Poem of the week: Fish by Peter Finch
A witty riff on the avant garde, and Wales, sparkles and spitsFishHe wrote the things decades backHe did them underwaterHe pulled them out like sonic fish,Dada hake, Bauhaus trout, Schwitters...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Antidotes to Fear of Death by Rebecca Elson
An intense engagement with mortality, by a young writer taken too soon, blends religious and scientific imageryAntidotes to Fear of DeathSometimes as an antidoteTo fear of death,I eat the...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Letter to My Daughter by William Palmer
A parent’s regretful words, ruing miscommunication, sing with clarity and concisionLetter to My DaughterThe hare limped trembling through the frozen grass…Continue reading...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Easter by Róisín Kelly
A chance sighting of an ex-lover sets off very ambivalent emotions, but also a kind of miracleEasterYou walk by holding a bunch of flowersnever knowing that you’ve just performed a miracle.Are those...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Can I fight the power? by Kev Inn
An internal dialogue wrestles with the question of how to contend with undeclared racismCan I fight the power?A meditation on ‘post-raciality’Continue reading...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Safe Houses by Bernard O’Donoghue
Wondering where the house keys are sets off a chain of associations leading to a much larger questionSafe HousesI find that I have started recentlyto keep spare keys to the front doorin several...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The New Divan by Edwin Morgan
To mark what would have been his 100th birthday, three pieces from his 100-part ‘war poem’ that is also about a forbidden loveThree poems from The New Divan1.Hafiz, old nightingale, what fires there...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Chess Player by Howard Altmann
A peaceful, lightly surreal scene is shadowed with wider forebodingThe Chess PlayerThey’ve left. They’ve all left.The pigeon feeders have left.The old men on the benches have left.The white-gloved...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Of Bronze — and Blaze (319) by Emily Dickinson
This fizzing response to seeing the Northern Lights steps carefully around cosmic visions319Of Bronze — and Blaze — The North — tonight — So adequate — it forms — So preconcerted with itself — So...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Ambala by Shanta Acharya
Two young women’s deep-felt friendship begins at college before a struggle with traumatic injury is revealedAmbalaShe burst into my room dancing, humming,a force of nature, her dark skin...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Godhuli Time by Srinivas Rayaprol
An anglophone Indian poet, mentored by William Carlos Williams in the US, considers an Indian sunset in a voice that spans centuries and continentsGodhuli TimeIt is the cow-dust hourAnd smoke lies...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Poem by Paul Bailey
A simply spoken meditation on the presence of death throughout a life is told with unpretentious witPoemMy last of days was there to contemplatewhen words absconded from meas long ago as...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Skipping Without Ropes by Jack Mapanje
One of the Malawian author’s many prison poems, this defiant work builds into a forceful cry of rageSkipping Without RopesI will, I will skip without your ropeSince you say I should not, I cannotBorrow...
View ArticlePoem of the week: My pity is fake … by Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann
These stark lines set out a hard, unfinished personal reckoning with atrocious memoryMy pity is fake,my poems, atonement.Mutation in my genesbegan in the gas chambers.Even before that,antigens...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Glacier by Gillian Clarke
Finding an unsettling symmetry between ecological catastrophe and the Aberfan Welsh pit village disaster, this sonnet conjures a fragile beauty GlacierThe miles-deep Greenland glacier’s lost its...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014 by Patricia Smith
The US poet’s reaction to the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown is a searing elegy for black lives destroyedIncendiary Art by Patricia Smith is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK, and...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Sic Vita by Henry David Thoreau
Before he became a pioneering ecological thinker, Thoreau was a poet and this youthful work contains the blueprint for his developmentSic Vita(“It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Sparrows of Butyrka by Irina Ratushinskaya
The Soviet-era dissident writer’s defiant prison lyric has lost none of its immediacy The Sparrows of ButyrkaNow even the snow has grown sad –Let overwhelmed reason go,And let’s smoke our cigarettes...
View ArticlePoem of the week: On First Knowing You’re a Teacher by Peter Kahn
The classroom’s unpredictable demands provide surprisingly poetical inspirationOn First Knowing You’re a TeacherRobert’s not coming in, my boss tells me.I’m sitting sweating in a windowless office,a...
View ArticlePoem of the week: If I Were to Meet by Grace Nichols
Imagining an impossible encounter with herself as a child, the poet discreetly evokes the girl’s intense lifeIf I Were to MeetIf I were to meet the ghostof my childhood runningwith slipping...
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