The poems in Maurice Riordan's second collection are unusual in their recourse to the humanist belief in poetry as one of the forms of knowledge, imparting information about the observable world; but they also mix ancient wisdom (signs and wonders) with the open-ended science of the quantum age.
'To say that [Fivemiletown] was one of the best books of the Eighties isn't enough: it is one of the best books I know, or for that matter, am capable of imagining: a corrosive and uproarious litany of bad sex, bad politics and bad religion.
The 'wind dog' is a broken rainbow, but, in the title poem of Tom Paulin's sixth collection, it provides this most agile of poets with a perfect bridge into childhood and its 'lingo-jingo of beginnings'.
This book offers Tom Paulin's own choice from his first four collections of poems, A State of Justice, The Strange Museum, Liberty Tree and Fivemiletown, and from Seize the Fire, his version of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound.
In his first collection since being appointed Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion negotiates the very space of poetry, moving between private and public realms, pondering each from the other's borders.
Sky Nails offers a selection from Jamie McKendrick's first three collections of poetry, including The Marble Fly, which was both a Poetry Book Society Choice and winner of the 1997 Forward Prize for Best Collection.
When Philip Larkin's High Windows first appeared, Kingsley Amis spoke for a large and loyal readership when he wrote: 'Larkin's admirers need only be told that he is as good as ever here, if not slightly better.
For the first time, the vast canon of the poetry of Ted Hughes - winner of the Whitbread and Forward Prizes and former Poet Laureate - together in a single e-book.
Originally published in 1979, Moortown Diary is the updated version of Ted Hughes's acclaimed Devon farming sequence, written over a period of several years during which he was spending almost every day outside, either gardening or farming.
This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney's published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987).
The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains England's best-loved poet - a writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader.
When Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was first published, it catapulted its author into the bestseller lists and established her as one of our funniest and most eloquent poets.
Electric Light travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime.
This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author's work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes.
At the centre of this collection, which includes groups of elegies and love poems, there is a short sonnet sequence which concentrates themes apparent elsewhere in the book: the individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death.
'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity.
Originally published in 1969, Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark continues a furrow so startlingly opened in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966).