Arranged in four acts, this collection of poems merrily experiments with voice, performance, and medium, exploring the craft through monologues, dialogues, choruses, songs, scene sets, and storyboards. Filled with experimental and stirring language, this anthology includes a piece confronting global warming as well as dramatic and satiric verse arranged with swagger and aplomb, citing surprising and surreal moments such as a seal reciting the poetry of R. A. K. Mason and a goat tied to a t...

Murray Edmond, a well-established poet, writes in Laminations a savage, witty new collection that reflects the times we live in. These polished verses lament the end of the century and celebrate sound, rhythm and word play. Edmond's work sits at the intersection of the personal and historical, and although it is tough and challenging, it is also richly rewarding – this is his strongest collection yet.

Exciting in its taut energy and inventive comedy, Murray Edmond's The Switch is a long poem in forty-nine parts which proceeds, not in a straight line, but in a dazzling display of repetitions, rearrangements and transformations. It's a game, a show, an entertainment and a meditation about love and the passage of time.

The four phases of the moon are the organizing theme of this poetry collection from a lively and irreverent New Zealand writer. Faraway places, conversations with friends, word games, theatrical elements, and encounters with other writers are among the subjects explored in this entertaining and surprisingly affirmative poetry. Found poems, elegies, and free verse reflections include sardonic and satirical glimpses of modern life.

A little bubbly, a little bitter, a little absurd, and echoing with the sound of laughter, these poem-songs have shaggy tales to tell. Shaggy Magpie Songs is a celebration of poetry's potential – for drama and comedy, narrative and nonsense. Presented in four parts – Praise, Nonsense, Blues and Pop – the poems are at times jazzy and rollicking, at other times crooningly melancholic. Edmond writes: 'Songs are poems that are incomplete without their music, so I think of these poems ...

The poems in From the Word Go come in various shapes, sizes and styles. All make language work hard, are vivid and carefully crafted, and put the reader in contact with a lively, inventive mind. The verses are often prose-like, where meaning builds up line by line. Edmond has a fantastic ear and his poems are always enjoyable.

The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the vio...

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Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," she uncovers the evidence presented to us daily by nature, in rivers and stones, willows and f...

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. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to describe Elizabeth Bishop -- one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light a...

Anne Stevenson is a major American and British poet. Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States but has lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour. "Poems 1955-2005" is a remaking...

A selection of Brian Patten's best work over the last forty-five years, chosen by the poet himself. The earliest of these poems, 'Sleep Now', was written when Patten was fifteen, the latest when he was sixty. Presented in rough chronological order, the selection includes a dozen new poems.