Poem of the week: Anne Cluysenaar's Diary Poems
Two entries from a poet's calendar use similar forms and language to engage with matters very grand and very smallAnne Cluysenaar's recent collection, Touching Distances: Diary Poems is a poet's...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Sonnet of Irreconcilables by Christopher Middleton
A classical music broadcast foregrounds fears of a cheapening of culture, and the possibility of mass brutalisation, in this late work from a poet with a unique and original voiceThis week's poem,...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Old Familiar Faces by Charles Lamb
Itself familiar from many anthologies, this sad and sweet descant on emotional losses has a singular magicI've often wondered how Charles Lamb came up with the form of this week's anthology favourite,...
View ArticlePoems of the week: Selima Hill
Four short and sharp looks at the social pressures weighing on young women are both witty and unsettlingSelima Hill's new collection The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism has an intriguing, faintly sexual...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Desert Flowers by Keith Douglas
Not long before his cruelly early death, Douglas matched the grim reality of war with a lyric passionSeventy years ago, the poet Keith Douglas was killed during the Allied invasion of Normandy on 9...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Ecce Puer by James Joyce
The death of his father and birth of his grandson prompted a return to poetry for Joyce and perhaps his finest work in the mediumBloomsday is 16 June, and what better poem to bring to a celebration of...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Silence by Lotte Kramer
The quiet pastoral of a river scene carries strong undercurrents of traumatic historical memoryA footnote to this week's poem by Lotte Kramer (published in The Rialto, No. 80, Spring-Summer 2014) tells...
View ArticlePoem of the week: A Birthmother's Catechism by Carrie Etter
In a haunting refrain of imagined questions and answers, a mother speculates how her son, adopted as a baby, feels about the parent he has never knownImagined Sons by Carrie Etter consists of a title...
View ArticlePoem of the week: A Dream by Matthew Arnold
A reverie on a Swiss mountain stream's descent is packed with sensuous details, carrying the reader down to an allegorical seaJohn Cowper Powys described Matthew Arnold in The Pleasures of Literature...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Dreamhorse by Jon Stallworthy
A children's toy provides the sunny springboard for a canter from the past into a future shadowed with the regrets of ageThis week's poem by Jon Stallworthy comes from his 2004 collection, Body...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Squawks and Speech by Ian Gregson
Peter is dead it is up to his abandoned parrot to detail his absence in a narrative of fits, starts and circlesThis week's poem, Squawks and Speech by Ian Gregson, is a vivid and disconcerting...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Virginia Woolf's Angels 1919 by Patricia McCarthy
Two contrasting varieties of 'angel' provide a dynamic image of the writer's sense of liberation, and subtle premonitions of her fateThis week's poem, Virginia Woolf's Angels 1919, comes from Patricia...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Book by FT Prince
A metaphysical love poem that orchestrates a wealth of feeling at the edges of body and soulThis week's poem, The Book, is by the South African poet, FT (Frank Templeton) Prince, who died 11 years ago...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Look-out by Ian House
This poem for peace eschews flag-waving and forced sentiment in favour of a still moment of ceasefireThis week's poem is Look-out by Ian House. It's from an unusual kind of commemorative anthology, The...
View ArticlePoem of the week: And if I did, What Then? by George Gascoigne | Carol Rumens
Wryly addressing a failure of romantic fidelity, with a very modern suspicion of work that 'smells of the inkhorn', this 16th-century lyric still fizzesGeorge Gascoigne (1539?1577) had a disappointing...
View ArticlePoem of the week: A Work of Fiction by Louise Glück
Glück's prose-poem combines meditation with anecdote as she remembers the moment of loss after finishing a novelThe expansive, leisurely poems in the new collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, by...
View ArticlePoem of the week: An Autumn Sunset by Edith Wharton
Best known for her fiction, the novelist was also an occasionally glorious poet, as this reflection on a fiery sky showsThere's a faint Keatsian flavour to this week's poem, An Autumn Sunset, by the...
View ArticlePoem of the week: A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General by...
This verdict on the passing of a publicly celebrated warrior is fuelled by a bracing contemptHate is as fine a motivator of the muse as love, and who better to provide an angry Poem of the week than...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Sea and the Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins
These ringing lines register the complex music of nature heard from the Welsh coast, set against the sordid human worldGerard Manley Hopkins was inspired by the charm and instress of Wales and also by...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Snow by Vidyan Ravinthiran
This fine, metaphysical work is as much a love poem as a love letter to that flaky white stuffI like the way this weeks poem begins by arguing not noisily, but with quietly casual insistence. Snow by...
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