This is proving to be a bumper year for centenaries. So far, we have had the entente cordiale, Beatrix Potter's Benjamin Bunny and the ice-cream cone. It would be a pity if the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth were to be overshadowed by such momentous occasions. Happily, we now have the first full English-language biography of Chile's Nobel-winning poet.

Adam Feinstein has done an excellent job of wrangling Neruda's [...]

It's rush hour; 80 degrees in the shade, 100 degrees and more on the Tube. Your fellow travellers throng the platform a dozen deep. Your train arrives, already gorged with passengers. You end up splayed diagonally between a foul-smelling street-dweller and an insurance agent from Penge, one toe clinging to the floor, a hand clawing desperately at the strap. Then, raising your nose a moment from your neighbour's armpit, you [...]

Just occasionally, a new collection of poetry appears that makes you recalibrate your scale of judgement, makes you realise that what you had counted as good was merely mediocre. Such a work is Hare Soup by Dorothy Molloy (Faber & Faber, £8.99), a slim assemblage of tales of childhood abuse, raw religion, bad French hotels and French peasant food, the rough clamour of love and exigent death. They are often [...]

Taken as a whole, the poetry of the First World War exhibits a strong and simple story: the shift from innocence to experience, from youthful, quasi-chivalric enthusiasm through hard experience to bitter disillusionment. It is the first poetry I remember reading for myself (rather than at a teacher's bidding), in a Chatto anthology entitled Men Who March Away. This, along with a companion volume - C Day Lewis's edition of [...]

Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, Minsk, deals with themes of home, migration and return. The thought is not so much that you can never go home, more that you can never get away in the first place. In "Essex Rag" we read about

The times I tried to move on . . .But from here, I mean there, whereveryou get to is not far, still nowhere, sothere's nothing [...]

It would be hard to overstate Robert Lowell's contribution to 20th-century poetry. His Life Studies (1959) has arguably been the most influential collection of the past 50 years, helping to define an epoch and spawning the so-called "confessional" school of poetry (a term that Lowell, incidentally, rejected).

The madness, too, helped shape the legend. He was born into a minor branch of a blue-blooded Bostonian dynasty (through which he was [...]

Just over ten years ago, not long after the first Gulf war, I started working for the free-speech magazine Index on Censorship. One day a letter arrived at the office from Harold Pinter, containing the text of a poem he had written in response to that con-flict. It had, he said, been turned down by the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Observer and the Independent. The implication was [...]

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the small magazine to the business of poetry. The rhyme rags provide a crucial staging post on the way to book publication: not only are they a space for new work, an arena for high-minded dispute and experiment, they also give poets a useful vanity mirror in which they can burnish their egos, as well as a forum to glad-hand their [...]

Bernard O'Donoghue's fourth collection of poetry is peopled largely by the dead: not only the ghosts of the poet's friends and relatives, but also the voices of other writers - most notably Yeats and Joyce - who are emblems of an Ireland that O'Donoghue has left behind, but cannot leave alone.

The marvellous first poem, "The Day I Outlived My Father", sets the tone. The sense of guilt and disloyalty [...]

This book is the distillation of 11 collections over a 35-year career, and will certainly confirm the position of the author as one of this country's foremost poets. Douglas Dunn, who is 60, is interested in history, in the politics and power of place and the workings of the imagination. His work straddles the personal and the political with apparent ease, negotiating a flinty, hard-edged language of engagement with its [...]