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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…
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‘The Bunkers at Wissant’ – a poem by Will Stone
The below poem is taken from Will Stone’s latest poetry collection, The Slowing Ride, published by Shearsman last autumn. The Bunkers at Wissant Once they were masters of the horizon, the steel of their blast doors shone, the barrels in their clean mouths moved confidently side to side, up…
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The Haunted Forties: Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly
Mark Valentine On the trestle table beneath the balconies and chandeliers of the Winter Gardens in the old spa town there was a run of pocket-sized poetry journals. The coats that carried a copy when it had just come out would have also contained an identity card and a ration book, probably a…
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‘Namái Ye Un Ayeri’ – a poem in Asturian and English by Xe M. Sánchez
Namái Ye Un Ayeri los poemes aseméyense abondu a eses ciudaes que les lleendes alluguen baxu les agües o sapozaes baxu les viesques. namái surden dende’l pasáu p’amosamos que nos, la xente d’anguañu, namái tamos fechos de pallabres pantasmes. poro pescancié que ye imposible imaxinar el futuru con pallabres vieyes y…
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‘Witness’ – a poem by Regina Weinert
Witness Once I saw my Masurian grandmother’s hair fall in pale amber waves over her left shoulder like a spell. She was half-facing the window, perched on the armchair’s edge, head inclined to the side, in swift ritual. She wove three strands into a tress from the nape to below the waist…
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‘Untitled Film Still’ – a poem by Daniel Fraser
Untitled Film Still Cindy Sherman, 1979 A woman. A road. A suitcase. Synapses glitter, searching for the rest. Her body shoulders a hymn called nowhere: hair a ruff of pale rockwool, face vanished over bromine hills. Four blunt pines light blackened candles. The lake is an eye that returns your…
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Why do we care: Romalyn Ante’s ‘Antiemetic for Homesickness’
Holly Loveday Romalyn Ante’s debut collection Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus, 2020) – flitting between clinical-white, squeaky hospital wards and the tropical abundance of the Philippines – allows us to experience what is it to be pulled in two directions. I write against a backdrop of Covid-19 forcing an entire world…
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Two poems by Nell Prince
The River The river cannot settle where to go. It may go under or it may begin again, it may rise up and change its forward flow. The river can’t decide. It doesn’t know. The sky won’t tell us anything but rain. The sky is just reflection of below. So what…