Eternal Life Slowly the leaves grow yellow and fall,and I hear leaders of corporate empiresfully confident of achieving eternal lifefor select customers in their lifetime.But in the Aveyron in the year 1851,most peasants the traveller encounteredexpressed a sincere longing for death. Lone swan on the Goudenhandreilifting off, permitted by ancient lawto tear open the pristine…

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at Suzanne Pleshette in The Birds I. Comes the silver Aston-Martinand the vague apprehensionthat some terror is on the wing.Don’t they ever stop migrating,these bottle-blondes from the city,flying down the highway, san souci?   II. While the heiress slept though transcontinental flights, she ran aground. A slash of dirt on…

Mat Riches recently published his debut collection, Collecting the Data, with Red Squirrel Press. Below are two new poems. Sticks The time to cut a stickis when you see it in the hedgehe said on one of our walks,before they became too much. A countryside carpe diem;it was the soundest advicehe ever gave me, a…

  For the latest event in the Wild Court Reading Series, King’s College London lecturer and T.S. Eliot Prize winner Anthony Joseph will be reading from his forthcoming Precious and Impossible: New & Selected Poems, published by Bloomsbury this autumn. Anthony will also be in conversation with Luke Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at…

He Could Leave You Tomorrow He buys me roses; I forget to put them in water,once again too caught-upin my tangled and scattered thoughts.They’re beautiful but– a little too pinkas if they’ve got prickedon a poisoned spindleperforming an ideaof everlasting beauty.I know soon enough they’ll be wiltedand that’s probably why I don’t water them,so I…

Early Doors They always said the larks were here in spirit,having disappeared while meadows were transformedto streets and drains when this became a gardened suburb. Heading for their allotment, my neighbours rose earlyto catch the day’s best light. On relished mornings,blessed with beginning, the earth still damp with dewwelcomed their trays of tender seedlings. Each…

Image © Sophie Davidson Never More, Sailor after Walter de la Mare and Tristan Corbière So this mariner, whether a sailor,captain, indeed whoever he may be,is dead below the wind-riddenbrine-infused sea.Come! so many have died mid-labourwith their boots on, for all the worldvividly alive, now under the weightof salted blankets, gale-hurled.A squall . . .…

Rite of Passage In Bali, it’s the filing of the caninesto limit boys’ wild adolescence.Among Cameroon’s Baka Pygmiesit’s the Spirit of the Forest killing boys to be reborn as men. And in ruralIllinois, 1964, the May grass green,resilient as Astro Turf, it’s initiationinto the fraternity of boys-who-mow. My turn now to untangle the Craftsmanfrom the…

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay Julian, there’s a lost language between us.                             I can’t walk through it but like a cloud it stays in my mind,circling round the differences that make me sad.                               Here, I am almost nothing among tousled hedgeson the sea’s edge, the calming marshes, the rawnesswhere I come to save myself.             I’m…

Lilburne’s Prayer Oh god; guide of hand and tongue through pamphlet, pillory and prisonwho walked with me from Kineton, washed me in blood all the way to Marston,who spoke within my Elizabeth as a happy band of offspringand never held my temper whether facing mob or king.God that cast the fortune which would not let…

Through an Office Window I am not at work hearing a service user saythe tremors were bad this morning, he’s been told it could be years or weeksbut he’s got no intention of stopping, I’m walking the ridge, crossing dependable fieldsbetween rooftops and clouds to the farm. And my dad is not in bed in the afternoonbut pottering in…

Alitheia The Greek truth –is it not every man’s truth,that the written word of the poetin its finality, will be,as we will come to know it,our only trusted ally? … War (her) bitten fingernails reap the scalp,religiously peeling at raw skin. Bloodfalls, like pellets into winter water. as a day ages, its waste journeys down…

Spring Offensive A day to go and it will be June.Yet we’re in March-to-April weather still.Will we get there in time?All the forecasts sayit’s going to happen soon. Spilling off the jetstreamto the east, ill winds sweepdrizzle into our minds.It seems in keeping with the timesthat nothing is as it should be. 31 May 2023…

We are delighted to have former New Zealand Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh as our featured reader at the inaugural event in the Wild Court Reading Series. The event – introduced and hosted by TS Eliot Prize 2022 winner Anthony Joseph – will take place at The Anatomy Museum on King’s College London’s Strand campus,…

The poem below was originally published in The Spectator and appears in Matthew Stewart’s second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, forthcoming from HappenStance Press in November. A launch for the collection will take place at The Devereux pub, Temple, London, from 7pm on Tuesday 7th November; free entry. Aveley Lane Lights turned on but…

Versions of the poems below appear in Teresa Forrest’s debut pamphlet, The Stories in Between, forthcoming as part of the Five Leaves New Poetry series. The pamphlet will be launched on the evening of 28th November at Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham. Details here. In Ballerin Village The fat-bellied range in my grandmother’s house worked hard,to…

The poem below is from John Greening’s The Interpretation of Owls: Poems 1977-2022, edited by Kevin Gardner (Baylor University Press, 2023). The volume’s UK launch will take place at Hatchards, Piccadilly, on the evening of Thursday 9th November. Tickets include a discount on the book and are available here. Fairey The first public conjuring show…

Veneto Bassano is my birthplace wherethe Dal Ponte family were born and worked on the six paintingsI counted at the Louvre years ago: true sketches of 16th-century folklife,religious works; realistic as photos. Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana,in all its majesty, hangs in the room of the Mona Lisa; I turned aroundto see Tiziano’s name,…

Image © Gerry Cambridge Scrap Your last words to me were written, not spoken,a paper cut severing us and our shared 14 yearsbecause you felt it was for the good of us both,how your happiness lay beyond this sacrifice. Two years on I hope your forecast proved true,it didn’t for me. I kept your letter…

Siena 1978 ‘the red-haired girl from Palaeography’ The photograph was taken when the sun broke throughAnd shone on the copper red of her hairAs we sat in the Piazza del CampoAfter seven days of unrelieved rainfall.We’d come out from seeing the LorenzettiFrescos: Good and Bad Government,And the attendant golden-haired angelsSurrounding the Virgin and her child.…