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 […]

        Glossa   (in response to M. Eminescu)   Remember how you starfished your way across the pool of infinity bay how you and paradise made eye contact […]

  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 […]

        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. […]

        Big Talk   ‘when the mystics speak of worlds beyond scent and colour, the common man… cannot grasp their reality.’ ~ Rumi   Cosmologists say, ‘if the […]

        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. […]

  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 […]

        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, […]

©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, […]

         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 […]

        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 […]

    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 […]

        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 […]

        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 […]

  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 […]

    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 […]

 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 […]