Writing in his 1990s study of Alasdair Gray’s novels, Stephen Bernstein identifies Gray as “one of the most important living writers in English. His satirical blend of realism and fantasy and his compassionate use of humor and sorrow distinguish his…

Witty and warm, expressed in musical but plain language, Laurence Lerner’s poems cast an intelligent and human eye over the lives we variously lead. His first published collections introduce an amiable and wryly observant poetic persona, a thoughtful poet and…

Mary Jo Salter describes herself as a ‘particularly formal poet’. Her attention to and rigorous engagement with poetic form is not only manifested across her eight books of poetry, but in her co-editorship of the Norton Anthology of Poetry in…

Richard Price’s poetry is perhaps most distinctive for its compelling mixture of lyric and avant-garde experimental tendencies; he is a poet as likely to write with a tender warmth and compassion as he is to push language’s everyday, hesitant provisionality…

‘Reality is where things happen’. So Michael Jackson writes in one of his poems, quoting William James. Reality, for Jackson, means to keep up a courteous but insistent conversation, a quest for answers even when they may seem unlikely to…

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography Levine deals with his experiences as a factory worker, his family and friends,…

Heather McHugh (b. 1948) was brought up in rural Virginia. She credits her early overwhelming shyness with inspiring, somewhat paradoxically, an intense pleasure in language: her reluctance to speak herself matched by her passionate attention to “every twist of tone…

Dannie Abse (1923-2014) was a poet, playwright and novelist whose literary career spanned half a century, the first of his fourteen collections of poetry, After Every Green Thing, being published in 1948, his latest collected appearing in 2003. In between Abse…