-
‘Encounter’, a version of Baudelaire, by Stuart Henson
Encounter Traffic was howling in my ears and eyes that moment when we passed—she in her slim black dress, a gloved hand tugging up the hem— and for one instant all things clarified. Those slo-mo seconds in a film when fate throws two together and the soundtrack dims and he looks…
-
Two poems by Natalie Linh Bolderston
Thất Tịch Seventh Month, Saigon, 1975 They share a dish of beans like small blood clots, believing they will one day wake to a tea ceremony, mâm quả, a blessing written on the wall. She rides home on the front of his bicycle as their city reddens. She threads seven…
-
On ‘Dressing for the Afterlife’ by Maria Taylor
Matthew Stewart In her second full collection, Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches, 2020), Maria Taylor makes a huge step forward from her already impressive first book, Melanchrini (Nine Arches, 2012). This progress is signposted by coherence and cohesion. Whether dealing with gender, nationality or family, the solidity of Taylor’s method provides…
-
Two poems by Nick Makoha
Codex 3 We were thirty. Another day was ending as a mosquito landed at the edge of my hand. You ordered two beers, to pour ourselves into, at the airport bar. Each sip a minute of absence as a bird trapped in the atrium flew in the direction of our gate. Flight…
-
Three poems by Daniel Bennett
Figures in a Landscape Remember when the country offered a pathway to freedom? The creek lanes and brooks and railway arches, spaces we filled with imagination and talk. Often talk. Abroad along the edges of wheat fields and rural car parks, any escape from our essentially loving households, where indulgence stuck…
-
‘For a Coming Extinction’: a poem by Pascale Petit
Image credit: © Brian Fraser King’s College London’s popular ‘Poetry And..’ series, chaired by Professor of Poetry Ruth Padel, returns on 30th November at 5pm with ‘Poetry And… The Wild in a Time of Coronavirus’, an online event with prize-winning poet Pascale Petit and award-winning wildlife film-maker Shekar Dattatri. More details, including how to…
-
New poems by John Greening
To mark the publication day of his Vapour Trails: Reviews and Essays on Poetry (Shoestring Press), Wild Court is featuring four new poems by John Greening. The first three are from an extended sequence about the historic county of Huntingdonshire, where he lives. Vapour Trails is a survey of modern poetry, gathering reviews…
-
‘Mephitine’: a poem by Sarah Doyle
Mephitine You will know me before you see me, will sense me from twenty paces. I am all sour milk top-notes, that pissy catch in the back of your throat while you try, politely, not to gag. The never-fresh, wearing a coat ripe with my own history, I assail your…
-
Two poems by Jennifer Lee Tsai
I remember you were the first man who taught me about death. I was five years old; we were walking across the fields to my school. Do you remember, Ba? It was an autumn morning, I think. The trees dazzled us with their electricity. Po Po had died in June, on…
-
‘No right or wrong, only how I got here’: The Early Poetry of Richie McCaffery
Photo image: © Gerry Cambridge Jonathan Davidson In his second pamphlet, Ballast Flint (Small Press Publishing for Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013, with artwork by Hannah Fry), and in his most recent, First Hare (Mariscat Press, 2020), Richie McCaffery mentions the idea of showing one’s working-out in an exam. This display of process…
-
Two translations by James Owens
The Death of Dido —Aeneid IV, 692-705 She searched the sky for light, and moaned to find it. Then mighty Juno, for pity on long pain and a hard-dying soul, sent Iris to unbind her from the struggle in her knotted limbs, insane with grief, burning with grief before her…
-
Two poems by Oliver Comins
Golf Behind Trees An elegant course is exposed by newly opened air. There used to be a thick hedge, armed with trees. We would hear the thwack of their swings and hits followed by good silence or disappointing scutter. In days gone by, for all we could see, those golfers might…
-
On ‘Belladonna’ by Suna Afshan
Daniel Bennett Both grounded and detached, playing with a sense of narrative but also revelling in the rarefied brightness of the image, Suna Afshan’s debut chapbook Belladonna, from Broken Sleep Books, is an experience notable for its intensity and a sense of writing that comes from beyond time. A single poem…
-
‘On the margin’ – a poem by Stephen Miller
On the margin On the margin of existence on the deep-sea floor between chimneys of boiling water and venting carbon where no life should sensibly occur shrimp-like creatures cleave to life indeed, do flourish on the edge of tolerance in a sightless world of simple purpose Here they say all beginnings…
-
Three poems by Hannah Lowe
image © Dirk Skiba Sonnet for the British-Born And suddenly, new language: ‘British-Born’, for kids who grew up on terraces in Leeds or tower blocks in Bow, and at weekends tied their bootlaces for footie on the lawn and went to college to study Sports or Business or Car Mechanics and…
-
‘Arachnid: Flight After Deluge’ – a poem by Naima Rashid
Arachnid: Flight After Deluge The waters have risen; the signal has sounded in our skeletons of minimal composition. An instinct of age-old urgency has stirred our colonies into motion. Time has come for the next rung of survival, quest for the next habitable frontier – former field, farm, meadow, now stubble,…
-
‘In an Orchard’ – a poem by William Wootten
In an Orchard Shall we drink a while and think of Eden, As in an orchard filled with waspy windfalls Children shout and run? Late summer sun Is angled close to term time, and the walls’ Strong yellow means the days are not so long. Something will go wrong, Slow as…
-
On Natalie Diaz’s ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’
Holly Loveday Ultimately, ‘you cannot drink poetry’. Diaz precedes this statement in her self-aware second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, with the prayer of an Elder Mojave woman given at the site of a pipeline protest. The Elder’s words are not a substitute for water, but their cognizance of the relational necessity between…
-
The Lustre in Dullness: Philip Larkin, Sinéad Morrissey and Balance
© National Portrait Gallery, London Nicola Healey In Sinéad Morrissey’s collection On Balance (2017), Morrissey selectively quotes from Larkin’s ‘Born Yesterday’ (1954) as the epigraph to her titular poem, ‘On Balance’.[1] She decontextualises his lines, however, to bolster her poem’s feminist drive, distorting Larkin’s poem and misleading the reader from the outset.…
-
Four poems by Jake Morris-Campbell
The Village that Vanished All the bitter day waves smash into Smugglers’ Cove and Byer’s Hole. The sky has failed to lift and a shipwright’s hoolie blows doon King Street. Sometime soon we’ll re-pack the van, lock the door, gan from here. Away from foghorn bass and herring-gull staccato we’ll wake…