The below poem is from Kim Moore’s forthcoming book-length sequence All the Men I Never Married.         All The Men I Never Married     No.21   Many […]

  This month Ruth Padel presents a major new work, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life, published in the 250th year of Beethoven’s birth. Below are two poems from it. […]

        Cults of Broadland   Fen raft spider   Let us venerate niche and otherness, local, patch-level occurrence – take the fen raft spider’s each simple eye, each […]

        The Roseland Peninsula   Tell me now – how often do we live in our own description? (Charles Tomlinson)   Looking west, the hill has no house […]

        Parable II   Here, lads, this song, No Eyes, reminds me when – this the common end to a normal night, being after, well in the new […]

Miranda Boulton / Island Series 12, 2018 / monoprint with gouache 39 x 48cm     Victoria Best   For a year and a half, between January 2017 and July […]

      from Windows   In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe… […]

        Garden God   Easing her flip-flops and ectopic body down the lamp-post, this grasshopper of a girl fringed with electricity from São Paulo and the South Seas […]

        Villa D’Este   More water, extravagant upshootings and downpourings of it, unbottled from the veins of a Borgia. Such force and power — though to what end […]

        Small griefs,   like looking up from the page and realising that the train, for quite some time, has been moving through the kind of scene that […]

          Mindfulness   Imagine truly being in the present, Our every thought upon a plane like one Mapped out by Euclid. Here, the garden sun Is eight […]

        The pool below the oak   Remember this: a driftway brimming cow parsley, bramble, its green beaded fruits; the field into which we clamber over wire, balance […]

image © Marlon James       The Water in the Pond Considers Narcissus   He looks at me and sees right through me, as if I am nothing, as […]

  Oliver writes: These are part of a ‘calendar’ of 12 poems set in Pitshanger Park, near where I live in Ealing. The Park is a place of leisure, but […]

        Re: Application FAO Dr Bob Pintle Senior Lecturer in Professional Creativity, Peterborough University and also dedicated to Dr Andrew Taylor, who did not inspire the poem   […]

        Chance: a dream   Yes. It was you. From its small source my heart rushed like a flooded beck. But would you lead a writing course? Or […]

    it’s hard at first to comprehend the sleeping man so horizontal all through the day so sleepy despite the hours spent seemingly at rest but like a meadow […]

Below are two poems from Lisa Kelly’s debut collecton A Map Towards Fluency, recently published by Carcanet. Colchester Native Oysters shucked. Poor man’s beef discardeddown guts and out again to […]

          Allotment Evening   You left the fire burning. The smoke stirred like a person moving among the brassicas and twine, and for a moment we thought […]

          Alfreton Town 0, Brackley Town 1 (89’)   for Lloyd Pettiford and Adam Tocock   The pitch is white where the sun’s not been seen on […]