This book offers Tom Paulin's own choice from his first four collections of poems, A State of Justice, The Strange Museum, Liberty Tree and Fivemiletown, and from Seize the Fire, his version of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. It introduces the new reader to a body of work distinguished from the outset by its intelligence, toughness and lyrical grace.

This volume introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry. An historical overview and critical introduction to the poetry published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century Introduces students to figures including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Andrew Motion Takes an integrative approach, emphasizing the complex negotiations between the British and Irish poetic traditions, and pulling together competing tendencies and positions Written by critics from Britain, Ireland, and the United States Includes suggestions for further reading and a chronology, detailing the most important writers, volumes and events

Since his precise, potent and subtle portraits of Northern Irish life first came to public attention in the 1970s, Tom Paulin has been an unmissable writer on the contemporary poetry scene. This selection on his work draws on nearly four decades of poetry and translation, updating and expanding upon the Selected Poems 1972-1990, and showcasing the microscopic detail and reinvention of the ordinary with which Paulin writes of place, culture and memory. The Ireland of Paulin's childhood is explored both from a personal and a historical perspective to form a complex picture of a country in turmoil and in recovery. But Paulin's concerns are as international as they are local, as reflected in his long-standing appetite for European writers, histories and languages. Dialectic and lyrical, original and exploratory, ambitious and provocative, Tom Paulin is one of the defining voices of his generation: brilliantly varied and utterly compelling, as apparent from this New Selected Poems.

Michael Schmidt’s anthology includes the work of more than a hundred poets from every part of the English-speaking world. What links their diverse voices is a common language: each poem, in its own way, adds to the resources of the medium and makes it new. The poems in this book are allowed to slip free of their moorings in the biography and history of the last century to create new spaces and times. They have been chosen because they are exceptional, profound and unique in what they do to language, regardless of their subject matter or the orientation of the poet. It is a powerful reminder that in the twentieth century poems did what they have never done before, and it provides us with a unique insight into the forces that will shape the poetry of the twenty-first century.

A selection of 118 poems by twentieth-century American poet Michael Palmer, drawn from throughout his career from 1972 to 1995.