Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1992, two years after the publication of his most ambitious and celebrated work, Omeros, an epic poem which draws on the Homeric tradition and relocates it in the voices…

Flitting between book smarts and wry humour, lyric eloquence and occasionally acerbic bluntness, the poetry of David Wheatley shares much in common with the prose he writes as a respected critic, and for which he is perhaps better known. But…

“Poetry now, every bit as much as in the Romantic age, is a utopian demonstration, by aesthetic means, of what true freedom would be like. It engages us to imagine something better than what at present we are afflicted with;…

Vona Groarke is one of the leading Irish poets of her generation. Born in Mostrim, Ireland, she studied at Trinity College, Dublin and University College, Cork. She has held positions at Villanova and Wake Forest Universities in the USA, and…

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poetry is notable for its quiet command of the reader’s attention; the small details of everyday life in India are its currency. ‘Ironing Lady’, a series of neat descriptions of the precise process of the activity becomes…

‘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…

Contemporary Maori poetry in English has found its poetically most versatile spokesman in Robert Sullivan whose poems manifest their close affinity to patterns of an oral tradition. Listening to his enunciation, we come across a speaker whose own individuality is…

Dorothea Smartt is a stunning performance artist and poet. She has taught in the United Kingdom, and Bahrain, South Africa, Barbados and the U.S, after beginning her writing life in the Black/feminist co-operatives of the Eighties, and publishing her first…

Born in Pakistan and brought up in Scotland, Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary film-maker who divides her time between London and India. This mixed heritage and itinerant lifestyle is at the heart of her writing: questioning, imagistic…