Ruth Padel: It was a great pleasure, this May, to go to the 4th Miłosz Festival, in honour of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most iconic poets, in Kraków, the city to which Czesław Miłosz returned at the end of his life, and an enormous honour to give this lecture there, the very…

Victoria Kennefick: The experience of reading Sarah Howe’s début poetry collection, Loop of Jade, is akin to that of the speaker in ‘Mother’s Jewellery Box,’ the first poem in the book, cracking open ‘the twin lids’ of the ‘black lacquer box’ to discover a cornucopia of minute and significant treasures. From the offset, Howe’s gift…

  Robert Selby   ‘The loss of imperial power,’ said Seamus Heaney in a Berkeley lecture of 1976, ‘the failure of economic nerve, the diminished influence of Britain inside Europe, all this has [begun to force English poets] to explore not just the matter of England, but what is the matter with England.’ Heaney was…