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The Poem Not Taken: Robert Frost and the inaugural tradition that isn’t
Rick de Villiers The sun shines on nothing new, saith the Preacher (and Samuel Beckett after him). But what if, on 21 January 1961, it hadn’t? What if neither snowy glare nor a whipping “Nor’easter” prevented Robert Frost from reading ‘Dedication’, the poem he’d written specially for the inauguration of John F.…
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Two poems by Ross Wilson
Vital Organs ICU, Easter, 2020 An outsider looking in might imagine they were seeing the interior of a space ship; ventilators, dialysis machines, monitors surrounded a station full of computers and strange-looking creatures, indistinguishable from one another. In gowns, masks, goggles and gloves with only a scribble like a tattoo…
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Poems from ‘The Conversation’ by Jo Burns and Emily Cooper
Emily and Jo write: “What follows is a six-poem sequence taken from the manuscript of a collaborative poetry collection, The Conversation. This collection follows a conversation held between three muses/lovers of Picasso: Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, as well as between ourselves: Emily Cooper and Jo Burns. The themes discussed are fidelity,…
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‘Dates with the Fates’ – a short sequence by Andew Neilson
Dates with the Fates i) Clotho Her last date? Some chump called Pelops. She gave him the cold shoulder. With her men, she likes them older and she dines on them like scallops. You can see why I’d be nervous. I asked to try the Sauvignon while she…
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Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize: 2020 winners
Alice Oldacre On Being Here When you Ought to be There When bent under absent weight you tend to wander, walking on the telephone, wise balancing act, mind on a window glossed fog, with bulbous groaning ache for an owed not owned place, sore throat in the morning, boredom, the…
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‘Cakes by Carol’ – a poem by Naima Rashid
Cakes by Carol It brought a strange comfort; somewhere in the folds of fondant she felt she had stowed away dreams she had held on to for too long, dreams she was too tired to carry any further. She was happiest when the show was on, in worlds lit up briefly…
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Fifty Forty: on the incomplete histories of Carcanet and the LRB
Kevin Gardner One of the most pleasurable of readerly experiences is the subversive frisson of snooping into the conversational intimacy of an author’s letters. When the initial titillation of prying fades, however, we are left craving an indulgence. If only this invasion of privacy were permitted, encouraged even, by the letter writer.…
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Two poems in memory of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)
Image: detail from cover of San Francisco Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights Foundation, 2003) John Gohorry Lights Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations. – Lawrence Ferlinghetti What happens to time on the mind’s Coney Island? It’s sixty years since the first trip I hitched in…
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On the poetry of George Kendrick
Matthew Stewart Let’s take a forgotten poet who went from publishing with Carcanet, garnering a PBS Recommendation and receiving excellent reviews in the broadsheets in the process, to barely appearing in Google searches for his name. Let’s chuck in an almost cinematographic biography with enough intriguing details and mysterious gaps to set…
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‘Swimming’ – a poem by Rupinder Kaur
Swimming Jaan to meri jaan, my life. The ghosts of language sit at the tip of my tongue and sing meri jaan. There’s a tale about two lovers, Sohni and Mahiwal. Sohni the daughter of potter Tulla and Izzat Baig of Bukhara a trader who became a buffalo herder known as…
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Two poems by Roy Marshall
Icarus’s Mother Missing from the Musee des Beaux Arts, a portrait of the slave girl, her name unimportant or forgotten, who gave birth to Icarus when she was just fifteen. The old Masters never painted this; a table littered with feathers, beads of wax, wood shavings and string, and at…
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Two poems by Alison Brackenbury
‘Honeymoon’ from the memoirs of Helen, widow of the poet Edward Thomas They fled, by train, to a poacher Edward named ‘Dad’. His own father made the Civil Service, rather than risky Dad’s wood-cottage. Green lit thatch like oaks, the emerald sheen of pheasants’ necks Dad wrung, unseen. Helen woke…
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‘The Kill’ – a poem by Andrew Jordan
Photo by Daniel Burka on Unsplash The Kill In your room, holding the cartridge, you imagined flames packed like petals in a bud, poppy red. Uncrimped, the hull revealed, instead, only seeds. Having tasted saltpetre and sulfur, ingested chemistry, mimed stock, action and barrel, linked vital spark in hunter,…
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‘Masks’ – a translation by April Yee of Sebastián Núñez Torres
April writes: “Chilean poet and academic Sebastián Núñez Torres (b. 1984) explores the fracturing of self and society in Las arpas rotas (Bajo la lluvia ediciones, 2020), a chapbook published in a lockdown that halted coronavirus as well as anti-government protests. The accelerating lines of his poem ‘Antifaces’, which I have translated, lament…
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Ana Blandiana: Poet, Civic Figure, Woman
Photo: Miguel Ruiz Durán Andreea Iulia Scridon Though her name may only be familiar to relatively few readers globally, Romanian poet, essayist, and translator Ana Blandiana (b.1942) is one of her – mostly male – generation’s (the “60s Generation” or less commonly “Neomodernist Generation”)[1] most acclaimed poets, and arguably the most…
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‘Neighbours’ – a poem by Mark Russell
Neighbours Grant was exhausted. I leaned over the shrub and watched him trying to hit a five-foot high stake into the ground. He isn’t a tall man and this was hampering his progress. This, combined with the fact that he would be better off using a long-handled roughneck sledgehammer rather than his…
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‘Those Days’ – a poem by Gary Allen
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash Those days There was always a simpleton as far back as I can remember her shit-covered hand through the broken glass of a small window high in the gable wall above the hoarding for Woodbine cigarettes as though she were asking for one, or…
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‘Peace in East Sussex’ – a poem by Colin Falck
The below poem is taken from Colin Falck’s final poetry collection, Leni’s Triumph, published by Shoestring Press shortly before his death in December at the age of 86. Copies are available to purchase online here. Peace in East Sussex These old joiners’-wood trees, beech and oak and ash, have stood…
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‘Like walking in the rain’: César Vallejo, Carolyn Forché, and the problem of witness
César Vallejo in 1929; the cover of Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us (Harper & Row, 1982) Jonathan Hitchens The very first couplet of A Man Passes with a Loaf of Bread on His Shoulder by Peruvian poet César Vallejo, one of the most influential Spanish-language poets of the 20th century,…
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Two poems by Anna Chorlton
Welcombe Moonlight exposes a split ship releasing souls. One – naked torso gleaming – battles toward shore, arcing arms throttling breakers, eyes fixated on a cove flecked with witness. A soul released from turmoil, from wild hounds, rising, howling, he stands tall on rough sand, ruthless eyes roaming. Why sea, did…