In 1487 Sir Henry Bodrugan, pursued for treason, leapt from a Cornish clifftop into a waiting boat and fled to France. Bodrugan's Leap, as the clifftop has come to be known, lies close to John Wilkinson's childhood home, and supplies the title for th...

To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and ser...

William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson's poetry: 'He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.' Of all...

I was born in Belgium, I'm Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.' So writes Leonard Nolens in 'Place and Date', which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this sel...

Rod Mengham's new offering comprises two complementary halves, one is a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound, on Dartmoor) and the other is a series of short essays on different cultural habitats. 'Grimspound' is a four-p...

"Dictator" recreates "Gilgamesh" using the 1500 word vocabulary of Globish (from the words "global" and "English") put together by Jean-Paul Nerriere. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to r...

"Nameless Country" gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur 'A.C.' Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his...

Jenny Lewis has produced a versatile and inventive retelling of "Gilgamesh" which brings alive a story that is as resonant today as it was when first composed in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) four millennia ago. In 2012 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fell...

"Notes from the Dream House" is a 'best of' selection of reviews by the celebrated Observer film critic Philip French. Spanning half the history of cinema, his reviews cover a great variety of films, from westerns and gangsters to art movies and musi...

The September-October 2018 issue The last published poems of the late Matthew Sweeney A translation of one of the most famous Ethiopian oral poems John Ash's first published poem in over a decade New poems by Sophie Hannah, Claudine Toutoungi and...