According to the seventeenth-century herbarium "The Garden of Eden", a "missel-child" is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree – a changeling, perhaps, "whereof many strange things are conceived". Helen Tookey's first full collect...

Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. In "documentary", she wrote, real things "lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens". If film, for Tait,...

"A blighted tree is said to be planet-struck. Similarly epilepsy, paralysis, lunacy and so on are attributed to the malignant influence of planets" – Brewer's "Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" Much of the material in Julian Turner's third collection w...

With the economy of proverbs and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence "Raptors" depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grot...

Inspired by the flotsam of contemporary culture, Philip Terry transforms Shakespeare's sonnet sequence into a celebration of language unleashed. The results are as disrespectful and anarchic as a cartoon – and as assured in their control of line. Phi...

"Select Meditations" is among the earliest works of the poet and mystic Thomas Traherne (1637-1674). Written shortly after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the manuscript was not discovered until 1964 and first published by Carcanet in 1997. Tr...

Charles Tomlinson's "New Collected Poems" gathers a lifetime's work, from the 1950s to 2006. A poet deeply responsive to English landscape, grounded in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Tomlinson is also a writer of international renown, with w...

When Elaine Feinstein first read the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva in Russian in the 1960s, the encounter transformed her. "What drew me to her initially", she writes, "was the intensity of her emotions, and the honesty with which she exposed them". Her...

Bengali is the world's seventh most popular language in terms of the number who use it, but few have made the journey from the West to its cultural or spiritual interior. Its intellectual tradition is without equal in present-day India. Rabindranath...

Edward Thomas is one of the best-loved of English poets, and a model of integrity for many of his successors. His poetry was written during the space of just two years, before he was killed in the First World War. Those years lie at the heart of "Edw...