Written between August and December 1938, Autumn Journal is still considered one of the most valuable and moving testaments of living through the thirties by a young writer. It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain.

In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. 'Though writing in a "holiday" spirit,' commented Auden, 'its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.' The result is the remarkable Letters from Iceland, a collaboration in poetry and prose, reportage and correspondence, published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress, beneath the shadow of looming world war.

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is rightly regarded as one of the foremost Irish poets of this century, but he was also a distinctive, gifted, and popular playwright. This unique selection of eight of MacNeice's best-known plays, most of which were written for BBC Radio, draws on the most authoritative texts to provide a much-needed reminder of the power of his dramatic writing. All the plays are published here in authentic versions for the first time, several considerably changed, and two entirely new plays, never before published. The volume comprises MacNeice's famous The Dark Tower, published here for the first time in its third and final version; the saga play They Met on Good Friday and the parable The Mad Islands, both of which use explicitly Irish subject-matter; the stage play One for the Grave, which mercilessly satirizes television and commercialism; the epic Christopher Columbus; He Had a Date (in its second version), an experiment in radio biography; Prisoner's Progress, a prize-winning parable about an escape from a prisoner-of-war camp; and MacNeice's last play, Persons from Porlock, which traces the nemesis of an artist and was broadcast just four days before MacNeice's own death. This generous and representative selection makes available again MacNeice's entertaining and innovative Irish blend of fantasy and realism, prose and verse, and offers important new perspectives on MacNeice's poetry.

This is the second of two collections of MacNeice's prose writings, prepared by Alan Heuser. The first, concentrating on his literary criticism, came out in 1987 (still available from OUP). The present collection will be of interest to a wider readership, since it covers the sweep of MacNeice's many ardently-pursued interests outside the strictly literary: philosophy and travel, history, autobiography, Ireland (the country of his birth, and one of the mainsprings of his writing of both prose and poetry), India, Greece - and rugby football. The volume also contains the `London letters', written during the Blitz; and a previously unpublished piece: Northern Ireland and her People. These writings convey the visual perceptiveness, humour, seriousness, and enthusiasm of MacNeice's personality and poetry: they are more than simply reflections of the decades in which they were written (from the thirties to the early sixties), revealing MacNeice's particular gifts as a writer, and throwing light on his personality and preoccupations. The complete bibliography of the shorter prose, included in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, is repeated here; and there is annotation and an index. This title also appears in the Oxford General Books catalogue for Autumn 1990.

In the decades since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's reputation as a poet (and, indeed, amongst poets) has grown steadily, and there are now several generations of readers in Ireland, Britain, and beyond, for whom he is one of the essential poets of the twentieth century. His work has also received increasing attention from academic writers and students. For both readers and critics, the nature of MacNeice's poetic work as a whole is a matter of importance, and the second posthumous Collected Poems, entirely re-edited by Peter McDonald, attempts, for the first time, to print MacNeice's poetry in groupings corresponding closely to the collections published by Faber between 1935 and 1963. This makes it easier to read the poet in the published forms in which he was read by his contemporaries. In choosing to re-create the environments of MacNeice's individual volumes of poetry, moreover, this new Collected reflects the opinion that MacNeice works best in and through those separate volumes, particularly so in the brilliant return to form - and unique kinds of return on lyric form itself - of the last three collections. The texts of the poems in the new edition are based on a comparison of all printed versions, as revised in the light of the poet's later thoughts. This has resulted in a large number of changes. It is hoped that the present edition presents MacNeice's poetry more accurately, as well as more fully, than all previous collections. The new Collected Poems also includes, as appendices, The Last Ditch - the short book of poems which MacNeice published with the Cuala Press in 1940 - and The Revenant, a cycle of songs written for MacNeice's wife, the singer Hedli Anderson, a selection of uncollected early poems, and from Blind Fireworks, MacNeice's first published book of verse.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907 and educated at Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. For most of his working life he was a writer and producer for BBC radio. His death in 1963 was sudden and unexpected.

Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.

Four short plays for young actors

Making Scenes 3 is an exciting selection of plays commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for the BT National Connections festival for young actors in 1995.
Indian Summer by Harwant Bains; Kulwant returns to India and becomes fascinated with an ice-cream seller and the Holy Man who has sat for years with a sword through his mouth. When Kulwant pulls out the sword and offers the man a tutti-frutti ice-cream, a remarkable friendship is established.
Almost Grown by Richard Cameron; set in Yorkshire this is the story of how a tragic accident has affected the lives of three friends.
The Ice Palace by Lucinda Coxon; in this magical rites of passage tale Siss and Unn are best friends at school, but when Siss goes to visit her one day they set out on an adventure into a magnificent frozen waterfall from which Unn will never return.
The Dark Tower by Louis MacNeice; Roland must follow his ancestors' and brothers' footsteps on a journey through time, by ship across the sea of doubt, past ghost towns of history and through 'deserts of dried-up hopes', until he reaches the Dark Tower.

Each play includes Production Notes, dealing with setting and staging, costume, lighting and casting. Also included are a set of questions and exercises for workshop classes.

'I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.' Louis MacNeice's prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural.' Michael Longley, himself a distinguished Ulster poet, has written an introductory essay of meticulous advocacy. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has supplied the apparatus for students and the general reader.