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…

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) is often grouped with such poets as Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Robert Lowell as a leading figure in the so-called ‘Confessional Movement’. Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts into an upper middle-class home, Sexton never…

Jo Shapcott (b.1953) is from London but traces her family roots to the former mining communities of the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal…

Galway Kinnell (1927 – 2014) grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and was educated at Princeton and Rochester University. He joined in the radical political movements of the 1960s, working for the Congress on Racial Equality and protesting against the…

Michael Symmons Roberts (b. 1963) is the author of four collections of poetry, and won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry for his most recent book, Corpus. Roberts is a lyric poet with philosophical and metaphysical concerns. These are strongly evident…

Michael Rosen (b. 1946) says he became a children’s poet by accident – “I thought I was being an ironic adult poet but children’s literature ‘claimed’ me”. He has since become a very well-known poet, for adults as well as…