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…

Bernard O’Donoghue’s poetry is marked by a gift for poetic portraiture, sketching characters at moments of emotional intensity. From encounters during his childhood in Ireland, to elegiac recollections of academics and poets in Oxford, O’Donoghue’s readers are met by a…

Jane Weir is an Anglo-Italian writer and designer. She has published two poetry collections with Templar – a third, Anna Magnani, Eat with Me, is published in 2016 – and two pamphlets, Alice (2006) and Signs of Early Man (2009),…

Fearless, naked and knowing, Melissa Lee-Houghton’s poems square up to the wildest reaches of our emotional lives. Hers is a poetry of excess, of the beautiful mess and complex depths of life as it is variously lived. While it is…

Amy Levy was one of seven children born to a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. She was in many ways a pioneering woman, becoming the first Jewish woman ever to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1879. She had a wide circle…

The Welsh poet William Henry Davies wrote the poem ‘Leisure’, which famously begins:‘What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare.’ The poem’s theme is reflected in Davies’s own outdoor life, which was unconventional….

Charlotte Mew was surrounded by mental ill health and death from a young age. Three brothers died while she was still a child and two other siblings were committed to mental institutions. She vowed never to marry, fearful of the…