In a period when nations are retracting within their borders, the vivid and intricate poems of Jamie McKendrick's new collection Anomaly are especially timely, and speak of a fragile legacy of openness and interconnectedness.
The Noise of a Fly is the first collection from Douglas Dunn in sixteen years, and the first since he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013.
Doves is Lachlan Mackinnon's most candid and affecting volume of poems to date, and follows on from Small Hours, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2010.
Thom Gunn's controlled used of form and the metaphysical was in evidence from his first collection, Fighting Terms, in 1954, which was widely regarded - perhaps not entirely accurately - as a contributor to 'The Movement' and the opposition to modernism.
This new anthology of poems, favourites from the nation's longest-running and best-loved request programme for verse, moves with the seasons, following the turning year from John Clare's 'pale splendour of the winter sun' to John Keats's 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness', by way of Larkin's 'young-leafed June' and Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'glassy peartree leaves and blooms' when 'Nothing is so beautiful as Spring'.
Drawn from thirty years of work, this selection, made by the poet himself, gathers from the best of Jamie McKendrick's six acclaimed collections, including some translations, from 1991's debut The Sirocco Room to Out There (2012, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize) by way of The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and Ink Stone, shortlisted for both the T.
The poems in David Harsent's new collection, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone.
Hugo Williams is rightly cherished for his inimitable fusion of autobiography and irony, and a technical glide that allows his writing to 'slip back to the past as effortlessly as a dreamer' (The Times).
Since his precise, potent and subtle portraits of Northern Irish life first came to public attention in the 1970s, Tom Paulin has been an unmissable writer on the contemporary poetry scene.
When Stevie Smith died in 1971 she was one of the twentieth-century's most popular poets; many of her poems have been widely anthologised, and 'Not Waving but Drowning' remains one of the nation's favourite poems to this day.
It follows the exploits of a group of hapless bards, more intimately connected than they themselves can possibly know, in their attempts to navigate the hazards of London literary society.
Sylvia Plath was, for both English and American poetry, one of the defining voices of twentieth-century, and one of the most appealing: few other poets have introduced as many new readers to poetry.
Andrew Motion's new book opens with a sequence of war poems (first published as the pamphlet Laurels and Donkeys, on Armistice Day 2010), drawing on soldiers' experiences of war from 1914 until today - beginning with a story about Siegfried Sassoon and moving via World War Two and Korea to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the throne, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy brings together a dazzling array of contemporary poets (sixty in fact) to write about each of the of the sixty years of Her Majesty's reign.
Lunch in Soho with a former lover - but Zanzotti's is under new management, and as the wine takes effect fond memories give way to something closer to the bone.
Winner of both the Queen's Gold Medal and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, James Fenton has given readers some of the most memorable lyric verse of the past decades, from the formal skill that marked his debut, Terminal Moraine, to the dramatic and political monologues of The Memory of War and Children in Exile, through to the unforgettable love poems of Out of Danger and his most recent work: Poems is an essential selection by, as Stephen Spender put it, 'a brilliant poet of technical virtuosity'.
In these poems, Hugo Williams's subjects include the stings inflicted by school, family and love-life, and the exquisite (if qualified) solace afforded by their contemplation.
Towards the end of his life the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote nearly four hundred poems in French - notably the two collections published as Les Fenetres (The Windows) and Les Roses.
Originally commissioned by Madison Opera as a libretto for American composer Daron Aric Hagen, Shining Brow can be read as a dramatic poem in its own right.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY 2003Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, where he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives.
Paul Muldoon's collection Hay refines, and re-defines, a lyrical strain in which an ostensible lightness of touch still has the strength to bear the weightiest subject matter.
Between New Weather (1973), which Seamus Heaney said marked its author as 'the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years', and The Annals of Chile, which was awarded the T.
'These poems delight in a wily, mischievous, nonchalant negotiation between the affections and attachments of Muldoon's own childhood, family and place, and the ironic discriminations of a cool literary sensibility and historical awareness.
