Poetry

To sing the evening home, the lover prepares a pot of lentil stew – her phone lighting up to the news of love’s imminent arrival, imagining her lover’s...

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...

-for Heaney and the Peace Bridge Grey and greying sky reflected in choppy body, as our matching heron performs his balancing act for all to see. The Donegal hills,...

First published in the May 1960 issue of The London Magazine (Volume 7, No. 5). Through purblind night the wiper Reaps a swathe of water

Andy Armitage's pamphlet is among a number of new releases from the poetry press Half-Moon Books, which is based in Otley, West Yorkshire, where...

“Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?” ~ Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze Sabeen had a list of crimes to her name – She ran a...

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...

Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar.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...

Leave the world alone and close the door, seal this room from everything outside, nothing else exists but these four walls; we have eight hours and five...

In her latest collection, WITCH, Rebecca Tamás explores the triumphs and oppression, the strengths and weaknesses, the power and the fears that generations of...

'No-one has ever written a poem “On His Deafness”'; (David Lodge, Deaf Sentence). - - - - - - - - - - - - - -...

Today it’s snowing, snowing In Istanbul, Stamboul, Constantinople, New Rome, Byzantium. The city has mislaid its Jews And most of its Greeks. The bones of its Armenians Are long scattered. Somewhere far...

To Steven O’ Brien Grandfather Heaney dug deep Into his country’s soil Another man unlike him left home To burrow through an alien forest In search of enemies The alien...

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a prolific poet and writer of essays, criticism and reviews during the twentieth century. Described as ‘England’s other Poet Laureate’,...

I only like imaginary men, the ones who think my art is the most transporting thing they have ever seen, and I am exactly as hilarious as I actually, actually am. Even then,...

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...

Synopsis People are taking sedatives in boats Going to America. Their names drift back to me— Hollowed out, unpronounceable. I walk through the crowds in the arcades And on the...

      My Kodak Brownie didn’t work but I have a picture of the green dress. The film was black and white, my memory is colour. We’d eaten our lunch...

Clitoral, like finding a small, hidden part of myself in someone else. Nerve-wet, fleshy - for a white guy, and stained between life-lines with red wine gone black. Only this...

He had that majority under the loquat, rain falling like a god in gold, the breakthrough sun, and the spin on things, tar growing a fur. Loitered...

from Norwegian / oh love, doesn't the fact that the world is so big, / laid out like ripe fruit / make you want to stay? / from Arabic / how I long to cleanse you / in the waters of the Tigris / how I long, as though you were a small and / priceless artefact, / to take you in my arms / from Ant-speak / I will carry you carry you / through legions of grass / protect you from the thumb, / the sole; the eager-feathered bird / will not swoop for you / from American / love is just love, and I'm in it / for the ride, o.k.? that tells me just exactly

Bez, post-Victorian Boz, Viz incarnate / and Viceroy of the sinew, what is the name / for light that detracts from the stars? / Urban pollutants de-lux distant galaxies / as we walk after / parties through school fields, / via car parks, past vacant vats & waste lots [...]

Layla Benitez-James Trapeze A rabbit might be taken away from a butcher by two different people and prepared separately; I mean, the structural integrity of my...

With her eyes closed she has been staring at the lamps on the ceiling for days. By now they must look like Sufi dervishes whirling in white to...