Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. In "documentary", she wrote, real things "lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens". If film, for Tait,...

In 1997 Carcanet published the "Selected Poems" with which James Tate (1943-2015) won the Pulitzer Prize and his first British book. "Hell, I love everybody: 52 Poems" by James Tate re-introduces the poet, providing a poem for every week of the year,...

Alexander (Sandy) Goehr is a leading British composer and teacher. Born into a Jewish musical family in Berlin in 1932 (his father a composer and conductor, pupil of Arnold Schoenberg; his mother a trained pianist from the Moscow Conservatory) he arr...

"Late Gifts" is a joyful and anxious book. The eponymous late gift, this book's occasion, is a son, born to a middle-aged father. How does this change his sense of present and future, of time itself? The poet focuses on this demanding and joyful rela...

Angela Leighton's sixth book of poems turns on the curious arts of remembering and forgetting. "A poem will be written", James Longenbach writes, "if in the grip of memory we are able to forget". A poem may be read in the same spirit, of remembering,...

The Jewish writer Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) writes in direct response to the Holocaust. She is uniquely a "prophetic" poet, one of the greatest of that species in twentieth century. Her first book appeared in the immediate wake of the Second World War...

"The Coming Thing" is a brilliant long narrative poem. It is not Evans's first: she has become celebrated for work on this scale, spoken, dramatic, abundant. She has been justly acclaimed by, among others, Colm Toibin. He says of her inimitable narra...

"Infinite in Finite" develops the inimitable style of "The Multiverse", the author's first collection (2018), praised as showing "some of the best technical skills of any living poet", the work of "one who is not afraid of big subjects, whose enthusi...

During the latter phases of covid, Isobel Williams completed the challenge of completing her celebrated translations of Catullus. The poems that had proved impossible when she was preparing "Shibari Carmina", published to acclaim in 2021, relented. N...

Fred D'Aguiar's new book recovers and re-imagines the story of a black jockey who raced and won the most publicised race of his era and yet was not named in any of the many press notices about the event. Except to say that he was black and he was a f...