Donald Davie was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time. His poems do not pre-empt us in the way that protest or political poetry does, though he protests and is political. He was a poet of English perspectives refracted through historical med...

Revolving around the public and private lives of the great modern painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, this collection explores the artist's relationship with her craft and her friendship with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his wife, sculptor Clara Westhoff....

In 1911 some of D. H. Lawrence's poems and his story "Odour of Chrysanthemums" found their way, without his knowledge, to the desk of the editor of the English Review, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford). Ford was astonished and invited Lawrence to meet...

Within this collection of her poetry, Mimi Khalvati weaves themes rooted in her childhood home, the British Isle of Wight. Through poetry she considers the houses in which she lived, the past coming into focus, and the most memorable feature of the i...

Thomas Kinsella stands apart in modern Irish poetry. His work, employing traditional and modernist elements in individual poems and open sequences, deals in a range of subjects from the most intense and psychic privacy to political satire and social...

Five years after the death of Joseph Brodsky, the heir of the generation of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and especially Akhmatova, this "Collected Poems" in English for the first time collects all his translated and original poems in English. It...

"Code" consists of a group of shorter poems and one of Eavan Boland's major sequences which extends the thematic concerns first traced in "The Journey" 15 years ago. Time passes: the poet's own situation as woman, mother and wife changes. The sense t...

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-...

When Octavio Paz (1914-1998) died, Mexico lost a tribe of writers. He was many poets, from the surrealist disciple of Andre Breton to the admiring imitator of Alexander Pope; now a radical experimentalist, now an autobiographer and confessional write...

Burns Singer spent the 1950's gaining and losing a reputation. He became an Insider, notably as the writer of Times Literary Supplement leaders, yet considered himself in many respects an Outsider, alienating a whole generation of young editors and f...