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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 call ‘the anatomy of movement’ in the vision of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914), to try and identify perhaps the most crucial strand leading…
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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 Fiacc In the chapel, eldritch windows by Harry Clarke gathered the lead of dusk. Half-asleep over my breviary I could still…
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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 Tate Modern today. I Four canvases of drowning green, grass so deep, so apple-filled, it overwhelms, lead me to what I think…
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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 whispered in its ear; bring on the blankets, the slumped pack, lovingly; weight on weight, what matters is this whole life being dedicated, haunch and…
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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, from the bud of the spine, so I turned away. I still remember the sound. If I close my eyes, I see your mouth, white,…
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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 pad. It’s okay, it’ll be over soon. The waves splash to my belly. My breasts leak, a turquoise vein swells. A woman once stood to…
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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 had leave to be with mine. He takes me on endless walks in the hills and glens, like a dog being exhausted so it sleeps,…
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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, an anthology published by Donut Press to mark Graham’s centenary. WS Graham: New Selected Poems, edited by Matthew, was published by Faber in September. …
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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 and colourful figures who have lived in, and been inspired by, the Cornish harbour town of St Ives and the wider Land’s End peninsula. Graham…
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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 heart of women’s writing about motherhood. She suggested that ‘the woman poet today is caught in a field of force’, offering an example of 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, hindquarters flexing and flinching as it browses closer, closer, greedy moulting drunk then suddenly up it startles, leaping towards me instead of off through the…
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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 at the end. Reading Reck In Memory of Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen (1884-1945) Genickschuss – a bullet in the neck improvised methods…
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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. Two months of starvation on the drone march of the imperial egg safe on your feet tucked under a fold of skin the brooding pouch.…
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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.’ (Inferno, trans. Sean O’Brien) Since reading the Inferno as a teenager, the subject of the dead in poetry has continued to fascinate me. There…
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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 dialect As I was gazing at the TV screen, I heard two glinting pixels gossip and scheme in whispers, apart from the venomous debate…
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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 poets to vanish once the fury of youth has abated, and we ignore them all too happily until the reflective wisdom of senility has finally…
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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. In it, through careful observation of the world around her, Padel has created a nuanced portrayal of the transformations that occur in our lives when…
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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, curated by Ruth Padel, takes place on Wednesday 28 November in King’s College London’s elegant Council Room on the Strand, 7.15-9pm. Please register for this…
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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 award-winning artist Emma Stibbon, takes place on Tuesday 16 October in King’s College London’s unique space Chapters on the Strand, 7-9.30pm. Please register for this free…
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‘Abducted’: on a poem by Stanley Kunitz
(photograph by Lynn Saville: www.lynnsaville.com) Martina Evans Although I know the month and the day, I don’t know the year I discovered Stanley Kunitz’s poem ‘The Abduction’. His name was familiar to me. I loved his poem ‘Route Six’ with its seal-like cat called Celia on her way to the Cape, but I…