James Fenton’s new book consists of three dramatic pieces, all commissioned to be performed with music: two libretti and the text of an oratorio. Different pieces for different kinds of music and different kinds of staging. Yet all three share the same underlying theme – fanaticism.

In the oratorio, conceived on a grand nineteenth-century scale, Fenton retells Josephus’ famous account of the Jews who refused to bow to the Roman yoke. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s celebrated children’s novel, imagination itself fights to survive against the forces of tyranny.

And in the completely original title-piece, Fenton writes of a modern-day religious cult where the extraordinary techniques of ‘flirty fishing’ and ‘love-bombing’ are employed to entrap the vulnerable and the unwary.

The Love Bomb and Other Musical Pieces is James Fenton’s first book of new verse since Out of Danger was published in 1993. Utterly different from the lyrical nature of that earlier volume, it suggests the extraordinary range of one of our finest poets.

Innovative Beat poet Michael McClure has written a book of poems unlike any of his others. These dharma devotions are fruits of his Buddhist mediation practice. Like bold calligraphy moving vertically down a white scroll, they surprise the eye and mind, awakening us to a heightened sense of everyday things.

Speakers in James Tate's poems are and are not like those we know: a man's meditation on gardening renders him witless; another man traps theories and then lets them loose in a city park; a nun confides that "it was her / cowboy pride that got her through"; a gnome's friend inhabits a world where "a great eschatological ferment is at work. "Shroud of the Gnome" is a bravura performance in Tate's signature style: playful, wicked, deliriously sober, charming, and dazzling. Here, once again, one of America's most masterful poets celebrates the inexplicable in his own strange tongue.

Born in New York in 1960, Eva Salzman published her first book of poetry, The English Earthquake, in 1992. Bargain with the Watchman, her second book of poems, is daring with language, alternately sexy, sassy, outspoken, and clever. Her energy, vitality, and capacity for satire persist in bold, candid poetry, often disconcerting, always compelling and controlled. This selection includes a two sequences, one of which, Masques, is a subversive look at the Muses, seen in crossed-dressed guise.

Millay's first three books of lyrics and sonnets are collected here: Renascence, Second April, and A Few Figs from Thistles. With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony.

In Canada, poems arrive out of the ether like the fabled, lantern-jawed Mountie coming to the rescue out of nowhere. Others are on their way back into the ether, transmissions from the brain of an uneasy redman. These are poems that make you feel the hairs on a pony's neck.

Canada opens in the backwoods of autobiography and narrative, then reports crisply on calls of sex and desire. After crossing the frontier, a final movement blows innocence off the map for good and all.

Edwin Arlington Robinson's finely crafted, formal rhythms mirror the tension the poet sees between life's immutable circumstances and humanity's often tragic attempts to exert control. At once dramatic and witty, his poems lay bare the loneliness and despair of life in genteel small towns, the tyranny of love, and unspoken, unnoticed suffering. The fictional characters he created in 'Reuben Bright', 'Miniver Cheery', and 'Richard Cory' and the historical figures he brought to life - Lincoln in 'The Master' and the great painter in 'Rembrandt to Rembrandt' - harbour demons and passions the world treats with indifference or cruelty. With an introduction that sheds light on Robinson's influence on poets from Eliot and Pound to Frost and Berryman, this collection brings an unjustly neglected poet to a new generation of readers.

With readable, richly varied contributions from women poets both famous and unknown, both young and old, both English-speaking and in-translation, I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists is a timely, unique, and exceptionally inclusive anthology. Edited by Carol Ann Duffy, herself a British feminist poet of much renown, this collection of insights and truths will appeal equally to poetry buffs and poetry novices, be they students or general readers.

It has been that Pauline Stainer is a poet working at the margins of the sacred, conveying sensations with economy of means that is breathtaking - all of which aptly applies to this brilliant new collection. She draws from a wealth of sources, including medieval lyrics, Eastern and Western art, and Christian liturgy. In The Wound Dresser's Dream, her challenging fourth collection, several sequences include elegies, and explorations of light and music. The title poem is drawn from Keats's fancy to become a ship's surgeon.

Whether chronicling 1960s sitcoms or the murder of Sharon Tate at the hand of Charles Manson's family, this collection of Trinidad's poetry explores popular American cultural themes, and delves deep into the fears that haunt so many suburban lives.

Aime Cesaire has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as likely to "figure alongside the Eliot-Pound-Yeats triumvirate that has dominated official poetic culture for more than fifty years". He was a cofounder and exponent of the concept of negritude and is a major spiritual, political, and literary figure.

Cesaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s. This collection, the only one in existence in any language to give a truly comprehensive retrospective of Cesaire's poetic production, demonstrates the narrowness of earlier readings that grew out of the climate of Black Power influenced by the essays of Frantz Fanon, another Martinican, who was largely responsible for the ambient view of Csaire a generation ago. It is the first collection to translate And the Dogs Were Silent and i, laminaria...

Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82 goes beyond anything else in print (in French or in English) in that it locates the issues of Cesaire's struggle with an emerging postmodern vision. It will place Cesaire in a strategic position in the current debate in the U.S. over emergent literature and will show him to be a major figure in the conflict between tradition and contemporary cultural identity.

In her work there is a return to the role of the poet as it served the human race for centuries: to fuel our thinking, show us our world in new ways, and to get us to feel more intensely. The rightness of this summary of Linda Pastan s poetic career in the San Francisco Review of Books will be immediately clear to readers of her new volume, PM/AM."

"The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The poems are about departures, about the pain of breaking away from lovers and from an old sense of self. They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll." David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review"