The poems in James Sutherland-Smith's eighth collection move from the garden into the neighbourhood of "a down-at-heel Hapsburg town" and then range into the nearby forest, the personal and the past. Borders are crossed and seemingly insignificant creatures suddenly gain visionary dimensions. The title poem recalls a poet whose attention to the small-scale made his work seem minor, yet as Hardy wrote "he noticed such things," a heedfulness absent in a contemporary world where both simplistic analysis and solutions constantly fail to address threats to our very existence. The namesake of a war criminal has been chopping wood for three days hefting an orange-handled axe. Behind him three hunting dogs bark at the nonchalant passage of a cat.

Mila Haugova has written a moving book about the farewell of loved ones and the slipping away of one's own life. The starting point is a double loss: her mother dies and her lover goes his own way. During her dead mother's childhood and distant past, the loved ones have faced a hoped-for future. Now only a reduced daily life remains, shot through with ever present memories. Haugova overlays the departed, and now recalculated, images of childhood and days spent with her lover. Is it possible to find some memory of lost warmth in this cold world? Re-encounter and farewells are one in Haugova's poetry: there are intimate companions in the absence of loved ones, in the acceptance of their disappearance, which over time develop a cathartic force that makes possible new love.

Maria Ferencuhova has emerged as one of the most promising and original European poets of the twenty-first century and is a rising star at international festivals. Beginning as one of the cool, post-modernist Slovak "aNesthetic" and "Text" poets using a matter-of-fact language with precise visual perceptions, her work has expanded its range of concerns from urban life to a wider perception of the individual in a world damaged by history and threatened by environmental destruction. At the heart of her work is a profound belief in a necessary relationship between human beings and the earth

Sixty-four improvisations, whose principal motifs are a stretch of a small river in Central Europe and a once feral black cat, navigate the language that we inhabit and that inhabits us. Three philosophers or the three musketeers, Boris Karloff, Li Bai and an Indian companion, among others, ghost in and out of poems ordered according to the progress of the seasons. Their moods and perspectives range from the inconsequential and paradoxical to the melancholic and erotic. Almost all the poems are in some measure love poems. Later the sky will be a light blue yearning for the transcendence to which the river whispers. I kiss your throat. The black cat chases herself up and down the stairs. Shall we get up, shower and dress or otherwise, nakedness being no constraint on the best or worst we can do?

"This is a masterpiece. The love poetry is especially beautiful. The entire sequence is in a way a love poem (and therefore must include some hate). The poem is a fine discourse on language, especially poetic language, and on simple speech aspiring to truth while aware that this is an ideal forever double-crossed by the duplicity of words in the human mouth." (Irving Weinman) "I read it through at one sitting, relishing the wit and observation. Somewhere around 42 I began to feel that this is a really wonderful sequence of poems - it has its own world, risky, audible and absorbing, shot through with paronomasia and otherworldly insight." (Piers M. Smith) "It is quite the most extraordinary work. What greatly strikes me is the ease with which [ - ] thought moves from the garden to China and elsewhere and the conflation in the final poem is truly remarkable. Breathtakingly so." - Marius Kociejowski

A generous selection of work by Miodrag Pavlovic. He is the third of the Serbian triumvirate of Popa, Lalic and Pavlovic which transformed Serb poetry in the 1950s. Pavlovic has been translated and published in English in book form and in pamphlets in Canada, but never before in from a British publisher. Nenad Aleksic and James Sutherland-Smith provide these astonishing new translations taken from "Iskon" the first volume of Pavlovic's selected poems, produced under Miodrag's supervision.

Mila Haugova has written a moving book about the farewell of loved ones and the slipping away of one's own life. The starting point is a double loss: her mother dies and her lover goes his own way. During her dead mother's childhood and distant past, the loved ones have faced a hoped-for future. Now only a reduced daily life remains, shot through with ever present memories. Haugova overlays the departed, and now recalculated, images of childhood and days spent with her lover. Is it possible to find some memory of lost warmth in this cold world? Re-encounter and farewells are one in Haugova's poetry: there are intimate companions in the absence of loved ones, in the acceptance of their disappearance, which over time develop a cathartic force that makes possible new love.