The poems in "Near-Life Experience" are curious about the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language, catching it before it vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects and trees, Ne...

A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 2024 Queen's Gold Medal 2011 The days have no names. The day they count the dead, the day they closed the doors, turned off the lights. We're still here in the silence, hearing tree-talk, the wind's secr...

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Spring 2024 In the archives of the Houghton Library at Harvard the incandescent work of V. R. "Bunny" Lang (1924-1956) has survived. The American poet and playwright whose name was all but erased from litera...

Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013 Oli Hazzard's third collection emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology: ambitious, formally various poems and sequences extract "the ore / from boredom", as memory – personal, famil...

Poetry Book Society Choice Spring 2024 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022 Emerging Writer of the Year in the Dalkey Literary Awards 2022 Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022 The lives that Victoria Kennefick evokes alter,...

Born into a family of musicians – his mother a music-hall singer, his father a pianist in silent cinemas – Anthony Burgess became interested in music at an early age. A composer long before he became a writer, he gained a wide knowledge of the classi...

Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2024 Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2020 Shortlisted for the Michael Ramsey Prize 2019 In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans ident...

"Sea Fever" remains one of the most popular poems of the last century, and John Masefield one of the most popular poets, a superb spinner of yarns and ballads of tall ships, exotic seas, of the deep-rooted life of rural England, and of the great narr...

In "Child Ballad", David Wheatley's sixth collection, he explores a world transformed by the experience of parenthood. Conducting his children through landscapes of Northern Scotland, he follows pathways laid down by departed Irish missionaries and b...

John Deane opted for a "Selected and New" rather than the tombstone of a "Collected" to mark his eightieth year before heaven. He is still a living force, in physical and spiritual space: a Selected Poems ("Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill", 2012) alrea...