This book provides an engaging, challenging and lively introduction to contemporary British and Irish poetry. It covers work by poets from a wide range of ethnic and regional backgrounds and covers a broad range of poetic styles, including mainstream names like Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy alongside more marginal and experimental poets like Tom Raworth and Geraldine Monk.

Passionate and carefully crafted, this collection of poetry offers an unflinching exploration of life and death and of the spirit s relationship to the world. Charting the drifts and tides of intimate relationships, these poems emerge out of a profound connection with the stunning New Zealand landscape, which is experienced as nurturing and menacing, tender and indifferent. Mapping the complex ties between family members, especially the changing relationship between a mother and her children, to detailing an encounter with alife-threatening illness to exploring extreme states of physical...