James Henry (1798-1876) was a controversially humane doctor in Dublin, elected Vice President of the College of Physicians in 1832. Thirteen years later, receiving a large legacy on the death of his mother, he gave up the practice of medicine to begin more than twenty years of journeying through Europe on foot, with his wife and daughter, studying Virgilian manuscripts and rare editions, translating The Aeneid, and writing poems. More than a century after Henry's death, Christopher Ricks came upon a book of his poems -- printed at his own expense and with their pages still uncut -- in the Cambridge University Library. Here was poetry, Ricks writes in his introduction to this volume, "unaffectedly direct, sinewy, seriously comic. And "brave" from a man who "had integrity, moral, political, and spiritual." His convictions and his humor, his idiosyncrasies and his courage, were realized by him in poems of gravity and levity that gained no attention in his day, but are worthy of our time. "What a find Ricks has here! Such a pleasant personality, even when contemplating the backward and forward abysm in which we all find ourselves. That poem of a man with the cigar, woman with a basket - how profound, how amusing, how accurate, how sad. Hoorah for Henry." -Charles Tomlinson "Henry is special. There's no one like him." -Philip Levine

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"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary. Antique Book The sky was crazed with swallows. We walked in the frozen grass of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep. Trees shook down their gaudy nests. The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow. I was jealous of the river, how the light broke it, of the skein of windows where we saw ourselves. Where we walked, the ice cracked like an antique book, opening and closing. The leaves beneath it were the marbled pages. Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

Henry Reed is most familiar as the author of 'The Naming of Parts', the best-loved and most anthologised poem of the Second World War. 'Collected Poems' includes many of his unpublished poems, translations, songs and early fragments, as well as his famous works.