Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring is set at that moment in Moscow when the change of seasons is marked by a quickening sense of liquefying movement: the melting of ice, fluidity of streams, the unsealing and opening of windows [...]

The most unexpected, and as it turned out inspiring, book I read last year was Airmail (Bloodaxe, 2013), a collection of letters between the American poet Robert Bly and the Swedish Nobel Laureate, Tomas Tranströmer. There is a similarity in the practice [...]

In a recent feature in the FT, a journalist quotes the painter Frank Auerbach as saying ‘some people are natural draughtsmen. I sometimes feel sorry for them – you have
to work through that to something deeper. I don’t know how you would [...]

Judging the Poetry London competition was like going on a journey. Sometimes I recognised the terrain; often it was over-familiar. Then suddenly I’d get a jolt and wonder where I was. I’d try to get my bearings, feeling the excitement [...]

Jennifer Militello for ‘A Dictionary of Having Been Prey in the Voice of the Grandmother’ Alex Toms for ‘Becoming Sei’ NJ Hynes for ‘The Hands Washing Us’ David HW Grubb for ‘Joe Boy Learns His Words’

In a recent collection of essays Al Alvarez (adept at poker and extreme sport, and advocate in 1966 of new American poets ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’) describes the writer alone with his own, rather dismal company. ‘For five or six [...]

Poetry London started life back in 1988 as Poetry London Newsletter, produced with the aid of an Amstrad PCW and intermittent access to a photocopier. It was a project born of enthusiasm by a group of poets interested in creating a space [...]

Observe my delicate Koong-see, whey-faced beside the lattice fence and warming in her palm my gift of an ivory bead.   In the palace garden’s midnight blue the apple tree lets fall its fruit as Koong-see walks and thinks of [...]

‘Who wants poets in lean years?’ That was how Michael Hamburger translated the phrase ‘wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?’, from Hölderlin’s poem ‘Bread and Wine’. ‘What are poets for in a destitute time?’ is how the question reappears with different [...]

The process of judging a poetry competition can feel like a bombardment: hundreds of poems all clamouring for attention, almost crying out Choose me! I’m the poem you want! It’s something of an emotional rollercoaster too: being suddenly sucked in to so [...]