‘The Poet As Witness’: CD Wright & The Art of Curating the Past
Paul Stephenson How do we look at a difficult past? Carolyn Forché has put forward the notion of ‘poetry of witness’ for a …
CategoryEssays
Making the Cut: John Greening on editing poems
John Greening I often quote Basil Bunting’s advice to young poets, that you should ‘cut out every word you dare’. Bunting certainly practised …
Private Morgan: World War Two & Edwin Morgan’s ‘The New Divan’
© Jessie Ann Matthew, National Galleries Scotland Richie McCaffery While many of Edwin Morgan’s (1920-2010) Scottish near contemporaries in poetry, such as Hamish …
The Anatomy of Movement: On Georg Trakl’s Poetry
Georg Trakl at Venice lido, 1913 Will Stone I In this essay I have attempted to illuminate what for want of …
‘St Ives Allure’: WS Graham among the artists
Monday 19th November is the late poet WS Graham’s 100th birthday. Below are extracts from David Whittaker’s new book St Ives Allure, a generously-illustrated …
Writing Birth: on the poetry of motherhood
Rachel Bower In her 1995 work Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Carcanet), Eavan Boland described …
Permanent Afternoons: The Underworld in the Poetry of Sean O’Brien
John Challis Then, midway down that channel of the dead, A figure thick with mud rose up and called: ‘Who are you? You …
Breaking the Unthinkable Silence: on Michael Hofmann’s ‘One Lark, One Horse’
(photograph by Jemimah Kuhfeld: www.jemimahkuhfeld.co.uk) André Naffis-Sahely Poetry critics, just like the rest of us, are largely ungenerous to the middle-aged. More often …
The World of the Half-Seen: on Ruth Padel’s ‘Emerald’ and writing loss
Nadia Saward Emerald, Ruth Padel’s new collection (Chatto & Windus, 2018), is primarily an elegy for her mother who passed away in 2017 …
‘Abducted’: on a poem by Stanley Kunitz
(photograph by Lynn Saville: www.lynnsaville.com) Martina Evans Although I know the month and the day, I don’t know the year I discovered Stanley …