Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told.

Originally published in 1956, this poem was subsequently seized by US customs and the San Francisco police. It was the subject of a long court trial at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene.

A collection that elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, and lifted and lowered.

Elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. This title broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past.

Abigail Parry's second collection was supposed to be about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, partnership and collective responsibility. Instead the poems relate to pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Anything except what intimacy is or looks like.

The first ever autobiography of John Cooper Clarke, the Bard of Salford, punk poet, rock star, fashion icon, national treasure and acerbic wit.

Gardens, relationships and imaginations run wild in Katie Oliver's debut short fiction collection. The world is unpredictable and no woman is safe. Boundaries are blurred: between fantasy and reality, technology and nature, autonomy and oppression. Threat of violence simmers. Women transform into birds, converse with plants and plot their revenge.

I WISH I KNEW is a book that will bring comfort, confidence, sisterhood and acceptance into the hearts of young women, and is also relevant for young men.

Contains all of the poetry that the author chose to publish, together with a small number of uncollected and unpublished poems. This book also supplies an illuminating introduction, and succinctly helpful apparatus. It tact are themselves a moving tribute, restoring to view one of the distinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century English poetry.

The new collection from one of the best new talents in contemporary poetry and winner of the 2002 Whitbread Poetry Award

This collection of poems from Wendy Cope reveals a softer lyrical voice, also present in her earlier books, but here given more room to develop in poems about gardens and contentment, and the poignancy of having something to lose.

High on Olympus, Zeus and the assembled deities look down on the world of men, to the city of Troy where a bitter and bloody war has dragged into its tenth year, and a quarrel rages between a legendary warrior and his commander. Greek ships decay, men languish, exhausted, and behind the walls of Troy a desperate people await the next turn of fate.

Tells the story of darkest episode in "Trojan War". At its centre is Achilles, greatest warrior-champion of Greeks, and his refusal to fight after being humiliated by his leader Agamemnon. But when Trojan Hector kills Achilles' close friend Patroclus, he storms back into battle to take revenge - even though he knows this may ensure his own death.

Much more than a series of battle scenes, the Iliad is a work of extraordinary pathos and profundity that concerns itself with issues as fundamental as the meaning of life and death.

One of the epics in Western literature, "The Iliad" recounts the story of the Trojan wars. In his introduction, the author observes that although the violence of the Iliad is grim and relentless, it co-exists with both images of civilized life and a poignant yearning for peace.

Cats! Some are sane, and some are mad. Some are good, and some are bad...

The book shows the variety of practice within the Imagist group, and shifts the focus from seeing Imagism purely as the creation of Ezra Pound, by granting a much stronger focus to often overlooked figures such as Amy Lowell, F.S.

What really counts in this life? For the writer, Alexander McCall Smith, it is friendship and love - themes that crop up time and again in his novels. And it is these themes that he explores in this, his debut collection of poems.

IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY follows three young men on a London council estate over two days when suddenly everything is at stake