Poetry of Place – serie

An extraordinarily ecclectic selection of poetry evoked by 'La Serenissima', including poetry from Longfellow, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ezra Pound, Oscar Wilde, Pushkin, Rilke, Brodsky, Dante and Derek Walcott. With a scintillating introduction by John Julius Norwich, who as Chairman of the organisation Venice in Peril has done much to help preserve the fabric of the fragile city.

Medieval Andalucia is famous as a land of regrets, the place of the Moorish King's last sigh, where travelers sense the desecration of the great mosque of Cordoba and feel the haunted emptiness of the Alhambra's gilded, plastered domes. This collection of poetry fills those deserted halls with a powerful and convincing lust for life, a near-suffocating desire for love and for the rich enchantments of wine, laughter, moonlit picnics, and bare flesh.

Istanbul, capital of two great empires, confluence of Asia and Europe, has called forth poetry throughout her long history, from paupers and sultans, natives and visitors alike. When Mehmed the Conqueror first wandered through the ruins of the Byzantine palace, it was with the words of the Persian poet Ferdowsi on his lips: "The spider spins his web in the Palace of the Caesars/An owl hoots in the towers of Afrasiyab". Since then the silhouette of thousand-year-old domes and tapering minarets, the sunsets reflected nightly in a thousand palace windows and the bustle of her markets have inspired Sultan Suleyman, W B Yeats and Nazim Hikmet, amongst others, to salute one of the world's most remarkable cities.

London's poetry ranges from the up-beat rap of Benjamin Zephaniah to Wordsworth's dawn sigh over the beauty of Westminster Bridge, from half-charred lines of Anglo-Saxon to yesterday's lyrics retrieved from a pub floor. Like the city itself this collection is full of grief, irony and delight. It shares no unifying historical vision and offers no single perspective over this tidal valley of mud, gravel, power and gold. Instead the unblinking eyes of the poets, touched by God, madness and desire, create a potent and highly personal corrective to political history.

For travellers through the Aegean from Odysseus onwards, the Greek islands have proved to be places of beauty and enchantment, but also of violence, of love and death. "Isles of Greece" doesn't plot a course from island to island. Instead it groups together poems and prose extracts in order to provide some sense of the glittering delights and dark tragedies that are part of the history and the present of all Greek islands. Solomos, the Greek national poet, was born on the island of Zante, as was his contemporary, Kalvos. Byron, was perhaps the first non-Greek of modern times to sing the island's praises, but there have been many since including the English poets Lawrence Durrell and Michael Ayrton, the Americans Rachel Hadas and David Mason and Australia's Chairman Clift. These are small books that open our vast landscapes of the mind.

Even before Islam, poetry was at the heart of Arabic culture. It spread and developed wherever the Arabic language came to be spoken, from Damascus to Fez, Baghdad to Cairo as well as in the Arabian heartland. This book takes us on a poetic journey through the Classical age of Arabic poetry, from about the year 600 AD to about 1000 AD. Poignant images of solitude, impossible love and the austere beauty of the desert pervade Arabic poetry from its beginnings, even when the poet lived in an urbane, courtly milieu. There are mystical poems, and blasphemous ones; war poems, political ones; satires, joke poems and overwrought if ingenious nature poems.

This is the patriot's song book, which includes such rollicking word-smiths as Hilaire Belloc, G K Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling and the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan. England, as every fan of Flanders and Swan will know, hasn't really got a national song. This collection more than fills the gap. Despite the worldwide spread of the English language in the wake of the Empire, the poets of England were always more interested in personal freedom than political conformity. Those rallying cries from the pens of Blake, Byron and Brook are as relevant as ever. Armed with the clarion calls of Milton and Shakespeare, "England" still calls upon us to do our duty: to cleanse our land of a media monoculture linked by a spreading cancer of motorways, hypermarkets and a rootless, heartless international capitalism that rots the spirit.

All roads lead to Rome, the eternal city, the centre of Christendom, the lodestone of the pilgrim and the artist, the seat of the only Empire that has ever succeeded in uniting the European landmass. No literate traveller can escape its fascination, and many get drawn back year after year. Despite the triumphant remains of the forum, Imperial arch, public baths, gilded basilica and palace, it is only the bright flame of passion-filled poetry that can bring it to life. Glyn Pursglove has woven a delicate tapestry of ancient, medieval and modern poetry, from Virgil to Pasolini. It is a truly Olympian cast enough to fill the Pantheon, whose voices magically echo the city and its lessons to us. Who can equal the sensuality, power and crude honesty of Martial and Catullus. An extraordinary treat to read these masters of hungry sexuality, not banished amongst the ancient histories and the classics, but brought hungrily to life beside their poet peers.

Stuff Dublin into your coat pocket. The perfect companion for a visit to the Fair City, or indeed to any inn, bar or cafe in Ireland. Some of the greatest writers in the English language were born in Dublin and every corner of the city has links with the written word, made explicit in this far-ranging collection. From Oscar Wilde to Rudyard Kipling, from Jonathan Swift to WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett: the city of Dublin has enchanted and inspired some great poetry.

The Berber tribes of the Mountains of Morocco are one of the great and inspiring survival stories of our times. They have occupied their mountain homelands since before the dawn of history, and travellers have long marvelled at how their music, dance, pre-historic rock carvings, traditional jewelry, tattoos, indigenous pottery, embroideries and carpets have all been impregnated with the wild soul of their fierce mountainous landscape. Never before have their traditional odes – which open up to us a precious window into a Homeric nobility and spiritualized landscape – been translated into English. Michael Peyron who has taught, explored and researched the history of the Berbers of Morocco over the last fifty years, has an exceptional understanding of this region and a unique archive of oral transmissions from some of the last bards uninfluenced by the modern world. This collection is both a gift to travellers and a priceless legacy.

There are few landscapes in the western world more bewitching than the mountain glens of the Scottish Highlands and the scattered islands of the Hebrides. From its bleak mountains to its flower-filled meadows, from savage sea-cliffs to pure white beaches, it has inspired an equally varied oral heritage. There are the works of gentle scholar saints, epic tales of murderous clan rivalry, Norse legends of monsters and unsubdued spirits and the romantic tale of how an exiled prince came back to rescue his land and crown, though his defeat brought ruin to this ancient culture. More recently, it is the landscape and its animal inhabitants that have inspired some of the greatest of the poems captured here by Mary Miers, whose feel for the spirit of the Highlands and islands is unerring. She combines the sensibility of a native from the island of South Uist with the eye of a travelling scholar of architecture. Small books that open our vast landscapes of the mind.

For two thousand years in China, the empires of politics and of the written word cohabited and depended on one another. The Chinese classics became the bedrock of political and cultural legitimacy, which was centred on the empire's great capital cities. One such classic was the "Book of Poetry", written perhaps three millennia ago. In the centuries that followed, poetry became China's highest art form. This collection gathers poems about four of these venerable cities - Chang'an (now Xi'an), Luoyang, Beijing and Hangzhou. To the Chinese, the city was a depiction of the Confucian ideal of social harmony. To leave the city was to exile oneself from high culture and high politics. This collection also chronicles that Taoist escape and exile: the poetry of personal loss and disappointment, the veiled political polemic and poetry extolling the natural world that lay beyond the Emperor's courts. These are small books that open our vast landscapes of the mind.

Whether you're a backpacker from Idaho on your first visit, or a cultural swallow on an annual migration to Paris, this pocket book will intoxicate and inspire, goad and guide. Unlike the grand city of public architecture and political achievement, the poetic tradition of Paris is personal, irreverent, sexy and invigorating. This collection delights in the company of such swashbuckling gallows-fodder as Francois Villon, and chuckles at the audacity of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, the perpetual rebels. What it proves is that in Paris, creativity is always political - whether it's Rimbaud reacting to the events of 1871, the Surrealists to the horrors of First World War trenches, or the generation of '68 to the excesses of Algeria and the complicities of Vichy. It's also fitting inspiration for taking a day off from monuments and making your own magic revolution from your bed.

Gaia Servadio is an Italian writer, long settled in Britain, who has retained a passionate relationship with her motherland and those who have expressed this in verse. The cast she has assembled has a spell-binding intensity, so that the reader twists between Byron and Dante, flickers between the imagery drawn by St Francis, Baudelaire and Milton, Gabriele D-Annunzio and Joseph Brodsky. Through her choices we see the two opposing natures of Italy, united by their differences.