A masterful 1881 triptych about the mysterious artist-prisoner who left a mural on the wall of a medieval French prison

A consideration of changing worlds, personal and planetary, with appropriately shifting registers

A trick of the light provides the relaxed occasion for an irreverent contemplation of religious myths

Considering his vocation in old age, the poet reflects wryly on what he can expect from a lifetime’s work

A Welsh poem, translated by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, uses the form of catechism to gently address some universal dilemmas

A playful and euphemistic poem about masculinity and the festering, phallic fear of sexual inadequacy

A poem about the most beautiful city in the world, and an example of the precise demands of translation

A eulogy for a young writer who died in a car accident aged 22, this bright poem refuses mourning to insist that her unfinished legacy will endure

A sequence of sharply visual impressions animates a wild animal’s darting mind as it comes upon a hunter – and meets its fate

The psychic wounds of an atrocity during the Iran-Iraq war are brought home by the stoic but still anguished voice of a survivor

A Victorian satire on evolutionary theory cleverly subverts, through a covert feminist argument, Darwinist ideas about the subjugation of women

An enigmatic narrative about a man, whose status seems to shift from verse to verse, reveals some stubborn social structures

Street slang gives vivid, swaggering life to this portrait of a young man keeping up his style while working as a rent boy

Written amid the ‘tremendous energy’ of Scotland’s independence campaign, this supple nature poem might be a livelier than usual image of nationhood

The Irish poet’s new collection includes the personal – and ultimately political – story of an ‘unletter’d woman’ of some other time dictating a lovely, mysterious and almost unguardedly sexual letter

Awash with syntactical and structural fluctuations that embody its central theme, Longfellow’s restless Petrarchan sonnet ranges far beyond technical virtuosity

Love is a fickle fashionista in a poem which was praised by Christina Rossetti for its ‘cool, bitter sarcasm’, but it is not without tenderness and hope

Exile brings severance, but it can also bring confidence: moving from Singapore to New York enabled Koh to find himself as a gay man and a poet

With invigorating pace and rhythm, British history is presented as a vivid mix of tragedy and triumph

Through a child’s bright, clear impressions, Mackay Brown dramatises a lively young mind, and the education system set on deadening it

A laconic address both to what was then a totalitarian state, and to the perennial ‘stupid’ violence of humanity, this is as trenchant as ever

A poetic parody of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Major-General’s Song with its own satirical target – the demotion of classics from the literary curriculum

The Indian poet’s fine handling of lyric form and metaphorical language combine powerfully in this elegaic, musical work

This best known and most enthralling of Whitman’s poems is a praise-song to physicality that raises questions about the soul

An exploration of the intense connection between mother and child, lost in the rhythmical somnolence of routine, cleverly avoids cliche

An unsettling monologue addressed to a child first arouses our suspicions, then invites us to have faith