Books

Thomas Kinsella is among the most distinguished modern poets. His work over fifty years has challenged and enriched the poetic landscape. Rooted in locality, Kinsella's poetry employs myth and modernism in explorations that range from intense lyricism to...

"Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in "The War Works Hard", a subversive, sobering work by an exiled Iraqi poet, and her first collection to appear in English. Compassionate, engaged and direct, Mikhail's is a voice that transcends...

In 1822 William Hazlitt, forty-four years old and married, was both tormented and enchanted by Sarah Walker, his landlady's nineteen-year-old daughter. "Liber Amoris" is the chronicle of that obsession, an extraordinary fragment of Romantic autobiography...

Ten years ago Carcanet published Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems, a book which confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. The New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code...

Averno, a crater lake in southern Italy, was for the Romans the entrance to the underworld, both gateway and impassable barrier between the living and the dead. In Louise Gluck's latest collection, Averno is the only source of heat and light in a world...

Eavan Boland has praised Grevel Lindop's 'lyric voice that handles images well, that distinguishes - as few poets do - the erotic from the sexual, that moves language in and out of metaphor with skill and grace.' The erotic and the sexual are richly...

Petronius lived during the reign of the notorious emperor Nero, a writer in a decadent empire, and in Frederic Raphael he finds a translator who brings his words vividly alive. Petronius' Rome is not the noble civilisation of classical ideals; his Romans...

In her first collection, Carola Luther makes a new kind of space in poetry, both impassioned and level-headed.

In his new selection from the poems of William Barnes (1801-1886), the neglected Dorset poet, critic Robert Nye gives the dialect poems their full due, and persuasively describes the contemporary relevance of Barnes 'rural language and vision.

Body language and the body of language - from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers - are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since The Guest from the Future (1995), described...

'Author of paradoxes as clear as water and, as water, dizzying ...mysterious man who does not cultivate mystery, mysterious as the mid-day moon, taciturn phantom of the Portuguese mid-day - who is Pessoa?' asks Octavio Paz. This collection of the work of...

Asked what problems most perplexed "young men at present" Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) replied "a growing sense of discrepancy". His wry and wise poetry explores the tensions of a time of radical changes in the religious, political and literary...

This collection of poems rooted in the wild and beautiful lands that lie between England and Scotland describes a traditionally lawless area whose inhabitants owed allegiance first to kin and laird and then to the authorities in London or Edinburgh...

The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Personal Terms", was greeted in the TLS as 'a small masterpiece'. With the publication of "Cuts and Bruises", the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement. "Cuts...

"The Book of Repulsive Women" includes previously unpublished and uncollected poems, and five illustrations by Barnes herself. Rebecca Loncraine provides an introduction to Barnes' poetry.

Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938), the most influential and controversial Italian poet of the 20th century, published his masterpiece "Halcyon" in 1903. It is a carefully organized sequence of 88 lyrics which, to gain their full effect, must be read as a...

William Tyndale (c.1494-1536) gave the English people their first printed New Testament which he translated from the orginal Greek, and half of the Old Testament, which he translated from the orginal Hebrew. His clear and memorable language spoke...

The prize-winning Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag has one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing. Among her most recent poems are the Summer Elegies, published to much acclaim in Austria in 2002. These,...

The lyric and satirical muses have kept busy with Les Murray. Subhuman Redneck Poems, awarded the 1996 T.S. Eliot Prize, Dog Fox Field (1991), Translations from the Natural World (1993) and Conscious and Verbal (1999) are added to his expanded and...

Edwin Morgan was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow in 1999, and many of these poems reflect the life of the city both now and in the past. But equally the poetry moves to other places and other worlds. A sequence of poems about a demon allows the mind...

This translation of Beowulf was made in the last years of the 1940s and was published in hardback by the Hand and Flower Press in 1952. In the present Carcanet edition, poem and introduction have been kept the same.

The 95 letters printed here in there entirety - dating from the late 1590s until a short time before Donne's death - constitute approximately half of his surviving correspondence. Addressed to a variety of recipients, they present the author of some of...

Louise Gluck has long practised poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortals. To read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle's metamorphoses into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal,...

Thomas Blackburn was a haunted and difficult man. His childhood was tormented by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin colour, and an overaffectionate mother. The moral and...

England in the 1880s: the aristocracy stoically endures the tedium of country-bound weeks in winter, when fashion forbids their showing themselves in London. Lord Beaconsfield's death is mourned - and a national myth is buried. The Times remains the...

Burns Singer spent the 1950s gaining and losing a reputation. He became an insider, notably as a writer of "Times Literary Supplement" leaders, yet considered himself an Outsider, alienating a generation of young editors and fellow poets. His attitude to...

"The Word Pavilion" is a journey, now exuberant, now straggling, into the finite and on to boundlessness. From eight other books of poems the author has selected 110 examples of his art that bear an avian motif, a recurrent theme in much of his work.

`Transparently accomplished,' as John Kerrigan has written, `his work displays the kind of internal "itinerary" which (in Mandelstam's language) is the mark of achieved poetry'. This book selects the best work from thirty years of that itinerary, a...

Hugh Latimer is remembered as one of the martyrs of the Reformation. He was fearless in an age of persecution, noted more for candour than tact. But he was as much concerned about social evils as theological verities. His sermons communicate his beliefs...

This text brings together Clare's longest poem, "The Parish", and his satires, "The Hue and Cry" and "The Summons". Other poems, some previously unpublished, are included. They reveal his reactions to political and social conditions and events of his age...

First published in 1973 as "Thomas Hardy and British Poetry", this book then represented a challenge to critical orthodoxy. It modified the image of Hardy the nostalgic countryman with that of Hardy the Victorian engineer of language. It also suggested...

Brings together selections of ten outstanding South African poets, to show, in writing drawn from more than four decades, from very different cultures and traditions, a vital and diverse literature. Representing a vision of a pluralistic Africanism the...

First selection of Andrew Young's best-known short poems and the long mystical poem "Into Hades". The volume is illustrated by Joan Hassalal's powerful wood-engravings.

This text draws on six previous collections published between 1978 and 1994. The earlier poems are diverse, ranging from descriptions of work in heavy industry to observations of wildlife around the writer's childhood home in Wales. Later poems deal with...

"Augatora" is a word lost from language. In Old High German it meant, more or less, "eye gate" ("window" with an inbuilt etymology). The windows in this book open on real and imagined land and cityscapes. Memory, science, language, history, and love...

Includes "Penelope's Song" in which the author interweaves in a book-length sequence an account of the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's "Odyssey". This collection of poetry also explores the notion of the "nostos", the...

To mark John Ashbery's 70th birthday, Carcanet publish his first five books of poems in a single volume: "The Tennis Court Oath" (1962); "Same Trees" (1956); "Rivers and Mountains" (1966); "The Double Dream of Spring" (1970); and "Three Poems" (1972).

This is a collection of poems and prose pieces that continue the author's exploration of self, place, history and comedy: from columns for BBC Radio 4, to a poetic journal of a Mexican visit; and from poems for "Arts Management Weekly" to poems rejected...

Shows Ford Madox Ford's poetic development from his early lyrics to his later conversational style. This volume displays, as well as early work, his less familiar modes, including satirical pieces never before collected.

Passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, paintings, apologies, and partings, all feature in this collection of poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Ashbery.

As civilian war poetry (written under the shattering impact of World War II), Trilogys three long poems rank with T. S. Eliots Four Quartets and Ezra Pounds Pisan Cantos. The first book of the Trilogy, published in the midst of the "fifty thousand...

Updating and correcting the earlier book, this edition features previously unknown works by Loy rescued from Dada archives and avant-garde magazines. All of Loy's futurist and feminist satires are included, as are the poems from her Paris and New York...

Ashberry was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975).

Professor Saraiva's multi-volume History of Portugal is a celebratedscholarly standard work. Yet, when he published a one-volume HistoriaConcisa, it proved a run-away best seller in Portugal, and the televisionseries that went with it became a...

The word "jazz" did not begin to appear in print until around 1915 and was grudgingly admitted into polite society. This book explores the vocabulary which has grown up around it. Entries include words unique to jazz ("bebop", Dixieland", "ragtime");...

Writing of African experiences in South Africa, Schwartzman poems are "stories" which build into a larger tale of lives lived in the shadow of division. The poems were written in the three years preceding the transfer of power in South Africa in April...

Drawing on both modernist and traditional resources, this collection of poems consists of works taken from six previous books. The book excludes the poem "M", but collects for the first time five other poems.

She establishes a voice and questions its integrity. In many ways, it is a book about becoming, as the poet's children leave home and she must find a changed self and purpose, a new space.