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Essays
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Category: Essays
Nursing & Poetry
Romalyn Ante
I migrated to the UK at sixteen when my mother – a nurse in the National Health Service – brought the whole family from the Philippines. If Jane Austen’s ‘truth universally acknowledged’ is that a rich man must want a [...] -
Online ExclusiveCategory: Essays
Czesław Miłosz wrote that ‘a poet participates in the management of the estate of poetry’. However, when we roam around ‘the estate of poetry’, what do we encounter? Are the walls high and the gates locked? Is there an enormous flight of steep stairs with no lift in sight? Who is inside the estate, and who is outside the walls, waiting to be let in?
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Online ExclusiveCategory: Essays
Gaps in the Wall: Tarn MacArthur on forms of belonging and unbelonging in two South African poets
Tarn MacArthur
The best poetry of place is a poetry of negative capability; of intimacy leveraged not to cement a totalising perspective but to recast a vision of the world from a slant that reveals certain complexities and truths that have gone [...] -
Category: Essays
I Wake With His Name On My Tongue
Fred D’Aguiar
excerpted from Year of Plagues: A 2020 Memoir (HarperCollins, 2021) George Floyd, I add your name to a long and growing list of those killed by the police, though no less of a shock to see over nine minutes of an officer [...] -
Category: EssaysZoë Brigley reports on the possibilities and challenges of new technologies Talking to the Paris Review in 1982, Philip Larkin tells of his deep disdain for poetry readings, claiming that they ruin the personal relationship with a poem: ‘hearing it means you’re dragged [...]
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Category: EssaysMarvin Thompson reflects on the competing demands of creativity, community and activism in the year of the pandemic. In Wales, the first COVID-19 lockdown stretched from March to July, 2020. As a secondary school teacher, these months were filled with home [...]
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Category: EssaysMy parents, told already by their GP I was deaf in one ear and developmentally delayed (shown a cartoon horse in a field, I shouted ‘cow!’), reacted sceptically when it was suggested, too, that I had a speech impediment. For [...]
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Category: EssaysStephen Sexton on the mutable parameters of elegy Hail starts its patter and John joins me in the gazebo. I don’t know John, but we will talk, and thereafter nod hello to each other in the breakfast room, the lounge and [...]
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Category: EssaysJoey Connolly on the poems – and ways of reading – that inspire trust ‘It is more shameful to distrust your friends than be deceived by them’ – François de La Rochefoucauld, although really I’m quoting from the Denise Riley poem ‘Lines [...]
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Category: EssaysKaren Solie writes about poetry in the age of climate crisis I In his 1965 memoir The Road Across Canada, Irish-born and Alberta-raised novelist Edward McCourt lamented the country’s excesses: ‘Too much rock, too much prairie, too much tundra, too much mountain, [...]
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Category: EssaysWhat is your favourite lost poem? There’s a lot of material (not) out there to choose from, from the lost plays of Aeschylus to the discarded hospital poems of Anne Sexton and Ivan Blatný. Ezra Pound thought poetry was the [...]
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Category: EssaysWill Harris on poetry and the moral subject ‘Perspective’ makes me think of the art class in which we were taught to draw a tree-lined path. I had to pick a point on the horizon and then draw a series [...]