Pro Eto - That's WhatVladimir Mayakovsky was one of the towering literary figures of pre and post revolutionary Russia, speaking as much to the working man as to other poets. His fascination with sound and form, linguistic metamorphosis and variation made him a sort of poets poet, the doyen, if not the envy, of his contemporaries, (Pasternak among them). His poetry is strangely akin to modern rock poetry in its erotic thrust, bluesy complaints and cries of pain, not to

who is a world expert on the short story and has breast cancer

INTERVIEW with poet

and those that are remote from the north of Scotland

Translated by George Szirtes

Tessa Hadley and Meic Stephens

It knows no barriers or borders

versions from the Aeneid and the Iliad

Faisal Darraj on the problems besetting Arab novelists

Fuad al-Takarli

John Clare

often preoccupied by suffering and the borders of existence and non-existence

not to mention its sardonic humour