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Private Morgan: World War Two & Edwin Morgan’s ‘The New Divan’
© Jessie Ann Matthew, National Galleries Scotland Richie McCaffery While many of Edwin Morgan’s (1920-2010) Scottish near contemporaries in poetry, such as Hamish Henderson and Sorley MacLean, wrote […]
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The Anatomy of Movement: On Georg Trakl’s Poetry
Georg Trakl at Venice lido, 1913 Will Stone I In this essay I have attempted to illuminate what for want of a better phrase one might […]
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From a sequence by Karl O’Hanlon
from In Our Outrageous Masks of Dog-Skin Prologue: St Joseph’s Seminary, Belfast—“the Wing” What did I learn up there? What do I now know? – Padraic […]
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A Bonnard Trilogy: poems by Ellen Cranitch
Pierre Bonnard, Self-portrait, c.1889, oil on canvas ‘Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory’, the first major exhibition of Bonnard’s work in the UK for 20 years, opens at the […]
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Two new poems by Niall Campbell
© Racheal Da Silva Burton Packhorse Bring on the bit and curb, the saddle, the saddlebag; broad animal, steady it goes for its own name being […]
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A poem by Helen Calcutt
Death in the form of a child When you came alive, I leant in, a red flower to your whisper. What you said, was dark. Darkness, […]
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Two poems by Rachel Bower
© Jan Bella Cannula after Matthew Siegel The sea is not as white as I expected. A lifeguard tapes gauze on my baby’s hand, secures the […]
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Four poems by Richie McCaffery
© Gerry Cambridge Inversnaid (for Chris Powici, & i.m. Helen Lamb) The time I visited him before this he still had a partner and I […]
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‘A Dream of Cornwall’: a poem by Matthew Francis
Gurnard’s Head, west of Zennor Monday 19th November is the late poet WS Graham’s 100th birthday. Below is a poem by Matthew Francis from The Caught Habits of Language, […]
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‘St Ives Allure’: WS Graham among the artists
Monday 19th November is the late poet WS Graham’s 100th birthday. Below are extracts from David Whittaker’s new book St Ives Allure, a generously-illustrated story of the painters, sculptors […]
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Writing Birth: on the poetry of motherhood
Rachel Bower In her 1995 work Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Carcanet), Eavan Boland described a powerful dilemma at the […]
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Three sonnets by Kate Bingham
Three Sonnets From brown on brown, a tall fawn eating blackberries. Look how it hasn’t seen me yet – head in the bushes full of flies, […]
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Three poems by Will Stone
Site of Hitler’s Berghof, Obersalzberg, October 2018 © Will Stone Below are three poems from Will Stone’s most recent collection, The Sleepwalkers (Shearsman). Notes on each poem follow […]
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Two poems by Rosanna Licari
Aptenodytes forsteri and the imperial egg Converge as the centre is everything in the deep Antarctic winter. Begin the clockwise shuffle towards the time of birth. […]
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Permanent Afternoons: The Underworld in the Poetry of Sean O’Brien
John Challis Then, midway down that channel of the dead, A figure thick with mud rose up and called: ‘Who are you? You have come before your time.’ […]
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‘Twa Pixels’: a poem by Philip Fried
Twa Pixels As I was walking all alane / I heard twa corbies makin a mane … — from the medieval ballad ‘Twa Corbies,’ in Scots […]
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Breaking the Unthinkable Silence: on Michael Hofmann’s ‘One Lark, One Horse’
(photograph by Jemimah Kuhfeld: www.jemimahkuhfeld.co.uk) André Naffis-Sahely Poetry critics, just like the rest of us, are largely ungenerous to the middle-aged. More often than not, we expect our […]
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The World of the Half-Seen: on Ruth Padel’s ‘Emerald’ and writing loss
Nadia Saward Emerald, Ruth Padel’s new collection (Chatto & Windus, 2018), is primarily an elegy for her mother who passed away in 2017 at the age of ninety-seven. […]
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‘Let the Parts of the Flower Speak’: a poem by Mona Arshi
‘Poetry And – Human Rights’, a free discussion and meet-the-author book signing with prize-winning poet and lawyer Mona Arshi and Shadow Attorney General and member of the House of Lords Shami Chakrabarti, […]
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‘Polynya’: a poem by Helen Mort
‘Poetry And – Women in the Arctic’, a free event – in partnership with Hercules Editions – curated by Ruth Padel, with poet Helen Mort, travel author and biographer Sara Wheeler, and […]