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You Do Not Have To Be Mad – Patrick Mackie
You Do Not Have To Be Mad So this is where you are, right at the heart of the wan, crushed summer of the referendum and of blame, of sleek […]
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Marcela Sonnets by Fiona Benson
Marcela Sonnets after Don Quixote i “I was born free, and to live free I chose the solitude of the countryside. The trees of these mountains are my company, the […]
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Grisóstomo’s Suicide – Nicola Nathan
Grisóstomo’s Suicide To David Harsent I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose […]
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If you believe that you’ll believe anything – Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet
André Naffis-Sahely Exactly a year prior to Nazi Germany’s surrender, while Allied planes were busy carpet-bombing the old continent in preparation for the D-Day landings, Robinson Jeffers wrote a poem […]
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Back to the crisis of living – time and trauma in Alice Oswald
Lucy Mercer “Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up […] now try to imagine what it was like to wake up […]
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‘The Woman I Met’ – Thomas Hardy
This is an extract from Mark Ford’s ‘Thomas Hardy – Half a Londoner’ which will be published in November 2016 by Harvard University Press Hardy’s longest London poem opens with […]
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Eroding the harmful binaries – Male homosocial bonding in the poetry of Michael Longley
Dave Coates The Helmet When shiny Hector reached out for his son, the wean Squirmed and buried his head between his nurse’s breasts And howled, terrorised by his father, […]
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R.F. Langley: Poetry of a Landscape
Chris Larkin ‘One needs to be a botanist, a physical geographer, and a naturalist, as well as an historian, to be able to feel certain that one has all the […]
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‘…in that the Soul standeth’: Randall Jarrell’s 90 North and John Berryman’s A Prayer for the Self
Toby Martinez de las Rivas The quote in the title of this short article is taken from Of Heaven and Hell by Jakob Boehme, a German shoemaker, mystic and theologian […]
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Marie Antoinette’s mock-peasant hamlet – the charges against Les Murray
John Clegg Les Murray is Teflon to generalisation. Ages ago in Areté, Jeremy Noel-Tod made an overview of his poetry which was acerbic and funny and rigorous and contained only […]
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Three Poems from Centres of Cataclysm
To celebrate 50 years of Modern Poetry in Translation, Bloodaxe have just published an anthology – Centres of Cataclysm – edited by Sasha Dugdale and David and Helen Constantine. Below […]
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Thaddeus O’Sullivan – ‘The Poetry of Making a Film’
Thaddeus O’Sullivan, edited by Ruth Padel Ruth: This essay sprang from a film-maker’s notes about directing. It has been written up by a poet eager to understand and is based […]
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‘I’m not sitting next to you’: On Poetry by Glyn Maxwell
Ellen Cranitch I once had to interview Glyn Maxwell. I’d just read this in his book On Poetry: ‘I think a poem you read has to meet the same criteria […]
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‘I dared speak my mind’: War Poetry, or the struggle to connect
James Nixon There is something very modern about Alun Lewis’s poem ‘All day it has rained …’ It is a poem that bares the isolation and boredom of the soldier’s […]
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Ahren Warner – Three Poems – PDF download
Ahren Warner Three Poems
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Iain McGilchrist – The Master and his Emissary
Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with […]
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The Edge of Thought: On Michael Symmons Roberts
Aviva Dautch Michael Symmons Roberts’s first collection, published in 1993, is Soft Keys and its title poem could be read as an ars poetica not just for this book but […]
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Black Lagoon – Abigail Parry
Black Lagoon ‘Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of a man-fish.’ But what did they tell you, Lucas? Out of the murk and mystery – was I all […]
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Seersucker – Will Burns
Seersucker The seersucker suit turns down a drink. I’ve seen you drinking wine before though, someone says. Chicken and onions, talk of his Soho… receding, recession. It’s a plain […]
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Kindness I Suppose – Will Burns
Kindness I Suppose These were the days pitched from morning straight into night, the days of vodka 7s in the shower, of you bringing the first good guitar any […]