'The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day ...' Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' has been loved and admired throughout the centuries. First circulated to a select group of friends, it was rushed to official publication in 1751 in order to avoid pirated copies being sold without the young poet's permission. Praised by Samuel Johnson, reprinted over and over again in Gray's lifetime and recited by generations of school children, it is one of the most famous poems in the English language. This edition reproduces the exquisite wood engravings made by Agnes Miller Parker in 1938. Parker visited the churchyard at St Giles, Stoke Poges, where the poem is set, in order to make her sketches, and all thirty-two stanzas of the poem are accompanied by detailed full-page illustrations. Commemorating the 250th anniversary of the poet's death, this edition will not only bring new readers to the 'Elegy' but will also appeal to those already familiar with its riches.

De Chirico's Threads, the new collection of poems from Carol Rumens features an unusual centre-piece, a verse-play, fizzing with ideas and surrealist imagery, based on the life and work of the Italian painter Georges De Chirico, as well as forty pages of distinctive and beautifully crafted individual poems by one of the UK's best poets. An acute socio-political awareness, sometimes satirical, sometimes tender, inspires a number of pieces such as the distopian vision of '2084', while 'The Tadpole goddess'is a clever alternative nature poem. Her delight in form is displayed in the series 'Six Sonnets on Petrarchan Themes'. Also here are poems about various places in London, such as the Crystal Palace rail Station and 'East Ending' which celebrates an old music hall. Sophisticated, playful, relevant and humane, a new collection by Carol Rumens is not to be missed.

Informed by a consciousness that is as fiercely personal and tender as it is public-minded and political, this compelling collection presents a wide range of poetry, from a sonnet, a sestina, and a villanelle, to a pantoum, a ghazal, or a fluid free verse poem. Divided into two parts, the book's first part contains a series of muse poems that are inspired by lines or images from the Italian poet, Eugenio Montale, and also influenced by the Hull-based poet, Philip Larkin. The central themes of these poems--longing, inspiration, unrequited desire, aging, change--are beautifully surmised in this important sequence. The second section varies between quick family portraits, pointed observations and musings on landscapes and seasons, several sharp political pieces, and poems that seek to unsettle prejudices and thwart conventional expectations.

A year of hand-picked poems and commentaries from the Guardian's 'Poem of the Week' blog. Carol Rumens has been contributing 'Poem of the Week' to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs! No wonder she has a large and devoted following. She's a poet-reader, not an academic. She is fascinated by the new, but her interest is instructed by the classic poems she has read. They make her ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up. 'A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.' Rumens partly agrees with Williams but she develops the conceit, seeing each poem 'as a more flexible instrument, a miniature neo-cortex, that super-connective, super-layered smartest device of the mammalian brain'. She tries to avoid poems built from kits with instruction manuals. She looks for surprises, and she surprises us.

A Different Vision And when the bright detail was restored, all my senses danced, until Ravel's Kaddish, rinsed with too much sunshine, scalded the morning with a blinding rain. I saw you and I thought if only I'd been more aware of all my retinal glitches, darnings, rainbows, I could have seen more clearly how to love you. What shall I do with all this finer light?

Elizabeth Bartlett's powerfully evocative poems are remarkable for their painfully truthful insights into people's lives. Born in 1924, she worked for many years in the Health Service. For Peter Forbes, she is poetry's chronicler of today's 'damaged Britain'... 'She writes about people in extreme states, some of which she has experienced herself...'