Poetry

• The Benefit Forms (Lobby Press, 1978)
• Going Out to Vote (Many Press, 1978)
• A Part of Rosemary Laxton (Privately printed, 1979)
• Overdrawn Account (Many Press, 1980)
• Anaglypta (Many Press, 1985)
• This Other Life (Carcanet Press, 1988)
• More About the Weather (Robert Jones, 1989)
• Entertaining Fates (Carcanet Press, 1992)
• Leaf-Viewing (Robert Jones, 1992)
• Lost and Found (Carcanet Press, 1997)
• Via Sauro Variations (Ridgeback Press, 1999)
• About Time Too (Carcanet Press, 2001)
• Anywhere You Like (Pine Wave Press, 2003)
• Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2003)
• Ghost Characters (Shoestring Press, 2006)
• There are Avenues (Brodie Press, 2006)

Poetry in Translation

• After Chardin: Selected Poems 1975-1995, trans. Takao Furukawa (Shimyakusha, 1996)
• L'attaccappanni e altre poesie, trans. Ornella Trevisan and the author (Moretti & Vitali, 2004)

Prose

• Untitled Deeds (Salt, 2004)

Translations

• Six Poems by Ungaretti (Plain Wrapper Press, 1980) with Marcus Perryman
• The Disease of the Elm and Other Poems by Vittorio Sereni (Many Press, 1983) with Marcus Perryman
• Selected Poems of Vittorio Sereni (Anvil Press, 1990) with Marcus Perryman
• When I was at my Most Beautiful and Other Poems by Noriko Ibaragi 1953-1982 (Skate Press, 1992) with Fumiko Horikawa
• The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (Worple Press, 2002)
• The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (Princeton University Press, 2006)
• Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (University of Chicago Press, 2006) with Marcus Perryman

Criticism

• In the Circumstances: About Poetry and Poets (Oxford, 1992)
• Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (Oxford, 2002)
• Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (Oxford, 2005)

Interviews

• Talk about Poetry: Conversations on the Art (Shearsman, 2006)

Editor

• Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (Open University Press, 1985)
• Liverpool Accents: Seven Poets and a City (Liverpool, 1996)
• The Thing about Roy Fisher: Essays on his Work (Liverpool, 2000) with John Kerrigan
• News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher (with Robert Sheppard)
• Mairi MacInnes: A Tribute (Shoestring, 2005)

Secondary

• Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, ed. Adam Piette and Katy Price (Salt, 2006)

CLOSURE

In another town you turn a corner,
but it's not there any more --
the place with hunting pieces, flagons,
a close-hung mish-mash of daubs and prints.

Here clean breasts were made, minds spoken --
our waiter boning fish, all
genial, patient, hardly bothered
if once more we proved the last to leave.

*

But dust has gathered
on lintel and sill;
restoration work this morning's
at a standstill...

I squint through smeared windows,
see grayness, a gray
of no menus, mementos,
no things.

*

And I see how the vacant ex-restaurant
through its cloud of chalk
is like nothing so much as a sea shell
in which you catch talk
that talked and went so far with distant
wave-forms broken on the shore
of others' minds like swell, swell
echoing from the years before.