bird poems entitled "Plato's Aviary"), for the naive curiosity and lu...