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 …
Poetry in the Age of Zoom
Zoë 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 …
What Anansi Taught Me
Marvin 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 flint holds fire: Vidyan Ravinthiran on growing up with a speech impediment
My 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 …
The Changing Mountain
Stephen 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 …
The Benefit of the Doubt
Joey 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, …
Sing It Again
Karen 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 …
Lost Poets: David Wheatley on canons, exclusions and the quicksand of oblivion
What 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 …
The Ethics of Perspective by Will Harris
Will 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 …
Wildly Unmothered by Daisy Lafarge
Dear Rachel, I hope this finds you well and you don’t mind my getting in touch. We met briefly in February in Tucson – I was visiting with my partner …
Thank You for Your Honesty by Sophie Collins
A response to digital prints, animations and texts by Niamh Riordan 1) To disturb reality using its own means and not a subjective interpretation thereof presenting the viewer with an …
Island Home for Isabelle Huppert (La Truite) Extract by Geraldine Clarkson
After Angela Dufresne World’s in love with Isabelle. Where Isabelle goes. What Isabelle knows. Isabelle’s ideal’s to live alone in green: plumped-up on an apple-bottomed sea, or pear – ooh …
The Tempest by Isobel Dixon
After Sarah Pickstone’s painting The Tempest Don’t we all want a green and pure ferocity, the lashing rain to make us naked to ourselves. Thwarted, aslant against our lives, lean …
Poems in response to paintings by Vera Iliatova by Rachael Allen
All titles are taken from Vera’s paintings Lunatic Urbaine The man who loved me pushed me to the ground in a pool of white plants. When we tell you to …
Setting the Horrors of War: Lawrence Kramer on Poetry, Music and the Presence of the Past
Musical settings of pre-existing poems are so familiar in the world of classical music that we sometimes forget what strange things they are. The music in these compositions is generally …
To Witness: Ian Duhig on poetry’s responsibilities
Will you write about Duggan? the man wants to know. Why don’t you? you ask. Me? he asks, looking slightly irritated. (Claudia Rankine, Citizen). When Tim Dooley approached me about …
Essay: The Feel of Thinking – Sarah Howe on lyric connections and incisions
Can lyric think? I want to work towards this question of poetics by way of a related one in philosophy, whose crispest articulation I’ve yet found swims up in the …
