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Four poems by James Peake
James Peake’s debut collection, Reaction Time of Glass, will be published by Two Rivers Press on 21st July. Below are four poems by James, including, from the book, ‘Marine Snow, Hammersmith’. Marine Snow, Hammersmith The flyover this late is less than human, the only evident affection drops from the sodium…
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‘Time a river we swim in freestyle’: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry & prose
Katie Da Cunha Lewin Throughout Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art, his manifesto on poetry written in aphorisms published in 2007, he returns to central questions about the existential problem of poetry: ‘What is the use of poetry? The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.’ …
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Essential fragments: on the poetry of David Harsent
Below is an essay by Lavinia Singer from A Working Model of the Fall from Grace: Essays & Poems for David Harsent, recently published by Offord Road Books in collaboration with The Next Review. The festschrift gathers together contributions in verse, prose, interview and image to celebrate David Harsent’s life and writing career that…
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Two poems by Ben Wilkinson
The Flower Carrier after the painting by Diego Rivera, 1935 These blooms are for the mayor’s daughter, wedding on which a town pins its hopes. Soon they’ll set long tables creaking, throng streets in hanging baskets, thread buttonholes of businessmen, diplomats. If I were a cynic I’d call them fig…
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‘Big Talk’: a poem by Zakia Carpenter-Hall
Big Talk ‘when the mystics speak of worlds beyond scent and colour, the common man… cannot grasp their reality.’ ~ Rumi Cosmologists say, ‘if the sun was a door, the earth would be the size of a dime’. And I try to envision the vastness that I love — a…
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Try To Be Better: an engagement with the creative practice of W. S. Graham
This week sees the launch of Try To Be Better, a multi-disciplinary engagement with the idiosyncratic creative practice of the late poet W. S. Graham, co-edited by Sam Buchan-Watts and Lavinia Singer, and published by Prototype (formerly Test Centre). In this book, contemporary writers and artists respond to prompts Graham left in notebooks and…
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‘Blood in the Sky’: a poem by Alan Zhukovski
Blood in the Sky A mortar attack hit a new condominium, built just a year ago, mixing lost lives with debris, gnawed by merciless, rat-like flames. A general ordered a small detachment to kill “a couple hundred civilians” just to discredit his enemies’ army. By chaos and fear, he wanted to…
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Marratide: William Martin’s Chorography of County Durham
‘Cuthbert’s brief dream / And high resting place / Here before Durham’ (s.16): Warden Law by William Martin, part of ‘Wiramutha Helix’ Jake Morris-Campbell Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of the late poet, William Martin (1925-2010). A self-professed son of the Haliwerfolc (followers of Saint Cuthbert, a…
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A poem from ‘Fighters, Losers’ by Declan Ryan
Below is a poem from Declan Ryan’s new pamphlet, Fighters, Losers, published this week by New Walk Editions and available to buy here. Declan will be launching his pamphlet at Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham this Thursday evening, 23rd May, alongside Linda Stern Zisquit and her pamphlet From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter. Event…
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Three poems by Kate Behrens
Dream Lover Next to a Spanish river, I tell him my body is ruined. Not existing, he doesnʼt mind: I like your differences. With metallic water, time unravels blue streets, silver mohicans ‒ theyʼre palm trees − behind them, tall town houses of the belonging children. Be careful what you wish…
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‘Rhiannon’: a poem by John Fuller
©Paul Stuart Rhiannon 1 One evening, having dined in my estate Among my many men, merry and wise, I took the air outside the palace, late In the day, but not too late to lift my eyes To where the sun still spun his daily heat Down the tall hill…
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‘The Poet As Witness’: CD Wright & The Art of Curating the Past
Paul Stephenson How do we look at a difficult past? Carolyn Forché has put forward the notion of ‘poetry of witness’ for a category of poems that ‘bear the race of extremity’ and end up as ‘evidence of what occurred’ (Forché 1993). In the space between citizen and state, she advocates that we…
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‘Notes from Sarajevo’: a poem by Scott Elder
Notes From Sarajevo …a bullet in flight bears no sound The city’s empty but for wind varying shades of darkness a woman kneeling under a briar from here she seems to be hiding if the shrub had a voice it would sing for water she’s found a crook in its…
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Three poems by Jennifer Lee Tsai
Another Language When I speak in Cantonese, I’m almost a different person. Louder, brighter. The seven tones, ascending, descending like musical notes. My grandparents, leaving the fragrant harbour of Hong-Kong, the Pearl River of Guang-Zhou for the dream of a better life in the West – what did they make of…
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Two new poems by John Greening
The following poems appear in John Greening’s new collection, The Silence, published by Carcanet in June 2019. from The Silence Sibelius lived with his wife, Aino, in Järvenpää, Finland until he was over ninety. But he released virtually no music from their forest home for the last thirty years…
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Making the Cut: John Greening on editing poems
John Greening I often quote Basil Bunting’s advice to young poets, that you should ‘cut out every word you dare’. Bunting certainly practised what he preached in his own wonderfully economical work, and even applied it to others, quite fearlessly – to Shakespeare, for instance, whose sonnets he ‘improved’ (as a pastime while…
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Two poems by Matthew Stewart
Shortheath Road In a suburb of my former home town on the way to a relegation clash, I stop to get a pasty for half-time at our corner shop, waiting in a queue alongside freshly elderly people. They’re the latest versions of Mum and Dad: Damart trousers, Dannimacs and stout shoes.…
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‘Highbury Park’: a poem by Liz Berry
Highbury Park In the woods at night men are fucking amongst the gorgeous piñatas of the rhododendrons, the avenue of cool limes. By day I walk my son down the secret pathways, smell the salt rime of sex on the wind, a condom glowing with blossomy cum, knotted and flung; I…
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‘The Capture of the Five Boroughs’ by Paul McLoughlin
Below is an extract from Paul McLoughlin’s Breaking Ground: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Poems in Old English and in Translation, recently published by Paekakariki Press, London. The Old English version of ‘The Capture of the Five Boroughs’ is followed by Paul’s translation. The Capture of the Five Boroughs AD 942 …
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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 immediate, resonant and powerful work about their active experiences in North Africa during World War Two, it was not until 1977, when Carcanet published Morgan’s…