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An extract from ‘Book of Days’ by Phoebe Power
The following is an extract from Book of Days, a long poem recounting a journey along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. This extract describes the sixth day of the walk, from the city of Pamplona to Uterga. 6 from Pamplona The streets still grey with night. On…
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Three poems from ‘Starting Eleven’ by Matthew Stewart
Left: Aldershot striker Mike Ring (16 goals in 76 appearances) with a diving header Right: Midfielder Ian McDonald, flanked by Bill Shankly, signing for Liverpool before his Shots days (340 apps) Aldershot FC Footballers of the 1980s 3 – Ian Phillips Shaven-headed but for straw-blond sideburns, signed on a free…
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‘The Southern Belle’ – a poem by Polly McCormack
Photo by Dovi on Unsplash The Southern Belle In 1812, when the building was first built, they infused the wallpaper with beetroot juice, to achieve the notorious burgundy colour fashionable in most Southern public houses. When the glasses have been polished to the point of invisibility, and the barrels have…
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An instinct for pace and balance: on Ruth Padel’s ‘Beethoven Variations’
John Greening Some composers keep themselves out of their music, but in Beethoven the life is always peeping through. It seems natural, then, for Ruth Padel to have woven herself into her Beethoven Variations (Chatto & Windus, 2020). The book – elegantly designed, with a list of recommended works and various illustrations…
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Two poems by Adam Tavel
Photo by Jack Douglass on Unsplash Somerset County Cold Case Photo, 1980 Shot from its stoop, this garden shed brims March, a ripe compendium of glistenings—yellow packets of seeds like solitaire across its workbench, new gloves still tagged. The pegboard’s collars shine the throats of screwdrivers by size, two…
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Three poems by Karen Ng
Touya From the corner of my eye I take out the stars crush each new flame into a thousand embers Purple pits and spoiled stitches answer the glare, repeat the blank stare I keep stomp out each trace of contested traits Swarm the gleam in my own eye and spit out…
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Two poems by Nicola Healey
Anosmia ‘The natural world is not kind.’ – ‘How viruses shape the world’, The Economist (22nd August 2020) I live to smell the flowers. I’d measured out my day in scents and my life in garden fragrances: yellow primroses in March, white lilacs in May, philadelphus in June. All that…
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A primer on the nature of hearing: on Seán Street’s ‘The Sound Recordist’
Kevin Gardner As Britain’s first professor of radio, Seán Street (emeritus professor at Bournemouth University) brings to the writing of poetry a unique perspective on sound. The author of six books on sound poetics, including Sound at the Edge of Perception and The Sound Inside the Silence, Street is a poet especially…
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Two poems by Matthew Paul
Chris Balderstone in action for Carlisle United and England The Last Corinthians for Ann and Peter Sansom A cricket bat slumped at the back of my father’s shed preserves the faintest whiff of linseed oil. Faded GM on its splice denotes the makers: Gunn and Moore, co-founded by Billy…
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‘claim your ghost’ – a poem by Charlie Baylis
claim your ghost for sophie a night of solitude by the river driftwood floating through the distance thinking back to the time before you were born when the willow’s branches were lines of unblemished philosophy winding backwards through time to the moment before you were born the willow’s leaves grow…
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‘Meccano Magazine’ – a poem by Bernard O’Donoghue
Meccano Magazine Bridge May Riordan ordered it for me From London. Being educational, It was exempt from the 2d Purchase Tax, Which was ironic because, in the reading Of instructions, I was ineducable. The sons of the Creamery Manager, Who also had Set 5, completed models So they always came out…
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‘Fear of Language’ – a Katja Perat poem translated
Nicoletta Asciuto writes: Katja Perat is a contemporary Slovenian poet and novelist. Her first poetry collection, Najboljši so padli (The Best Have Fallen), was published by Beletrina (Ljubljana) in 2011 and received the Best Debut Award and Best Book of the Year from the Slovenian Literary Critics Association. Perat is also the author…
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‘Man of the region’: an appraisal of poet Will Burns
Will Burns in Wendover Woods, Buckinghamshire; photograph by Antonio Olmos Jake Morris-Campbell, April 2021 May 2020, the seventh week of lockdown measures. It’s about 9.30 in the morning and I’m pushing out of the village with the bairn, up beneath the hills, along a gravely track parallel to the disused reservoir (replete with a 100-foot,…
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Two poems by John Challis
The below poems are taken from John Challis’s debut collection, The Resurrectionists, forthcoming from Bloodaxe this month. There’s been talk of a child born on Cheapside with a wolf’s tail and goat’s breasts, of Quakers down Cannon Street with pans of fire on their heads, and months ago, in…
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Two translations of Corrado Govoni
Chiara Salomoni writes: Corrado Govoni was born near Ferrara in 1884 and died near Rome in 1965. He was a prolific writer of poetry, prose and drama. Govoni joined the Futurist Movement and collaborated on Marinetti’s Notebooks but his crepuscular way of writing remained a characteristic of his poetry. He was the president of…
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Fog Theory: lost in the white gaze
Alycia Pirmohamed “Fog is a cloud that touches the ground.” A metaphor for vanishing, for dissolving, for withholding, fog often finds its way into my poetry. A woman becomes the fog. An unanswered prayer is the fog. A body disappears into the fog. The fog is a way to make a…
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‘In Memoriam Alun Lewis’ – a poem by Byron Beynon
In Memoriam Alun Lewis 1915-1944 From India you wrote of coming back and that isolation for youth to breathe and grow. Later when the history books were updated and maps became the colour of rainbows, warm letters home once written between breaks in the clouds floated like bruised poppies on…
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Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize 2021 winner: Karen Downs-Barton
Karen Downs-Barton
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Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize 2021 runners-up
Fintan Calpin Hannah Clayton Lauren Mappledoram Charlie Brittlebank …
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‘The Stillness of the Cows’ – a poem by Robert Etty
Photo by Henrik Hjortshøj on Unsplash The Stillness of the Cows While summer’s delaying, they doze and graze, ruminate over landscapes all day, lie side by side and gaze across fields, content (or a milk cow’s equivalent) with sunshine, warm rain, the shade of a hedge and acres of…