Poetry
Fairground Music (Chatto & Windus, 1961)
The Tree that Walked (Chatto & Windus, 1967; Poetry Book Society Choice)
Cannibals and Missionaries (Secker & Warburg, 1972)
Epistles to Several Persons (Secker & Warburg, 1973; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize)
The Mountain in the Sea (Secker & Warburg, 1975)
Lies and Secrets (Secker & Warburg, 1979)
The Illusionists (Secker & Warburg, 1980; Southern Arts Literature Prize)
Waiting for the Music (Salamander Press, 1982)
The Beautiful Inventions (Secker and Warburg, 1983; Poetry Book Society Choice)
Selected Poems 1954-1982 (Secker & Warburg, 1985, and Penguin Books, 1986)
Partingtime Hall (with James Fenton, Salamander Press, 1987, and Penguin Books, 1989)
The Grey among the Green (Chatto & Windus, 1988; Poetry Book Society Recommendation)
The Mechanical Body (Chatto & Windus, 1991)
Stones and Fires (Chatto & Windus, 1996; Forward prize)
Collected Poems (Chatto & Windus, 1996)
Now and for a Time (Chatto & Windus, 2002; shortlisted for the Forward Prize)
Ghosts (Chatto & Windus, 2004; shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize)
The Space of Joy (Chatto & Windus, 2006; shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize)
Song & Dance (Chatto & Windus, 2008; Poetry Book Society Recommendation)
Pebble & I (Chatto & Windus, 2010; Poetry Book Society Recommendation)
Writing the Picture (with David Hurn, Seren Books, 2010)
Dream Hunter (with Nicola LeFanu, Edition Peters, 2011)
Selected Poems 1983-2008 (Chatto & Windus, 2012)
Sketches from the Sierra de Tejeda (Clutag Press, 2013)
The Dice Cup (Chatto and Windus, 2014)
Gravel in my Shoe (Chatto and Windus, 2015)
AWOL (with Andrew Wynn Owen, The Emma Press, 2015)
The Bone Flowers (Chatto and Windus, 2016)
A Week in Bern (Clutag Press, 2016)
Double Dactyls (Shoestring Press, 2017)
Asleep & Awake  (Chatto & Windus, 2020)


Fiction
Flying to Nowhere (Salamander Press, 1983, and Penguin Books, 1983; Whitbread Prize 
  for a first novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize)
The Adventures of Speedfall (Salamander Press, 1985, and Penguin Books, 1986)
Tell It Me Again (Chatto & Windus, 1988)
The Burning Boys (Chatto & Windus, 1989)
Look Twice (Chatto & Windus, 1991)
The Worm and the Star (Chatto & Windus, 1993)
A Skin Diary (Chatto & Windus, 1997)
The Memoirs of Laetitia Horsepole, by Herself (Chatto & Windus, 2001)
Flawed Angel (Chatto & Windus, 2005)
The Clock in the Forest (Shoestring Press, 2019)
Loser (Shoestring Press, 2021)


Criticism
The Sonnet (Methuen, 1972)
W. H. Auden: a commentary (Faber & Faber, 1998)
Who is Ozymandias? and other puzzles in poetry (Chatto & Windus, 2011)

For Children
Herod Do Your Worst (Novello, 1968)
Squeaking Crust (Chatto & Windus, 1970)
The Spider Monkey Uncle King (Novello, 1972)
The Last Bid (Deutsch, 1975)
The Extraordinary Wool Mill and other stories (Deutsch, 1980)
Come Aboard and Sail Away (Salamander Press, 1983)
You’re Having Me On! (Laurel Books, 2014)
Up and Down the Chimney (Shoestring Press, 2021)

As Editor
The Dramatic Works of John Gay (Clarendon Press, 1983)
The Chatto Book of Love Poetry (Chatto & Windus, 1995)
The Oxford Book of Sonnets (Oxford University Press, 2000)
W. H. Auden (Poet to Poet Series, Faber and Faber, 2005)
Alexander Pope (Poet to Poet Series, Faber and Faber, 2008)

Some work in pamphlets not collected, or fully collected, in the above, includes:
The Art of Love (The Review, 1968); The Wreck (Turret Books, 1979); The Body of the World 
(1998, set by Robin Holloway as A Hymn to the Senses, Promenade Concerts, 1998). Carving 
Trifles: William King’s Imitation of Horace (Chatterton Lecture on an English Poet, British 
Academy, 1976); Pleasing Ma: the poetry of W. H. Auden (Kenneth Allott Lecture, Liverpool, 1995)