"Herne the Hunter" is the sixth collection from one of Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets. In this new body of work, Peter McDonald deepens his interest in myth and storytelling through the legend of Herne, a phantom huntsman of English folklore...

In this unique and finely-wrought collection, award-winning poet and scholar Peter McDonald gives us the first contemporary translation of the Homeric Hymns; a collection of 33 anonymous Ancient Greek hymns celebrating individual gods. From Zeus to A...

Stanley Moss dedicates these poems "to departed friends: human, canine, arboreal, avian", setting the tone for a collection that is celebratory, occasional, salutatory. Striking out at "Sunrise", the poems move through sections for "Noon", "Sunset",...

For Rod Mengham sculpture and painting exist in the world the way poems do. He invokes the Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, who believes that sculpture must be understood as part of the world around it. In "Chance of a Storm", poetry is language that...

The clearly-focussed lyrics of Les Murray's "Waiting for the Past" are rich in topographies and the languages peculiar to them – wonga vines, lyre birds, gum trees, shrike thrushes, tallow boughs, boab trees, the octopus in Wylies Baths killed by ste...

In the informal rituals of the tide remaking its tideline, of a painter absorbed in the act of painting or of an old couple greeting the night, the English poet Kate Miller sees and charts the creative process at work. As its title suggests, Miller's...

Over the past twenty-five years, the award-winning writer David Morley has become known as one of Britain's most original poets. Known for his energy and linguistic inventiveness, Morley is a master storyteller, whose poems uncover "universes bound t...

One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all a testament to his lifelong commitm...

C. H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of th...

"An Aviary of Small Birds" is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. Here, birth paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after long labour, the baby's heart gives out. Howeve...