The long title poem of John Greening's The Silence is a meditation on Jean Sibelius and the thirty years he spent grappling with an eighth symphony, which in the end he probably burned. The poem is emblematic of a broader concern with the mystery of the creative process, explored here in the work of other artists but also grappled with first-hand, in the composition of poems. The collection is haunted by other kinds of silence too, especially that most emphatic one (notably in Greening's w...

In a sequence of verse letters, John Greening sends dispatches across the decades, looking back over the century since the outbreak of the First World War. He addresses the war poets directly, making connections yet always aware of distance, and explores "Englishness," but also—in his translations from Heym, Trakl, Stadler, and Stramm—provides an alternative perspective. From the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial just before the start of the Second World War to the security forces' shut-d...

The title poem of The Silence is a meditation on Sibelius and the thirty years he spent grappling with an eighth symphony that he eventually burned. The poem is emblematic of a broader concern with the mystery of the creative process, explored in the work of other artists but also grappled with first-hand, in the composition of poems. Death, that most emphatic of silences, is a recurring theme; but so too is the bright potentiality of the unknown, the beyond. A tribute to the late Dennis O...

Growing up on the Isle of Lewis, Iain Crichton Smith spoke only Gaelic until he was five. But at school in Bayble and then Stornoway, everything had to be in English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two histories entailing exile, a central theme of his poetry. His divided perspective sharply delineates the tyranny of history and religion, of the cramped life of small communities; it gives him a tender eye for the struggle of women and men in a w...

In over twenty poetry collections since 1982, John Greening has explored subjects as varied as Egypt, Captain Scott, WWI, classical music, Ben Jonson and Heathrow airport, but he has kept returning to the landscape of a quintessentially English (and technically non-existent) county. His well-received Huntingdonshire Eclogues of the late 1980s were followed a decade later by Huntingdonshire Nocturnes and, another ten more years after that, the Huntingdonshire Elegies

Accompanied Voices is a unique book: not only is it a highly readable anthology of some of the most memorable and accessible international writing about classical music, and a moving commentary by one set of practising artists on the work of another. There have been several anthologies of "music poems", but never one which follows the story of western music through from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. This is in effect a chronologicalguide to the major composers of th...

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) was one of the youngest of the war poets, enlisting straight from school to find himself in some of the Western Front's most notorious hot-spots. His prose memoir, written in a rich, allusive vein, full of anecdote and human interest, is unique for its quiet authority and for the potency of its dream-like narrative. Once we accept the archaic conventions and catch the tone—which can be by turns horrifying or hilarious—Undertones of War gradually reveals itself as...

From the phenomenally bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time comes Mark Haddon’s first collection of poems.The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea reveals a poet of great versatility and formal talent. All the gifts so admired in Haddon’s prose are in strong evidence here—the humanity, the dark humour, and the uncanny ventriloquism—but Haddon is also a writer of considerable seriousness, ly...

Magma poetry magazine’s summer 2014 issue, Magma 59, is on the theme of breaks.Editors Roberta James and Alex Price have selected over 65 new poems that reach in to bring a new look on a familiar scene, take us to places we have not been before, or show us new ways to be in our sometimes broken but beautiful world. After poems of great delicacy and eggshells came others of metal and grind. Poems which could make us stride forward, unshakeable and unbreakable are co...

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales's National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer given the Welsh laureateship. She is a bilingual virtuoso, publishing several books in both English and Welsh. Chaotic Angels brings together the poems from her ?rst three English collections, Parables & Faxes (1995), Zero Gravity (1998) and Keeping Mum (2003). She has since published A Hospital Odyssey (2010) and Sparrow Tree (2011). 'The fact that Gwyneth Lewis writes in Welsh and English is central to the issues...

Niall Campbell grew up on South Uist in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, and his first collection, Moontide, is filled with images of the island's seascapes, its myths, its wildlife, and the long dark of its winters. Quietly reflective and deftly musical, these thoughtful poems resonate with silence and song, mystery and wonder, exploring ideas of companionship and withdrawal, love and the stillness of solitude. This highly assured debut collection will establish him as one of the most distincti...

A powerful new collection by the bestselling translator of Beowulf.In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on airThat is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on holdIn the everything flows and steady go of the world.--from "Perch"Seamus Heaney's new collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world and revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and th...