Miguel Torga's celebrated Tales ("Contos and Novos Contos de Montanha") are set in the remote and barren Tras-os-Montos-"over the mountains"-region of north-east Portugal. There the writer was born into a family of illiterate country people. He speak...

P. J. Kavanagh's poems are filled with praise, with the minute observations that transform a mood, or the dazzling recollection that can change the heart. "If description is revelation", wrote Derek Mahon in the Irish Times, "his revelatory gift is p...

After the First World War, Hugh MacDiarmid took hold of the pillars of the Scottish literary and educational establishment and did the job of Samson. The essays that form "Contemporary Scottish Studies", first published in "The Scottish Educational J...

Ivor Gurney's poetic career was unusual. It began in 1917 and 1919 with two small volumes of verse ("Severn and Somme / War's Embers", published by Carcanet). Then in 1922 he entered the asylum from which only an occasional poem in a magazine emerged...

Born on 24 July 1895, Robert Graves had a richly literary early environment. His father was a poet and a schools inspector. He followed, with firmer tread, in his father's footsteps. Admired in his pram by Swinburne, he was not permanently damaged by...

The second volume of this occasional series introduces another nine talented newcomers. The variety of poetic voices and themes on display reflects backgrounds which range from Scotland to Bristol and from gardening to rock bands. Many have been publ...

John Clare was an assiduous practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last few years before his institutionalisation in 1837, fist at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of...

One of John Peck's debts to the Modernists is his sense of continuity between the arts: poetry, music, sculpture and painting are not only analogous as forms of discovery; their process is related at a deeper level, the "cantabile" of making and maki...

Adam Schwartzman is an African writing of African experiences. His remarkable first collection, formally assured, thematically mature, is marked by a youthful grasp of variously peopled landscapes. The poems are "stories" which build together into a...

Irish literature exists in two languages. A dual approach is necessary if the tradition, with its historical, political and semantic tensions, is to be understood-indeed, if some of its features are to be appreciated at all. Separate Gaelic and Anglo...