Books in the Salt Modern Poets series

Transcending poetic schools and binaries in poetics with an odic verve and analytic intensity, Surge is the provocative, open-ended ending to Drafts, DuPlessis's twenty-six year project in the long poem.

Event, the first book by Australian poet Judith Bishop, is the work of a border-crosser. Emotionally intense, formally inventive and musical, with influences ranging from Ted Hughes and Elizabeth Bishop to Yves Bonnefoy.

In Michael Murphy's annotated edition of Kenneth Allott's Collected Poems all Allott's previously published work is combined with eighteen new poems, some of which have only recently come to light. The whole collection now represents the most complete picture of Allott, a man widely regarded as one of most exciting poets of the Thirties.

Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. These poems are clear, direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery, but head right for the heart of shame, laying bare the terrors of parenting, loss, regret, and falling in love with the wrong people.

Mark Burnhope's poems peer out over disability, faith and prejudice. They visit town and sea, husband and wife, monuments to grief built of snow, steel, stone. They take us to a talking tree and an outcast crew including Pinocchio, Queequeg and Quasimodo. But at their heart, there is great warmth.

A poem sequence that interweaves scenes and stories in a soundtrack that sweeps through modern Los Angeles. A cop and a hooker become a lover and a beloved, who, line by line, scene by scene, reveal their affair in a bitter script that tours the city streets, taking in actresses and immigrants, beauty school students, dreamers and discontents.

A tenth anniversary edition of Chris Emery's black comedy debut, Dr. Mephisto, made simultaneously available in print and electronic form. Flamboyant, funny, poignant and excessive, Emery's modernist work is a picaresque, historical road show of hell from the brink of the 21st Century.

In this collection, Peter Daniels looks at his life as an older gay man, his London neighbourhood, his furniture, other people's gardens and London's creatures.

Peterkin explores the expectations and limits of being human with lashings of wit and sometimes a disquieting note of threat. Mad cap, extravagant, urban and questioning, this is a collection no one will forget.

Heat Wave seeks to unsettle and wrong-foot; it refuses to adopt a sententious or holier than thou attitudes regarding the many crises which confront us. The poems subvert as well as entertain.

Words Need Love Too represents both a summation - a drawing together of concerns that the poet has explored in his writings through the previous 'years of salt' - and a turning point, a hopeful new beginning.

Wilkinson's classic, Proud Flesh, is a journal of love's intensities and convulsions. Panning across its characters like a camera, this is lyric poetry as film noire, filled with jealousy, violence and sexual obsession. Incandescent images play across the bodies of the lovers, each caught, frame by frame, in an intense act of surveillance.

John James is one of the most highly respected poets of his generation. In this volume all his major works are gathered together from Mmm ... Ah Yes (1967) to Schlegel Eats a Bagel (1996). In addition, a number of hard to obtain poems are also reprinted, including A Former Boiling (1979) and The Ghost of Jimi Hendrix at Stokesay Castle (1988).

Periplum and other poems brings together Peter Gizzi's celebrated and influential first book, out of print for nearly a decade, with 60 pages of early and uncollected work, including the long poem "Music for Films." This new edition functions as a collected poems of Gizzi's work from 1987 to 1992.

Shortlisted for The Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Katia Kapovich creates a gallery of narrative portraits that are both unheroic and unforgettable - mute children, laundering women, Moldovan homosexuals, beggars, pickpockets, Russian draftees, Soviet boy scouts, political convicts, all at home in Dostoyevskian worlds.

Gravity presents the first five books of poems from the sequence Gravity as a consequence of shape, started in 1982 and scheduled for completion in 2005. The subjects bridge biotechnology and quantum physics through a system of urban gardening and leaking streets.

Silliman's major long poem published in a new edition and introduced by Barrett Watten. Tjanting abounds in a wealth of cultural reference and explores the strategies and procedures of constructing a reality in language. This classic text will delight readers and provide students of modern American poetry with a key work of the late 20th Century.

A gorgeous and brilliant book, a work of complex sensuousness and deep intelligence. Its four major sequences are each formally distinct, but the works are all related to one another in being addressed to the material world and what, in 'return to a new physics,' Fagan calls "systems and embodiments."

Braided River is a selection from forty years of published poems plus some of Hollo's most recent, uncollected work. It describes a lifetime's endeavours to write poems that reflect a thinking and feeling person's twentieth century existence in Europe and America.

In this selection of shorter lyric poems, celebrated Language poet Bruce Andrews offers his charismatic blend of satire, wit and jouissance, creating a dizzying picture of modern America. In these poems Andrews explores a more intimate and domestic register, further reminding us of the astonishing range of this contemporary master.

These are poems which welcome distraction and seem to have a lasting interest in registering and reproducing a sense of the uncanny. The strategies adopted veer between lyric mannerism and reconstructed second-hand words and, taken together, chart a form of investigative political thinking through the last three decades of the twentieth century.

Imagination Verses is a moving and accomplished book of real lyric poetry. Hailed as a modern masterpice it is made available here in a new expanded UK edition. Rarely does a poet bring such talent and experience together in a single volume, it is a book of wonderous possiblities, warm, engaging and truly magical.

This book draws together a major selection of poems from 1984-2004. Including works on London, sport, boats, cartoons, food, the classics, the mystical, history, crime, and the North. A taut, rhythmic verse, with respect for word-sound and a cheering disregard for consensus on history, language and 'poetry'.