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Two poems by Matt Howard
Cults of Broadland Fen raft spider Let us venerate niche and otherness, local, patch-level occurrence – take the fen raft spider’s each simple eye, each leg hair sensing the water’s tension. All his drawn out care, a display of front legs in arcs across the meniscus, that moving slenderness, stop-start,…
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A poem by G.E. Stevens
The Roseland Peninsula Tell me now – how often do we live in our own description? (Charles Tomlinson) Looking west, the hill has no house so you imagine one. Curved stone lintels. A deep-set door where you’d expect. Outside, an unassuming car with cassette tapes in the glovebox and on…
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Two poems by T.P.E
Parable II Here, lads, this song, No Eyes, reminds me when – this the common end to a normal night, being after, well in the new day, stooped but standing over a laptop, headphones at the end of their tethers, harsh pebbles on eardrum – I was dancing, the spasm done…
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Everyday Creativity: Inside the Minds of a Painter and a Poet
Miranda Boulton / Island Series 12, 2018 / monoprint with gouache 39 x 48cm Victoria Best For a year and a half, between January 2017 and July 2018, I witnessed and recorded an artistic collaboration between two sets of friends, one working and creating in the present, the other – because mortality…
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Two poems by Iain Britton
from Windows In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe… Samuel Beckett VII i remember the expanses between winter the cyclic shifts the lying amongst sand dunes & flax fields i remember…
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‘Garden God’: a poem by Kevin Cahill
Garden God Easing her flip-flops and ectopic body down the lamp-post, this grasshopper of a girl fringed with electricity from São Paulo and the South Seas hangs with me at three a.m…. touches at herself publicly – and grants her charm in piecemeal at the postern earlier in the night in…
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Two poems by John Greening
Villa D’Este More water, extravagant upshootings and downpourings of it, unbottled from the veins of a Borgia. Such force and power — though to what end other than to cool the minds of those overheating here in the future? Let it rush and hiss and chuckle and spray its optimistic excess…
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Two poems by Rachel Piercey
Small griefs, like looking up from the page and realising that the train, for quite some time, has been moving through the kind of scene that feathers your body with desire. Border of buddleia and rosebay, foreground of inscrutable wheat. And how many hedged fields, billowing up and over the hillside,…
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Three poems by William Wootten
Mindfulness Imagine truly being in the present, Our every thought upon a plane like one Mapped out by Euclid. Here, the garden sun Is eight minutes old and there is a pleasant Sense of valediction to the moment, As the moment leaves us like a houseguest: Bags stowed, she is…
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‘All the Soul’s Endeavour’: where did the poetry of running go?
Hoplitodromos from an Attic black-figure Panathenaic amphora, 323–322 BC (photograph Marie-Lan Nguyen) Ben Wilkinson Fast-forward to August of 2020 and all eyes will be on Tokyo, as the Games of the 32nd Olympiad kick off with fireworks and fanfare. But among the 33 different sports contested and the 339 medal events,…
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More Memorable than Sweetness: on Li-Young Lee’s poem ‘Always a Rose’
Zakia Carpenter-Hall A poet must perpetually ask the question, explicitly or implicitly, ‘What is it?’ What are the plants, animals, objects, etc. with which we share and compose our lives? Like the unnamed child in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass who asked, ‘What is the grass?’ demonstrating that the simplest question can…
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Three poems by Jane Lovell
The pool below the oak Remember this: a driftway brimming cow parsley, bramble, its green beaded fruits; the field into which we clamber over wire, balance each other; that pool below the oak, black and bitter with tannins, where the cattle come to lap; the lack of breeze; the oak, its…
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‘The Water in the Pond Considers Narcissus’: a poem by Andre Bagoo
image © Marlon James The Water in the Pond Considers Narcissus He looks at me and sees right through me, as if I am nothing, as if he could live without me. I bathed him each day, moistly kissing the rise of his flesh, slapping his limbs then falling away, down…
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Three poems by Oliver Comins
Oliver writes: These are part of a ‘calendar’ of 12 poems set in Pitshanger Park, near where I live in Ealing. The Park is a place of leisure, but also a setting where small and large histories play out and which is not protected from the mayhem around. Evening Clouds…
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‘All the Roads that Lead to Eminescu’: on the great Romanian poet
Andreea Iulia Scridon The name Mihai Eminescu isn’t likely to ring an immediate bell for Anglophone readers, but would certainly deserve to, having circled the globe quite a few times. The man unanimously considered Romania’s greatest poet was first translated into German (by the Romanian Queen of the time, Elizabeth, who wrote…
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Two Pintle poems by Rory Waterman
Re: Application FAO Dr Bob Pintle Senior Lecturer in Professional Creativity, Peterborough University and also dedicated to Dr Andrew Taylor, who did not inspire the poem Dear Robert, The Board regrets to inform several colleagues, including you, that your recent sabbatical applications will not go forward, after review. The panel felt…
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Three poems by Alison Brackenbury
Chance: a dream Yes. It was you. From its small source my heart rushed like a flooded beck. But would you lead a writing course? Or choose a tweed with purple check? The others sat, to write and learn. It was too late to learn. Instead I wandered out of your…
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From ‘the garden sonnets’: three poems by Andrew McMillan
it’s hard at first to comprehend the sleeping man so horizontal all through the day so sleepy despite the hours spent seemingly at rest but like a meadow glimpsed from speeding train of course there are permanent convulsions beneath the topsoil of your matted hair love what horses are at work on you…
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Pixel Perfect: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Chris Larkin When I was seven or eight years old, I was desperate to own either a Sega Mega Drive or a Super Nintendo. Much to my frustration I wasn’t allowed either and had to make-do with holing up at various friends’ houses for hours on end watching them play whilst I…
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Thom Gunn’s carnival: a radical inside job
Thom Gunn, 1986. Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark. Courtesy of The University of Arizona Poetry Center. Copyright Arizona Board of Regents Andre Bagoo Thom Gunn’s poem ‘The Messenger’ starts with a question: Is this man turning angel as he stares At one red flower whose name he does not know,…