Poetry

Michael O’Neill (1953-2018) was a very gifted poet and a brilliant literary critic, who was Professor of English at the University of Durham, where...

Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets Tupelo Press, 2018, edited by Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve The news in recent months has been splashed with images of...

A huge thanks to everyone who entered this year's poetry prize! We had so many high quality entries this year which resulted in a...

I It’s just the same old air a person breathes, roughly the same respiratory system, steady compared with ours, the same idea of hindrance (flesh the breath must...

There is nothing in this room for those who have not learned to sing without thinking, who don’t know where the music fits in their bodies, how to...

After Alison Watt, ‘Venus’ (2015) Their backs against the grass, she felt a pull, as if the leaves on the trees were lodestones, the hairs on her skin...

This is not throwing plates, how you ask me. Too late for that. This is a whisper dissection. This is a beggar’s hand in my mouth. This is...

An old lady writes me in a spidery style, Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand Pellucid as paper, travelling on a skein Of such...

Weekends, growing up, I'd watch my father as he sat on a low stool in the veranda surrounded by half a dozen pairs of shoes, their laces...

Can you rinse away this city that lasts like blood on the bitten tongue? ~ Agha Shahid Ali Delhi, where parrots lift the weight of tombs, poets offer daggers to deepen...

Over a cup of Marco Polo And a bowl of bird's nest soup, Listening to the world as a whole Through the particular, I laugh Into the telephone...

The clouds have swum down from the sky and rolled onto their backs in the streets, begging for someone to rub their fluffy bellies A day...

  He was patient as a dead bird. He perched on the ledge of bottom and rocked.  He was the missed flight. He was silence calmed down. He loved...

There’s a stream by the Avon ward Where I stand to watch the water flow And unwind the whirlpools of my mind When it’s dark I let...

(R.I.P. Derek Walcott: January 23, 1930 – March 17, 2017) Deep seas of yesteryears wash new froth on your home shores. Egrets, sea gulls, circle the...

What Follows Deer cull, Wytham 7th February 2015 A moment’s pause before a fist of swallows spooks the sky above the nearest trees. Something shakes the fence-bound rows, bursts through...

Raymond Antrobus is a poet, educator, curator, editor and investigator of missing sounds, who is a founding member of Chill Pill as well as the Keats...

We look up, & beyond the maple trees & the brick steeples with weathervane roosters, clouds billow as sleeping monsters. Not the sort of billowing that clouds...

The air has cleared today, Over the city, and in my head, I see the trees breathe The invisible greenness of air, I feel the taste of sunlight On...

Two Poems, Philip Larkin London Magazine / January 1970 / Vol.9 No.10     Philip Larkin, (1922-1985) a prolific poet and writer of essays,...

Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar. February there is a white pigeon opened like a book on the...

Response to Finding a Fossil at Writhlington Coal Batches: A Fossil (a Fern) on Writhlington Batches Re-Take (Pt.II) Time not as we know it but another time...

after Wu Hao’s Duke Cups The china cup is frilled at the rim like tired lace and all over it ceramic tentacles extend to whisper if you drink...

Yesterday we spoke to artist and poet Momtaza Mehri, who has recently been announced as Young People’s Laureate for London, who will take over from poet and musician Caleb Femi in the role which was launched by Spread The Word Last Year.