If Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives.
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.
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.
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.
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).
In some respects a sequel to The Man With Night Sweats, Boss Cupid is a memorialising of friends who have died, an anatomy of survival, and a self-portrait of the poet in age.
For this new edition, first published in 1971, Ted Hughes augmented his original selection of Shakespeare's poems and dramatic speeches and completely rewrote his accompanying essay, intending to restore to the common reader much of what, in Shakespeare, was instinctively available to the audience of his day, and to show how Shakespeare's language unites in its sinews and substance the full range of Elizabethan preoccupations, philosophical and social.
Wendy Cope's most recent collection, her first since Serious Concerns in 1992, extends her concern with the comedy of the examined life ('the way we have been, the way we sometimes are'), and imagines those adjustments to the ordinary which would fulfil our futures, or allow us to realize the golden age of five minutes ago, or weigh the 'out there' of the present moment, where what is in sight is also out of reach.
In this compelling first volume in the Blackwell Introductions to Literature series, Roy Flannagan, editor of The Milton Quarterly, provides a readable and uncluttered critical account of a complicated and sophisticated author, and his poetry and prose.
From her reflections on African American life and hardship in Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie to her revolutionary celebrations of womanhood in Phenomenal Woman and Still I Rise, and her elegant tributes to dignitaries Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela (On the Pulse of Morning and His Day Is Done, respectively), every inspiring word of Maya Angelou's poetry is included in the pages of this volume.
Ian Duhig's The Speed of Dark is structured around his astonishing reworking of the text of Le Roman de Fauvel, a medieval text that railed against the corruption of the 12th-century French court and church.
