It’s the autumn term: tutoring students in poetry in a mysterious village, Glyn’s world is transformed by the arrival of Keats in a country lane; Emily Dickinson and other poets …
Milk by Emma Jeremy
It was easy not to like him, because of the milk. It bled from every pore of him, thousands of tiny waterfalls of milk. Milk-falls. You would think that he …
The Detectives by Jane Yeh
No matter where we go, it always looks like California. Get in the car and drive. Our invisible friend Comes with us everywhere, like a shadow. He tells us how …
Skylight by Natalie Shapero
YOU DESERVE IT was what she said when I called a cab at 10 p.m. instead of hopping the 89 bus, which lets off six blocks from my place – …
On Radical Tenderness: Andrea Brady talks to Andrew Spragg
Andrea Brady’s work explores the potential of poetry to transform our lives, politics and communities. It also refuses to ignore the tensions that exist in the foundations and functions of …
Salve to Exile: Momtaza Mehri on Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf’s memory work
Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf The Sea-Migrations/Tahriib (Translated by Clare Pollard, with Said Jama Hussein and Maxamed Xasan ‘Alto’) Bloodaxe £12.00 Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf is a contemporary Somali poet who …
Poetry London Spring 2018 Readings – Thursday 8 February
PLEASE NOTE: Leontia Flynn sadly will no longer be appearing at this event. However, she’ll be replaced by two new wonderful readers, detailed below. Poetry London launches its Spring 2018 …
New Magazine and Subscription Pricing
As you’ll probably know by now, we have developed a new design for the magazine to ensure the quality of its content is matched by the all-round attractiveness of its …
The Twilight Sleep II by Alice Tomlinson
We bring them in, bursting with promise, sweet in sherbet-coloured nighties, bright spring flowers picked during a gale. We smooth wild hair and swaddle pretty heads in bales of soft …
Dare by Mark Pajak
You dare me to cross Bently road naked. Its three a.m. and we’re the only two awake and its icy and streetlights shy down their yellow. On the tarmac my …
I Need the Courage of a Cremated Woman by Natalya Anderson
Marguerite called me last night from her rotary dial. It’s been several moons since I heard her rosary beads dancing with the cord of that phone. Marguerite has been dead …
The memory-foam pillow (3rd prize: 2017 competition)
– Katherine Pierpoint
Cages (2nd prize: 2017 Competition)
– Jack Houston
Crocodile (1st prize: 2017 competition)
I know how I will die then in a death roll scales to my cheek claws sunk into my pale shoulders water burning my throat like whiskey the uncountable rows …
Poetry London 2017 Competition: Judges Report
Judging a poetry competition is like putting your ear to a seashell to hear what the sea has to say: a strange, choric and slightly unreal experience, a multitude of …
Metaphors of the Spirit: Shara McCallum on two Poet Laureates of Jamaica
Mervyn Morris Peelin Orange: Collected Poems Carcanet £14.99 Lorna Goodison Collected Poems Carcanet £14.99 I first encountered poems by Mervyn Morris and Lorna Goodison over twenty years ago, at a …
Editorial: Our rubble-strewn hearts
In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart recounts a strange haunting. It concerns one of Nicholas Abraham’s psychoanalytic patients: an amateur geologist and entomologist, who spends his …
The Experiment by Jane Draycott
Dearests I have arrived. Some things have already been taken: the small blue bowls and airmail stationery, the summer tablecloth (only slightly blue) and the darkness is now quite cleared. …
Augurs by Oli Hazzard
during the course of a particular day the word shapen happens sharpens how I see the snow how I know it is what it is only listening to it glistening …