Rebecca Goss has described poetry as ‘an invitation to look very closely at something’, and her refined, spare style certainly supports this idea; as Val McDermid has written, ‘[her] language is precise and evocative, the images sharp as a photograph’….

Charlotte Turner was born in 1749 into the landed gentry. Her father owned two prosperous estates, Stoke Place in Surrey and Bignor Park in Sussex, but gambling losses destroyed his fortune; aged fifteen Charlotte was married off to the wealthy but…

Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 in England. In 1630 she emigrated to Massachusetts, with her father Thomas Dudley and her husband Simon Bradstreet. They sailed as members of the expedition led by John Winthrop, eventually the first governor of…

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the tenth and youngest child of the schoolmaster of the country town of Ottery St Mary. After the death of his father he attended Christ’s Hospital School: ‘I was reared / In the…

Born in Birmingham in 1950, Sheenagh Pugh lived in Wales for many years before moving to Shetland, where she currently resides. She is the author of nine poetry collections (with a tenth forthcoming in 2013) and two novels, as well…

In 2009, WS Merwin won the Pulizer Prize for poetry for the second time, with The Shadow of Sirius. In an interview soon afterward, Merwin recalls his earliest observations about poetry: “The idea of writing to me was from the…

Measured, musical and understated, Jacob Polley’s poems delve deep into the elemental, the eerie and the unstable. Whether conjuring a crow from the Biblical tale of Cain’s murder of Abel, his gloves “set alight” and “blackened into life”, or simply…

Winner of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2001, Sally Read is one of a new generation of younger poets shaping the future of British poetry. Her work is notable for its coupling of a sensitive,…

Few other contemporary British poets combine the intensity of Sarah Maguire’s lyrical imagination with the breadth of her geopolitical reach. From the first poem (‘May Day, 1986’) of her first collection (Spilt Milk), her searchingly intelligent poems interrogated how even…

Stephanie Norgate was born in 1957 and grew up in Selborne, Hampshire. She spent part of her childhood reading the naturalist Gilbert White and playing in his house and garden, which impelled an early love of nature and of writing….

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is a brooding presence in the landscape of 20th Century poetry, not unlike the six hundred feet-high Scout Rock which overshadowed his Yorkshire childhood. Hughes’ early experience of the moors and his industrially-scarred surroundings were the keynotes…

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is a poet whose very name conjures up a specific persona: the gloomy, death-obsessed and darkly humorous observer of human foibles and failings. The truth, both about the man and his work, is more complex, but the…