Essays
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‘Parts of us regenerate, others don’t’: On Dan O’Brien
James Peake The photojournalist and Pulitzer-prize winner, Paul Watson, is a friend, collaborator and in “complicated ways, almost family” to the poet and playwright Dan O’Brien. […]
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Peter Redgrove: Dreaming in a Wakeful World
Peter Redgrove, sometime in the 1970s John Greening discusses Peter Redgrove and his poetry. Based on a talk given to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Falmouth […]
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‘All our past lives’: on Emily Berry’s ‘Unexhausted Time’
Nicola Healey I have long admired the way Emily Berry’s poetry handles complex thought, not just feeling, within carefully considered sentences, her intelligent sensitivity to our interior […]
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‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’: reading A. E. Housman
Nell Prince I partially recall A Shropshire Lad’s thirty-first poem, ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’, because it’s in a cinematic adaptation of Alan Bennet’s […]
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In Defence of Inspiration
Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash Sarah Fletcher I want to start with an anecdote: I was at the pub after a poetry reading in London. I […]
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‘Marginalised and Pigeonholed’: a re-evaluation of Evangeline Paterson
Matthew Stewart urges the re-evaluation of Evangeline Paterson as a major poet of her generation Blurbs tend to get a justified bashing these days for their breathless […]
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The voyage to ‘eternal silence’: Male heroism and the evasion of death in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’
Ulixes mosaic at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. 2nd century AD. Lily Searstone Tennyson’s nuanced reworking of Homeric epic in his Ulysses (1842) is monumental in […]
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An excerpt from ‘Wendy Cope’ by Rory Waterman: on her ‘Saint Hilda of Whitby’
Rory Waterman writes: This is a slightly edited short excerpt from my recent book Wendy Cope (Liverpool University Press, 2021), reprinted here with thanks to the publisher. In 2018, […]
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A psycho-geographer slipping the coordinates of time: on Tim Cumming
Julian Stannard ‘You sit/down to put into words your reckoning.’ I don’t read Tim Cumming with any expectation of the anodyne. The title of his latest […]
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Handbrake turn on a hair-pin bend: Lavinia Greenlaw and poetic feat
This essay was originally published by Wild Court on 1st March 2016. Lavinia Greenlaw will be taking part in the latest online ‘Poetry And…’ event, curated by Ruth Padel, […]
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Discovering George Mackay Brown
John Greening marks the centenary of the birth of George Mackay Brown (1921-1996), which falls this Sunday, 17th October. The June bee Bumps in the pane […]
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Poems of Community and Historical Memory: an interview with Ian Parks
Portrait of Ian Parks by Andrew Farmer Ian Parks was born in 1959 and is the author of eight collections of poems, including Shell Island, The Exile’s […]
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‘Man of the region’: an appraisal of poet Will Burns
Will Burns in Wendover Woods, Buckinghamshire; photograph by Antonio Olmos Jake Morris-Campbell, April 2021 May 2020, the seventh week of lockdown measures. It’s about 9.30 in the morning and I’m […]
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Fog Theory: lost in the white gaze
Alycia Pirmohamed “Fog is a cloud that touches the ground.” A metaphor for vanishing, for dissolving, for withholding, fog often finds its way into my poetry. […]
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Larkin Stateside: implicit dialogues between the poetries of Joshua Mehigan and Philip Larkin
Matthew Stewart From the perspective of English critics, poets and readers, it’s impossible to separate Philip Larkin’s qualities as a poet from his country of origin. He’s such […]
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The Poem Not Taken: Robert Frost and the inaugural tradition that isn’t
Rick de Villiers The sun shines on nothing new, saith the Preacher (and Samuel Beckett after him). But what if, on 21 January 1961, it hadn’t? What […]
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Fifty Forty: on the incomplete histories of Carcanet and the LRB
Kevin Gardner One of the most pleasurable of readerly experiences is the subversive frisson of snooping into the conversational intimacy of an author’s letters. When the initial […]
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On the poetry of George Kendrick
Matthew Stewart Let’s take a forgotten poet who went from publishing with Carcanet, garnering a PBS Recommendation and receiving excellent reviews in the broadsheets in the process, […]
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Ana Blandiana: Poet, Civic Figure, Woman
Photo: Miguel Ruiz Durán Andreea Iulia Scridon Though her name may only be familiar to relatively few readers globally, Romanian poet, essayist, and translator Ana Blandiana […]
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‘Like walking in the rain’: César Vallejo, Carolyn Forché, and the problem of witness
César Vallejo in 1929; the cover of Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us (Harper & Row, 1982) Jonathan Hitchens The very first couplet of A Man […]