Poetry And, the much-loved public events series at King’s chaired by Professor of Poetry Ruth Padel, is teaming up with the Obsidian Foundation – a new foundation for Black poets – for a free online event on 13th May, presented by Obsidian’s founder Nick Makoha and featuring Ariana Benson, Zakia Carpenter-Hall, and Saddiq…

  ‘Poetry And – Women in the Arctic’, a free event – in partnership with Hercules Editions – curated by Ruth Padel, with poet Helen Mort, travel author and biographer Sara Wheeler, and award-winning artist Emma Stibbon, takes place on Tuesday 16 October in King’s College London’s unique space Chapters on the Strand, 7-9.30pm. Please register for this free…

Photo credit: Urszula Soltys   ‘Poetry And – The Red Egg’, a free talk and poetry reading with two award-winning writers, poet Paul Farley and scientist Tim Birkhead, takes place on Tuesday 28 November at King’s Chapel on the Strand, 7-8.30pm. Curated by Ruth Padel, Paul and Tim will share their passion for birds, birds’…

‘Poetry And – The Red Egg’, a free talk and poetry reading with two award-winning writers, scientist Tim Birkhead and poet Paul Farley, takes place on Tuesday 28 November at King’s Chapel on the Strand, 7-8.30pm. Curated by Ruth Padel, Tim and Paul will share their passion for birds, birds’ eggs and the mystery of…

Thaddeus O’Sullivan, edited by Ruth Padel Ruth: This essay sprang from a film-maker’s notes about directing. It has been written up by a poet eager to understand and is based on a conversation the two of us had, at a POETRY AND event, in King’s College Chapel, on St Patrick’s Day 2016. Thaddeus O’Sullivan is…

Ellen Cranitch I once had to interview Glyn Maxwell. I’d just read this in his book On Poetry: ‘I think a poem you read has to meet the same criteria as a person you meet: did it mean anything to you, matter to you, affect you? If it didn’t do those things you won’t remember…

James Nixon There is something very modern about Alun Lewis’s poem ‘All day it has rained …’ It is a poem that bares the isolation and boredom of the soldier’s life for readers in as poignant and stark a manner as the feature film Jarhead did for noughties cinemagoers. Lewis himself was for a time…

Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values. Most scientists long ago abandoned the attempt to understand why nature has so carefully segregated the hemispheres, or how to…

Aviva Dautch Michael Symmons Roberts’s first collection, published in 1993, is Soft Keys and its title poem could be read as an ars poetica not just for this book but for his entire oeuvre. His punning wordplay encompasses islands in Florida, piano music, Biblical keys to ‘heaven and hell’, metaphysical keys that ‘open up the…

Ruth Padel In The Art of Writing, written in the 3rd century AD, the Chinese poet Lu Ji wrote about strategies for finding words which seem “to belong with each other”. In 1942, in a key passage of Little Gidding reflecting his experience as air-raid warden in the London blitz, T.S. Eliot embellishes and embodies…

Jerry Brotton’s A History of the World In Twelve Maps was reviewed by Tom Holland for The Guardian. Holland noted that Brotton’s “idea of tracing within maps the patterns of human thought and civilisation is a wonderful one” Some of the maps discussed include:  Aligihiero Boetti, Mappa, 1970s   Ptolemy, world map, 14th century Hereford…

Joey Connolly The first poem in Kei Miller’s first Carcanet book, There Is an Anger that Moves, opens like this: In this country you have an accent; in the pub, a woman mocks it. You want to ignore her but wonder how many hearts is she being bold for? What thematics are we being given…

Richard Scott: It’s been over ten years since Daljit Nagra wrote his poem Look We Have Coming to Dover and it seems more urgent now than ever. In 2004, Nagra’s fantastical invasion of immigrants all ‘stowed in the sea’ but hoping to get ‘blair’d in the cash’ spoke to the slow migration of thousands of…