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Poet
Selima Hill
B. 1945
Selima Hill is perhaps best known for her surrealism. Pierre Reverdy has said of surrealism that ‘the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true […] the greater its emotional power and poetic reality’; this certainly…
Poet
John Milton
B. 1608 D. 1674
John Milton was born in 1608 in Bread Street, Cheapside, the son of a composer and scrivener. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Christ’s College, Cambridge and seemed destined for the priesthood. However, at Cambridge he began to…
Poet
Robert Sullivan
B. 1967
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…
Poet
Michael Jackson
B. 1940
‘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…
Poet
Emily Bronte
B. 1818 D. 1848
Emily Bronte was born in 1818, the daughter of Irishman Patrick Bronte, perpetual curate of Haworth, Yorkshire. Emily’s mother died in 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to the care of their aunt. Four of the daughters were sent…
Poet
George Herbert
B. 1593 D. 1633
George Herbert was born 3 April 1593 in Montgomery, Powys, Wales and died at the age of forty. He was descended on his father’s side from the earls of Pembroke and on his mother’s from a family of Shropshire knights….
Poet
Briar Wood
B. 1958
āotearoa New Zealand writer, poet and academic Briar Wood is of Te Hikutu ki Hokianga Ngapuhi Nui, Scottish, Cornish, English and Portuguese descent. Her poetry has been published in a number of international journals and anthologies, including Albert Wendt, Robert…
Poet
David Wagoner
B. 1926 D. 2021
David Wagoner is widely regarded as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest. He was born in Ohio and grew up in Indiana, where his mother, a trained opera singer, sang German lieder around the house. He has spoken in…
Poet
Clare Pollard
B. 1978
As a precocious adolescent with a penchant for raw confessionalism, Clare Pollard (b.1978) appeared on the poetry scene in the late nineties with her energetic, expressive and markedly contemporary work. She was chosen as one of Poetry Review’s New Poets…
Poet
Catherine Smith
B. 1962
Through direct, colloquial language and often intense imagery, Catherine Smith invites the reader into a world at once familiar and unsettling. Her poems display a gift for teasing significance from relatable personal experience: vivid dreams of secondary school exams; the…
Poet
Sylvia Townsend Warner
B. 1893 D. 1978
Sylvia Townsend Warner [1893-1978] is best known today as a groundbreaking feminist and lesbian writer who championed the cause of the outsider in novels such as Lolly Willowes. However, this is only one aspect of a writer whose literary career…
Poet
Helen Farish
B. 1962
Helen Farish was born in 1962 in Cumbria, where she now lives. She has been a Fellow at Hawthornden International Centre for Writers and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust (2004-5). She has also been…
Poet
Kathryn Simmonds
B. 1972
In 2008, Kathryn Simmonds won the Forward Best First Collection Award with Sunday at the Skin Laundrette, which Michael Symmons Roberts lauded as “a remarkable debut.” He praised her “expansive imagination”, her “wit and humanity”. Also shortlisted for the Costa…
Poet
Mark Strand
B. 1934 D. 2014
Mark Strand was born in 1934 on Prince Edward Island, Canada and grew up in the United States. He was a shy dreamy child, and claimed not to have been very bright at school. When he was a year old,…
Poet
Gerald Stern
B. 1925 D. 2022
Son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Gerald Stern grew up in Pittsburgh, in a house with no books. It wasn’t as if being a writer was discouraged, he says, it just wasn’t considered something that anyone in his family would…
Poet
Fiona Sampson
B. 1963
Fiona Sampson was born in London, and grew up in the West Country, on the west coast of Wales and in Gloucestershire. Her background in music forms an important part of her poetic voice – leaving school at sixteen to…
Poet
Bill Manhire
B. 1946
Bill Manhire (b. 1946) was born in Invercargill, New Zealand, and joined the English Department at Victoria University, Wellington, in 1973, where he has held a Personal Chair since 1997. As a ‘young’ New Zealand poet of the late 1960s,…
Poet
Robert Hass
B. 1941
Robert Hass (b. 1941) is a native of California, specifically San Francisco, and the twin influences of the city’s cultural life and the lush landscape around it are both evident in his work. It was Hass’s teenage experience of the…