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Poem of the week: Night and Morning by Robert Browning
Two perspectives on either side of a nocturnal liaison make up a strikingly contrasting diptychThis week's choice is an intriguing diptych by Robert Browning. "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at...
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Poem of the week: Hymn of Hymns by John Rodker
Rodker's eclectic denunciation of religion's repressions, written after the first world war, is funny and unexpectedly sympatheticDon't believe the title of this week's poem. "Hymn of Hymns," by John...
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Poem of the week: Relational Epistemology by Heather Phillipson
Phillipson's humorous description of an intellectual family making a cake is leavened by her fondness for her subjectsThis week's poem, "Relational Epistemology" by Heather Phillipson, is almost as...
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Poem of the week: The Unquiet Grave
Concise and musical, this is one of the most popular versions of a much-reworked ballad of aching love and lossThis week's poem is among the most beautiful of the "Child" ballads. It's an unusually...
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Poem of the week: Sonnet 30 by Robert Sidney
A lover's lament to personified 'Absence', the melancholy here is contained by a remarkably elegant rhetorical techniqueThis week's poem comes from a collection of sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies...
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Poem of the week: Boy Soldier by Fred D'Aguiar
This shocking portrait of a child locked into a brutal cycle of war restrains its language, but its outrage is palpableThis week's poem "Boy Soldier" is by Fred D'Aguiar and comes from his new...
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Poem of the week: two cinquains by Adelaide Crapsey
The unjustly neglected early modernist developed from haiku her own form, a vessel for pared-down vernacular observationWhen a loved daughter was christened in Brooklyn Heights in 1878, the name...
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Poem of the week: The Fetching by Graham Mort
Mort's mythic poem of the sea is a story of creation overshadowed, a world where language cannot yet be trustedThis week's poem "The Fetching" is by Graham Mort and comes from his 2007 collection,...
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Luminary by RS Thomas: Poem of the week
With its melodious free verse, this love poem's imagery extends beyond an individual woman to wider natureAmong the publications marking the centenary of RS Thomas's birth in 1913, especially...
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Poem of the week: Pissarro's Orchards by Marianne Burton
An impressionist's manifesto for more naturalistic, less grandiose painting also makes the case for – and expresses – a more immediate poetryThis week, it's time to relax and enjoy a fruit-laden summer...
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Poem of the week: The Man by Maitreyabandhu
A quiet portrait of isolated life uses coolly observed, ordinary details to build an unexpectedly suspenseful narrativeThis week's poem "The Man" is by the Buddhist writer Maitreyabandhu, whose first...
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Poem of the week: An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope
Whilst counselling restraint, Pope's famously stinging wit is here trained on targets that can still be seen todayThis week's choice is an extract from Part Three of Alexander Pope's An Essay on...
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Poem of the week: Elegy by Sidney Keyes
Candid and unsentimental, the teenage poet's tribute to his departed grandfather is striking in its originalitySidney Keyes was a few weeks old when his mother died of peritonitis, and his father,...
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Poem of the week: Actaeon by George Szirtes
A version of the Greek myth, refocused through the eyes of an ageing 21st-century man, retells the story suggestively slantFrom Victorian times at least, women writers have been retelling classical...
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Poem of the week: In a Garden by Amy Lowell
Despite using the precise details and sharp focus of imagism, this is nonetheless a rhapsodic love lyricThis week's poem comes from Amy Lowell's second collection, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914)....
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Poem of the week: Girl and Grandmother at the National Gallery by Meg Bateman
Published here with its Gaelic version, 'Nighean is Seanmhair aig a' Ghailearaidh Nàiseanta', this is a sharp look at youth and ageThe Edinburgh-born poet Meg Bateman is acclaimed for her work in...
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Poem of the week: Lock Me Away by Clive James
An unsettling meditation on the mental disarrangements of encroaching senility manages a rare balancing of poetry and comedyAs a poet, Clive James shares some qualities with the English "Movement"...
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Poem of the week: The Faerie Queene, Canto XI, Book One, by Edmund Spenser
A fearsome closeup of the dragon facing down the Redcrosse knight makes full use of Spenser's nine-line stanza formThis week we're looking at stanzas X-XV from Canto XI, Book One, of Edmund Spenser's...
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Poem of the week: Kite-Flyers of Cengkareng by Iain Bamforth
A description of boys flying homemade kites against the Jakarta dusk juxtaposes the past and future of globalised AsiaThis week's poem, Kite-Flyers of Cengkareng by Iain Bamforth, uses an almost...
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Poem of the week: Łódź by Sujata Bhatt
This meditation on horror and healing, set in a Jewish cemetery that was part of the Łódź Ghetto, achieves a tentative blessingSujata Bhatt's newly published Collected Poems explores, with remarkable...
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