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…

  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…

        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.…

         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…

  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…

        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…

  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…

  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…

      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…

Somewhere   Somewhere I once belonged. Who knows where? But like the map englobed My journey’s clear. I must find out. I must go there. For the past is space That must be crossed, Memory a face That’s not quite lost. Somewhere within me A remembered promise, Hard to misprove, A spoken word That is…

Twickenham Garden   We say it still, asking each other how many poems do you know by heart? Meaning how many can you recite from memory and something more implying passion not rote, the stronger with time. We say by heart, because we love – as lovers remember each other – from first sight. And…

Ahren Warner Three Poems  

Black Lagoon   ‘Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of a man-fish.’ But what did they tell you, Lucas? Out of the murk and mystery – was I all pleats and webbing, spats and pipes, my wet heart thrashing for lovely Julia Adams? I live here all alone. The water looks like screens look…

Seersucker   The seersucker suit turns down a drink. I’ve seen you drinking wine before though, someone says. Chicken and onions, talk of his Soho… receding, recession. It’s a plain dinner we receive, but good all the same.

Kindness I Suppose   These were the days pitched from morning straight into night, the days of vodka 7s in the shower, of you bringing the first good guitar any of us owned over and playing all day long— those broken songs it was, and lives too hard for us to have fully understood. A…

Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’   Lying there. Just knotted and crushed by speckled coils. A whistling snap and bite. I could have sworn I saw him smile. But wrong, that. That was only his last try, a grabbed breath short of shining back to a table’s warmth, the glow of…