August Kleinzahler

Shadow man’s still there, his back to it all, huddled over the picnic table, even after Halloween, after the first big December rain, the pre-Christmas all day Church&Baseball Posada,mariachi trumpet, impassioned orators:GOD LOVES BASEBALL. GOD LOVES YOU.

Still there, under the sycamores, big dun leaves plastering the basketball court, staring, as he does, at nothing.

I...

In​ The Orchid Boat, the most recent of his more than 25 collections, Lee Harwood lights out from his seaside eyrie in Hove to many places, real, dreamed of or imagined: New Zealand, north-east India (‘where the Khasi people still sing some/hymns in Welsh’), fourth-century Alexandria, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, 15th-century Constantinople, Bologna in 1992, Amiens...

The​ retrospective of Richard Estes’s work (until 8 February) is dazzling in more than one sense. From the late 1960s, when he established his mature style, his paintings of New York make use of hard, reflective surfaces like plate-glass shop windows, car bonnets, fenders and windscreens to fragment, distort and multiply images, replicating something of the visual complexity, speed...

E.E. Cummings​ is the sort of poet one loves at the age of 17 and finds unbearably mawkish and vacuous as an adult. But in the mid-20th century he was the most popular poet in the United States after Robert Frost, and from early in his career, among the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who...

Passenger ferries emerge from the mist       river and sky, seamless, as one –             watered ink on silk

then disappear again, crossing back over       to the other shore, the World of Forms –...