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Two poems by Adam Warne
This summer saw the release of Adam Warne’s debut pamphlet, Suffolk Bang, published by Gatehouse Press. Warne’s fractured, ‘spooked songs’ draw on folklore and an ethnographic study of his native Suffolk. Below are two new poems. Nettle chronic perennial, similar to spinach though borne on a serrated margin, cast…
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Three poems by Sarah Law
Below are three poems from Sarah Law’s new pamphlet My Converted Father, recently published by Broken Sleep Books. Hobbies I’ve had my enthusiasms, admits my converted father. Your mother was never very encouraging. I know, I say. It was fishing for a while. You had rods, lines, and tins of…
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Two poems by Julie Irigaray
Bologna A terracotta forest of distorted towers: medieval Manhattan where Dante wandered. Madonnas nestled at the corner of each via: mounds of sacred hearts, altars of salted tears. The manganese facades of palaces and porticoes with faded frescoes. The embalming smell of a leather-bound book and the one diffused via a…
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Two poems by Richard O’Brien
Photo credit: Adrian Pope You & me & the incredibly distant island universes 1. The man behind the glass removes his gloves. The man without his gloves, glittered in salt, flips up his goggle glasses, and he looks like a woodsman training as a legal clerk, tucked tightly in…
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Hart Crane in Greenwich Village
(photograph by Walker Evans) Francesca Bratton In his 1921 flâneur’s guide to New York City, Hints to Pilgrims, the dramatist and essayist Charles S. Brooks briefly interrupts his rhapsodies over the city’s ‘restaurants and theatres…bridges…the shipping…parks…fifth avenue…electric signs’ with a quick sketch of its ‘quartier Latin’, Greenwich Village. Brooks’s interlude revolves around a…
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Three poems by Richard Skinner
Below are three poems from Richard Skinner’s new pamphlet The Malvern Aviator, recently published by Smokestack Books. Dark Nook I am Egbert Clague. I come every morning from Agneash hoping for the nod from the bargain man. It takes two hours to descend the ladders, our tallow candles round our necks like…
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A poem by Hilary Davies
Below is a poem from the sequence ‘Rhine Fugue’ by Hilary Davies, which appears in her fourth collection, Exile and the Kingdom (Enitharmon, 2016). A note by Hilary follows the poem. V Printing William Tyndale’s New Testament, Peter Schoeffer’s Workshop, Worms, 1526 Come here and see the frameset of…
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Two poems by Theresa Muñoz
Water of Leith By the water of Leith you sit & think of the day. Scrolling down, seeing bad news, you kept a straight face. Told yourself: don’t do it, don’t give yourself away. Your streamlined self exists. Always filtering your words. Black on black is your staple wear, body conscious.…
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Three poems by James Peake
The Skin of Epimenides Read The Seven Sages and you’re asked to believe this loner cured all Athens of disease, backwards prophet who saw past not future, first things first, like the irruption of order into cosmos. But a seer doesn’t want for time and is free to pen nothing in…
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Three poems from ‘The Built Environment’ by Emily Hasler
Below are three poems from Emily Hasler’s debut collection The Built Environment, published this month by Pavilion Poetry. The Built Environment is being launched at the University of Liverpool on Thursday 26th April alongside new collections from fellow Pavilion poets Sarah Corbett and Alice Miller: event details here. Emily will be appearing at a…
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‘Translation is the Opposite of War’: On Sarah Maguire
Photos above & below: © Crispin Hughes André Naffis-Sahely True translators take to their craft so intensely that they tend to hurtle towards invisibility, and in Britain, the land of the Anonymous Translator, nobody paid a greater price for their devotion to world poetry than Sarah Maguire, who died in November 2017, following…
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Three new poems by Isabel Galleymore
Shadow Tale In the tree, down the trunk, on the curb and then running in front of a car. Experience has taught me if it doesn’t work out with you, if I don’t see you again along comes another I can’t tell apart. Fable An ass once…
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Four poems from ‘Spoils’ by James Brookes
Below are four poems from the sequence ‘Antigeorgics’ by James Brookes, which appears in his second full collection, Spoils, published this month by Offord Road Books. Spoils is being launched at The Crown Tavern, Clerkenwell, on Tuesday 20th February: all are welcome. Event details here. Tapsel Gate, Jevington Pivot the…
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Five poems from ‘The Mains’ by Patrick Davidson Roberts
Below are five poems from Patrick Davidson Roberts’s debut collection, The Mains, recently published by Vanguard Editions. The collection is being launched at the London Review Bookshop, Bloomsbury, this Thursday evening (8th February) from 6.30pm: all are welcome. Event details here. Barbara Villiers for James Brookes Worked on by the…
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Four new poems by Fiona Benson
Heavenly Bodies for Mark Haworth-Booth Small mother, I want to believe that when the soul is released it is borne to the stars by a swan, though the body remains, your small bones laid in a Perspex kist and soft-clothed clean, beads at your mouth like a song for the child curled…
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‘Back into the socket’: William Fuller’s Playtime
Photo credit: Anna Fuller They are tempted to note patterns in the scene below, but its aspects are so various and the names to be applied to them so few that nothing can be described —‘¶¶’, William Fuller Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a…
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Meeting Point: on being a Chinese poet writing in English
Mary Jean Chan ‘I realize that the Other doesn’t really look for diversity – he is only looking for himself’ – Kei Miller As a Chinese poet now living in London, the question of ‘why don’t you write in Chinese?’ has come to the fore at poetry readings and literary events in the…
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‘Very gently struck / the quay night bell’: W.S. Graham & The Nightfishing
2018 will mark the centenary of the poet W.S. Graham (1918-1986). Graham – a Scot who for most of his adult life lived in west Cornwall – was neglected in his lifetime, but in recent years has become widely regarded as one of the most important UK poets of the twentieth century. In 1947, while…
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Into the Road Map’s Blank Regions: On Paul Farley
Photo credit: Urszula Soltys ‘Poetry And – The Red Egg’, a free talk and poetry reading with two award-winning writers, poet Paul Farley and scientist Tim Birkhead, takes place on Tuesday 28 November at King’s Chapel on the Strand, 7-8.30pm. Curated by Ruth Padel, Paul and Tim will share their passion for birds, birds’…
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‘The Mystery’: a poem by Paul Farley
Photo credit: Urszula Soltys ‘Poetry And – The Red Egg’, a free talk and poetry reading with two award-winning writers, poet Paul Farley and scientist Tim Birkhead, takes place on Tuesday 28 November at King’s Chapel on the Strand, 7-8.30pm. Curated by Ruth Padel, Paul and Tim will share their passion for birds, birds’…