INTRODUCTION BY GERMAINE GREERShakespeare's sonnets are lyrical, haunting, beautiful and often breath-taking, representing one of the finest bodies of poetry ever penned.
In these extraordinary poems, using multiple viewpoints - from Darwin himself, to his beloved wife Emma, and even, at one point, the orangutang at London Zoo - Ruth Padel illuminates the development of Darwin's thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and the fluctuating emotions of Darwin the husband, the naturalist and the tender father, in a powerful tribute to her famous ancestor.
In 1944, at the age of five, William Graves was taken from England to the delightful mountain village of Deya in Majorca, where his father - the poet Robert Graves - had returned with his new family to the place he had lived with Laura Riding before the war.
Taking its title from Uccello's famous painting of a band of men - on foot and on horseback - massing for the chase, John Burnside's new poems take us on a journey out of the light and into the darkness, where we may just as easily lose ourselves as find what we are looking for.
'Thank you, O golden mother, / For giving me a life,' says Paul Durcan in this brilliant new collection, a poignant tribute to 'the first woman I ever knew'.
Sharon Olds divides this new book into five sections - 'Blood', 'Tin', ' 'Straw', ' 'Fire' and 'Light' - each made up of fourteen poems whose dominant imagery is drawn from one of these elements.
James Lasdun's third book of poems explores the themes and tensions of his last two with a new boldness and exuberance, in a series of poems about life in the Catskill mountains outside Woodstock, where the author moved with his family some years ago.
After his first collection - SOFT KEYS - Michael Symmons Roberts was hailed by Les Murray as 'a poet for the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned'.
In his first two collections - Soft Keys and Raising Sparks - Michael Symmons Roberts established himself as a lyric and dramatic poet with metaphysical concerns.
'A beautifully clear account of a richly complex life, an account which is also fascinatingly vivid on the political and social background of the time.
A deeply personal story of one man's life-long obsession with an ancient poet, and an exploration of what Horace's thoughts on life, leisure and love can teach us today 'A moving memoir that shakes the dust off Horace – and restores him to his rightful berth among the immortals' Harry Mount, author of Amo, Amas, Amat.
When Corpus won the Whitbread Poetry Award, the judges described it as 'an outstanding, perfectly weighted collection that inspires meditation on the nature of the soul.
Subversive and satirical, inventive, wry and unconventional, John Hartley Williams has long been celebrated for his maverick sensibility, for his outsider's take on the way we live our lives.
Like the possible phantoms that stalk the dark passageways of its title poem, John Fuller's beautifully lucid collection explores the grey area between life and death.
'Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled' William Blake Patti Smith introduces her favourite selection of Blake's poems, including the complete poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
The Unswept Room is a dazzling collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and rhythm, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humour.
Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony.
Holding in balance the ecological and the technological, ancient and modern, Full Volume sings languages and cultures, people and habitats burgeoning on the brink of extinction.
