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On ‘The Sleep Road’ by Stewart Sanderson
Matthew Stewart In his first full collection, The Sleep Road (Tapsalterie, 2022), Stewart Sanderson addresses several issues that are currently popular among many poets of his generation: the relationship between the human and natural worlds, the role that history plays in understanding the present, and an examination of national identity. Nevertheless,…
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‘Church Crawling’: a poem by John Greening
Fotheringhay © Kevin Gardner Church Crawling for Kevin Gardner Leighton Bromswold Yes, locked, of course. And once we find the key it’s comically huge, and hard to turn, but when it does, George Herbert’s century comes tumbling, sliding, singing at my phone from beams and dust and tracery and…
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‘Ballad of the Outer Life’: from the German of Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Below is a translation by James Owens of the poem ‘Ballade des äußeren Lebens’ by the Austrian poet, novelist and essayist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). Stefan Zweig wrote of Hofmannsthal: “In world literature, except for Keats and Rimbaud, I know no other youthful example of a similar impeccability in the mastering of language, no…
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Two poems by Hamish Whyte
Photo by Michael Mahood on Unsplash From the Sea-window The tide’s going out. The heron stalks the rock pools. A dunlin picks its way through the seaweed. A black poodle paddles in the shallows. The ladies who swim wade ashore and take off their wetsuits and pink floats. The heron…
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‘Window in the Rock’ – a poem by Lucy Dixcart
Andrea Sonda on Unsplash Window in the Rock When you glimpse it you’re crammed into a floating bathtub with a teenage boy at the tiller, hurtling towards likely death. At the moment you think if I live, Mum can never know, you look back and spot the rogue pixel…
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A statement for the importance of poems in a life: on Jonathan Davidson’s ‘A Commonplace’
Daniel Bennett A sense of place abounds in Jonathan Davidson’s A Commonplace (Smith-Doorstep, 2020), and while that might seem natural from the title, the ‘place’ here derives from a translation of the Latin term ‘locus communis’ or ‘a general or common topic’. Commonplace books were collections of sayings, proverbs or quotations on…
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‘Zaban i urdu’ – a poem by Amaan Hyder
Harry Grout on Unsplash Zaban i urdu Zaban i urdu, meaning language of the camp. In Urdu, here is idher or yahan. There is udher or wahan. We drive through a town. My father says, We lived here when we first came to England. Temporary lodging. A street of houses…
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Two poems by Matthew Paul
Frans Ruiter on Unsplash Brian Clough in the Rijksmuseum I had four beautiful days in Amsterdam. The weather was gorgeous, the sights were just absolutely gorgeous. Everything about the place is magic. – The Frost Interview, 1974 As he stood eye to eye with Rembrandt’s 1628 self-portrait, did newly-sacked…
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Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize 2022 – winner
Gabriela Sambuccetti MA in Modern Languages, Literature and Culture, Arts & Humanities A Migrant in a Piece of Paper A migrant could be someone who bought a plane ticket to London, and talked with customer service and customs at the airport, and filled a pile of papers, and got into…
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Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize 2022 – joint runners-up
Jit Mun MSc Early Intervention in Psychosis, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience New Year Moon The luminous New Year moon Ascends in empty moorlands instead of the red and gold splendour of Banquet halls eight hours forward or in the ice-white lights of my grandparents’ home, their table…
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Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize 2022 – specially commended
Heilien Diedericks PhD Global Health and Social Medicine, Department of Global Health & Social Medicine Moving the family Through the passenger window, the mountain burns. The Mantis God lives in those flames; her white karos the break between heat and death. Once, She rode the mountain’s back as it…
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Three pamphlets reviewed by Richie McCaffery
Richie McCaffery It is apt that John Greening recently edited the Carcanet selection of Iain Crichton Smith’s poems. There’s an anecdote that does the rounds in Scottish literary circles, probably apocryphal, which goes: Norman MacCaig was walking down the street in Edinburgh and he sees a friend, so he stops them and…
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‘In the Mountains of the Monédières, by the Green Waters of the Vienne’ – a poem by Hilary Davies
© Hilary Davies In the Mountains of the Monédières, by the Green Waters of the Vienne In the mountains of the Monédières I sat by the brook and waited for you. The young goats came to see And the pipits dipped all along the watercourses. On a sudden I thought:…
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‘Love’s Arrow’ – a translation of Chaucer
© Morgan Library, New York The below is a translation by Mark McGuinness of a section of Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer’s epic poem re-telling, in Middle English, the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde amid the Trojan War and the siege of Troy. The original Middle English follows…
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‘Cleaning the Big House’ – a poem by Martyn Crucefix
Photo by Anna Kukhareva on Unsplash Cleaning the Big House Norfolk, England, 2030 It was the English woman Veronica Berridge who let the place go — her spirit vanishing maybe eight years back I imagine into one of these portraits in the attic room perhaps this one…
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Pushing her own boundaries: on Alison Brackenbury’s ‘Thorpeness’
Matthew Stewart Alison Brackenbury’s new collection, Thorpeness (Carcanet Press, 2022), provides a perfect rebuttal to Larkin’s notorious disavowal of a poet’s obligation to develop. This might be Brackenbury’s eleventh full collection, but it does show an indisputable progression. All Brackenbury’s renowned qualities remain present in Thorpeness, such as her mastery…
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‘Salmon Farm Blues’ – a poem by Andrew McNeillie
Photo by Datingscout on Unsplash Andrew McNeillie’s New and Collected poems, Striking a Match in a Storm, is published this week by Carcanet. There will be an online launch reading on Wednesday 30th – details here. Salmon Farm Blues Call me old-fashioned, as you will, but I prefer…
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‘Hijrah’ – a poem by Imad Khan
Photo by Steve McSkudder on Unsplash Hijrah* I’ve been here and there looking for my Promised Land hearing sweet voices through the wall and the sound of my boots on gravel straining my ear at the feedback crackle of the universe and treating it, like everything else, as primary evidence back…
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‘The Waterspout’ – a translation of Luis Vaz de Camões
The below is a translation by Mark McGuinness of a section of Os Lusíadas (‘The Luciads’), an epic poem by the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camões (c. 1524/25 – 1580). Os Lusíadas is widely regarded as the most important work of Portuguese-language literature and is frequently compared to Virgil’s Aeneid. The…
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‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’: reading A. E. Housman
Nell Prince I partially recall A Shropshire Lad’s thirty-first poem, ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’, because it’s in a cinematic adaptation of Alan Bennet’s The History Boys (2006). A middle-aged, wheezing English teacher, who is both relic and rebel, quotes in part reverie, part depressed mood: The tree…