An anthology which bridges the poetic and the lesbian cultures developed in contemporary England and North America.

When she died, in 2009, Anthony Thwaite described U.A. Fanthorpe as a 'smiling subversive with a voice like bird-song'. An encouraging example to all late developers, this particular bird's voice took its time: she didn't become a poet until she was 45. But these examples of her very earliest work show the latent mastery and the rapid development of the craft that would bring her wide critical acclaim and an affectionate general readership. The mysteries of the trade gradually reveal themselves as rooted in a wide and uncensored range of subject-matter, a life-time's love of words, and an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of form and voice. Recognising her role so late, she was a woman in a hurry; there wasn't time for self-consciousness or grandiose notions of 'vocation'. 'A poet, ' she said, 'is a smuggler. He imports things clandestinely which are not supposed to have got through the customs.' Poetry 'happened to me', she would say. Her job? To listen, to pass it on.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Hecht has long been regarded as one of the great modern American poets, and is hailed by many as the unofficial Poet Laureate' of the USA. This volume brings together all the poems contained in The Hard Hours (1967), Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), and The Venetian Vespers (1980), and versions of Joseph Brodsky's early poems, which Hecht was the first to translate. These three distinguished books affirm Hecht's reputation as a technically accomplished poet capable of powerfully expressing deep sentiment and original thought.

Gathers poems written in English by Welsh poets, including Dylan Thomas, and discusses the history of Welsh poetry

Peter Levi is one of the most accomplished and individual lyric poets now writing. This is his fourth collection, containing 40 poems, mostly written - some in Greece and Afghanistan, the majority in England - since the publication of `Fresh Water, Sea Water' (1966). They develop the intimate, almost mystical element which is the keynote of his work. John Bayley writing in `Agenda' described this as "his power of taking an active situation, emotion or longing, and revealing beneath and around it the quality that Napoleon called `repose'." `Death is a Pulpit', containing poems written for public performance, is published simultaneously.

This book contains five poems, each written for public performance on a special occasion. Traditional forms - mainly the heroic couplet - are used in a new way under a new necessity. A poem on the art of satire is followed by three sermons - for Christmas, Whitsun and the feast of St Thomas More - and the concluding poem is an elegy for T. S. Eliot. Together they complement the more personal poems collected in `Life is a Platform', which is published simultaneously.

I have a Name is a vital engagement with life and an unflinching stare at death, concluding that love transcendent is a reality, Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) The wondrous subtlety of David Ignatow's art is brought to bear on the timeless themes of love and death. Intimate remembrances evince a rich life: Hebrew lessons, war, first love, friendships with Stanley Kunitz and others, his wife's death. One poem comments on another, often with wit and irony; no statement is ever final. In this way, Ignatow shows that we exist most fully in the fluidity of our perceptions and in our inability to attain a single state of mind or definition of things. I Have A Name is a vital engagement with life and an unflinching stare at death, concluding that love transcendent is a reality, embracing all, the living and the dead.

A collection of poems by Anne Michaels. The poems are meditations on how love changes in order to survive, how we move from obsolete science to new perceptions, and how, in her words, the same loneliness that closes us/ Opens us again.