Spotlight II: Dostoyevsky Wannabe
The London Magazine has long been a champion of emerging writers and independent publishers, stretching back to the 1950s and 60s, when young writers...
Archive | Poetry | Peter Bland
Peter Bland, the New Zealand writer and actor, has written extensively over his long career, and has been lauded with many accolades, among them...
Acrostic by Sudeep Sen
(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...
Archive | Philip Larkin | Two Poems: To The Sea, Annus...
Two Poems, Philip Larkin London Magazine / January 1970 / Vol.9 No.10
Philip Larkin, (1922-1985) a prolific poet and writer of essays,...
They Would Have All That by Mary Jean Chan
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...
The Daylight Comes With Me by John Darwin
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...
Towpath by Neil Burns
I
The Lagan - a muddy silt river -
Barrel of roll-tide, ribs of clean branches
Poke up water jutting. On the towpath
I glean a warm wet...
Archive | Poetry | The Wiper by Louis MacNeice
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
At Aya Sofia by Edward Lucie-Smith
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...
Poetry | Coot by Iain Twiddy
Iain Twiddy
Coot
It didn’t need to be a big ripple
nudging its reed-nest for the overstep
to plop into the up-plump of the breast,
and the coot to...
We Wait for Poets by Manash Bhattacharjee
prophets have retired
so do not wait for yours to come to you
~ Ashraf Fayadh (translated by Mona Kareem)
In our country, a prince,
Dara Shikoh, had...
The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar by Imogen Cassels
Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar.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...
Through it by Ila Colley
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...
Playing Safe | Hugo Williams
I liked not liking you much.
I liked playing safe. Not being bowled over by you
was part of the thrill.
At the King’s Palace Hotel
you couldn’t...
Eros and Asbo by Miles Burrows
As a man under a restraining order
Still follows his ex about from day to day
I stalk your shadow as if you could show up
In...
Counting by Ralf Webb
April doesn't rain.
We have spent days watching
the truant magpies comb
our cat-eyed neighbour’s lawn
for bottle caps and burnt-out tin foil.
The cloying sun has not coaxed...
Poetry | A Series of Ekphrastic Poems on Eileen Agar’s Marine...
Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, editor, and critic. The following series of poems was inspired by a visit to the exhibition Virginia Woolf:...
Interview | Raymond Antrobus
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 Are The Cenotaphs by Aaron Fagan
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...
Caries by Fiona Sampson
Little hole little well
of dark staining the lacquer
of my tooth little confessor
coming close and coming close
why are you pursuing me
interrogator of the nerve
in its...
Review | Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets
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...
Home from Greece by Robert Selby
Above whitewashed, tabby-haunted Kamari,
I wearied of the incessant inversions
in Pope’s Homer, and left my self-improvement’s
cooling terrace to the night, now drawing in
here too, across...
Poetry | Woman by Manash Bhattacharjee
Woman
“It’s easy, impossible, hard, worth trying.”
~ Wislawa Szymborska, “Portrait of a Woman” (1976)
She is intimately attached
To night and day.
Only...
Evening Light
Evening Light
Brave bat in a bowler hat
Blood shot eyes question
What time does this light
Depart?
The light descends elsewhere
Its shadow rising here
The bat changes into an...