Poetry

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...

"Clarify your intent," — Lama Chopra, our meditation teacher, rang the bell for us to sit — "the Reaper was once an old friend." My...

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...

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...

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

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.

Lifesaving They don’t do it anymore, breathe into the mouth to save. We had learnt it reluctantly, lined up beside a recumbent dummy, waiting to take our turn 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...

My Father was a boxer. He taught me how to box when I was nine. This commonality, and the need to impress him, informed a great deal. When Charles Bukowski at an event asked me to ‘take it outside’ over a girl, I said okay. I was 21 and shy. Everyone at the party kept telling him [...]

The following poem is taken from the anthology Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City, ed. Claire Armitstead, Arcadia Books, London, 2019. Ferdous...

Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, editor, and critic. The following series of poems was inspired by a visit to the exhibition Virginia Woolf:...

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...

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...

As I leave for Calcutta I think the city Always that other city Its river Ganga Always my other river Howrah Bridge What a colonial cradle A Raj suspended Kipling's imperial joy Hoogly...

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...

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...

Replete Enough of beauty - I have devoured small boats curtseying at anchor, green palace-dotted hills swarming the spice-scented shore of Asia Minor. I couldn’t chew another mouthful of waves,...

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...

There are times when I remember / all of them fondly enough for them / to be here once more, all around / this house, which is far away from / where they were around, and at this hour, / far away again from my childhood fears. / Now I can just think of them. And / what is thinking except the mind’s / imaginings, the heart speaking to itself / in the darkness of default, fearing alien / ears, the world’s participation in the shame / of being touched in front of others? [...]

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...

Old man, you surface seldom. / Then you come in with the tide's coming / When seas wash cold, foam- / Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, / A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves / Crest and trough. Miles long [...]

Last Heron As the last heron goes, rooks fall from the sky like old black rags to carpet the new-laid field. ____________________Six days now, six days and nights without rain...

SUFFER THE COUNTRY   Suffer the curled up corpses of the tortured Suffer the cluttered ranks of the bound and the beaten Suffer the pleading eyes of those...

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...