Wild Court

An international poetry journal based in the English Department of King’s College London

New work

  • Four poems from ‘Greencombe’ by Ella Duffy

    Four poems from ‘Greencombe’ by Ella Duffy

    Below is an extract from Greencombe by Ella Duffy, recently published by Hazel Press. Greencombe consists of twenty-nine interlinked poems which walk the paths through the titular woodland garden in […]

  • A poem by Naima Rashid

    A poem by Naima Rashid

    My aunts had names like sugar and spice Maybe they started in a doll’s house,where the world was rainbows and unicorns.Their lives changed colours,but their names stayed the same. Pinky […]

  • Wit and wordplay: ‘After You Were, I Am’ by Camille Ralphs

    Wit and wordplay: ‘After You Were, I Am’ by Camille Ralphs

    Kevin Gardner Divided into three discrete units, Camille Ralph’s After You Were, I Am (Faber, 2024) transports the reader into a warped revisioning of the seventeenth century. The first section […]

  • ‘Night Hunt’: a poem by Jane Draycott

    ‘Night Hunt’: a poem by Jane Draycott

    Night Hunt i.m. Michael Jones Like hunters entering the wood we have cometo the duty-free halls, the perfumes of small flowers –jasmine, Joy – first steps on our journey to […]

  • A poem by Sarah Howe

    A poem by Sarah Howe

    For the third event in the Wild Court Reading Series, we are delighted to welcome award-winning poet and editor Sarah Howe. Sarah will be reading and in conversation with poet […]

  • ‘July 15th, 2022’: a poem by DS Maolalai  

    ‘July 15th, 2022’: a poem by DS Maolalai  

    July 15th, 2022 I’m wearing a wedding ring. youput it on. and I did for you –think of squeezing it overthe knuckle. and there is a feeling –a hard one […]

  • ‘You must live through hell’: On Survivor’s Notebook by Dan O’Brien

    ‘You must live through hell’: On Survivor’s Notebook by Dan O’Brien

    Nicola Healey Survivor’s Notebook (Acre, 2023) interrogates the aftermath of Dan O’Brien’s recovery from cancer. A memoiristic sequence of prose poems, it forms a companion to Our Cancers (Acre, 2021; […]

  • ‘Tide and Tidings at the Equinox’: a poem by Prue Chamberlayne

    ‘Tide and Tidings at the Equinox’: a poem by Prue Chamberlayne

    Tide and Tidings at the Equinox Concrete curve is lashed in swirls of spray      from gun-metal grey —a liturgy for loss for one snatched off      mysteriously,a […]

  • ‘On the Hudson’: a poem by Matthew DeLuca

    ‘On the Hudson’: a poem by Matthew DeLuca

     Artwork by the poet On the Hudson In times like these I turn from the world      that cannot be the world, because it does not know meas the […]

  • Paths chosen and unchosen: on ‘Downland’ by Anna Dillon and Jonathan Davidson

    Paths chosen and unchosen: on ‘Downland’ by Anna Dillon and Jonathan Davidson

    David Clarke For those of us who have been following Jonathan Davidson’s work in recent years, each new book has brought with it the prospect of another (often unexpected) push […]

  • ‘Piking’: a poem by William Thompson

    ‘Piking’: a poem by William Thompson

    Piking i. The wind plays a low notethrough the one bar gate onto the bridleway.I tick the code into the lock. It clicks open. Once our car has passed, the […]

  • Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize 2024 winner: Rochelle Ruo Xuan Lee

    Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize 2024 winner: Rochelle Ruo Xuan Lee

    Rochelle Ruo Xuan Lee musings from the other end of homesickness —when i get to see my parents again; the whole timei will cheat my way to normal as if […]

  • Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize 2024 runner up: Madeleine George

    Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize 2024 runner up: Madeleine George

    Madeleine George Blackbird, Singing This is the chronic night-warand Iam waiting for the morning. The earth shudderedas she spun,sloughing off so many sheetsof ice likethe sheet that caught on your […]

  • Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize 2024 runner up: Fintan Calpin

    Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize 2024 runner up: Fintan Calpin

    Fintan Calpin We gave you a theory of systems

  • Breviloquent power: ‘House on the A34’ by Philip Hancock

    Breviloquent power: ‘House on the A34’ by Philip Hancock

    Richie McCaffery House on the A34, Philip Hancock’s second collection with CB editions, is a book of breviloquent but powerful poems, carefully constructed with a craftsman-like attention to detail about […]

  • ‘Seaweed Herbarium’: a poem by Melissa Tuckman

    ‘Seaweed Herbarium’: a poem by Melissa Tuckman

    Image: michael clarke stuff on Flickr Seaweed Herbarium Mermaid hairisn’t rare, but it’s worthpreserving for its hue: dark greenat the root of every lock,brighter near the ends, which splitinto finer […]

  • ‘In Memory of Robert Burns’: a poem by Aaron Aquilina

    ‘In Memory of Robert Burns’: a poem by Aaron Aquilina

      In Memory of Robert Burns   I The ghosts of all past members of the Dumfries and Galloway Town Council gather for a resource management meeting in perpetuity. In […]

  • ‘Five Breaths’: a poem by Eleanor Rees

    ‘Five Breaths’: a poem by Eleanor Rees

    Five Breaths were needed to extinguish the flameand now a red wick leans into the melt, diving into a quarried lakehigh in the mountains to find mouthfulsof salt in the […]

  • A Scholar of the Everyday: on ‘Collecting the Data’ by Mat Riches

    A Scholar of the Everyday: on ‘Collecting the Data’ by Mat Riches

    Christopher Horton Collecting the Data (Red Squirrel Press, 2023) is a pamphlet that decrypts everyday experiences, observing in them both the complex and the sublime as an integral part of […]

  • Two poems by Matthew Paul

    Two poems by Matthew Paul

    Photo by Thomas Verbruggen on Unsplash A Short History of Greenhouses In the end, my father’s greenhouse was shipwreckedBy ivy, which spiralled round bamboo canes, stuckLike octopus suckers glued to […]

  • A poem by Rory Waterman

    A poem by Rory Waterman

    Below is a poem from Rory Waterman’s fourth collection, Come Here to This Gate, published by Carcanet on 25th April. Until that date, the Carcanet website is offering a 25% […]

  • The sound of hope:  ‘Before We Go Any Further’ by Tristram Fane Saunders

    The sound of hope: ‘Before We Go Any Further’ by Tristram Fane Saunders

    Kevin Gardner Imbedded in the heart of Before We Go Any Further (Carcanet, 2023) is a wickedly subversive sequence, “Five Songs on a Cruel Instrument”, purporting to contain translations of […]

  • A poem by Nicola Healey

    A poem by Nicola Healey

    Below is a poem from Nicola Healey’s debut pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, published by Dare-Gale Press this month. Summer/Winter This brazen blue day is a dangerous scene.My mind clashes like […]

  • A poem from Paul McLoughlin: Selected Poems

    A poem from Paul McLoughlin: Selected Poems

    Below is a poem from the Selected Poems of the late Paul McLoughlin (1947-2021), recently published by Shoestring Press and edited with an introduction by John Forth. Mother in Murreigh […]

  • Two poems by Will Stone

    Two poems by Will Stone

    Eternal Life Slowly the leaves grow yellow and fall,and I hear leaders of corporate empiresfully confident of achieving eternal lifefor select customers in their lifetime.But in the Aveyron in the […]

  • A poem by Erin O’Luanaigh

    A poem by Erin O’Luanaigh

      Thirteen Ways of Looking at Suzanne Pleshette in The Birds I. Comes the silver Aston-Martinand the vague apprehensionthat some terror is on the wing.Don’t they ever stop migrating,these bottle-blondes […]

  • Two poems by Mat Riches

    Two poems by Mat Riches

    Mat Riches recently published his debut collection, Collecting the Data, with Red Squirrel Press. Below are two new poems. Sticks The time to cut a stickis when you see it […]

  • Two poems by Anthony Joseph

    Two poems by Anthony Joseph

      For the latest event in the Wild Court Reading Series, King’s College London lecturer and T.S. Eliot Prize winner Anthony Joseph will be reading from his forthcoming Precious and […]

  • Lie down and be counted: on Geoff Hattersley’s ‘Instead of an Alibi’

    Lie down and be counted: on Geoff Hattersley’s ‘Instead of an Alibi’

    Dane Holt I discovered Geoff Hattersley in 2019, after reading Wayne Holloway-Smith’s poem ‘Some Waynes’ in an issue of Poetry magazine: ‘a cavalcade of Waynes fucking each other up in […]

  • A poem by Maëlle Leggiadro

    A poem by Maëlle Leggiadro

    He Could Leave You Tomorrow He buys me roses; I forget to put them in water,once again too caught-upin my tangled and scattered thoughts.They’re beautiful but– a little too pinkas […]