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 supposed to express the feeling and perhaps the meaning conveyed [...]

KMW: The Silvering is your fifth collection. It feels as if there is a consolidation, thematically and formally, in terms of how the work brings political, personal and ecological strands together – the poem ‘Still Life with Sea Pinks and High [...]

In considering some of the challenges of teaching a poetry course to undergraduates, the American poet Robert Hass calls to mind a haiku by the nineteenth century poet Kobayashi Issa:         The man pulling radishes Pointed the [...]

Join us to celebrate the launch of the Summer 2016 issue of Poetry London with a special evening of readings, offering a unique opportunity to hear some of the magazine’s most distinguished contributors. Please come to hear an evening of great poetry introduced [...]

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 writing on the subject of poetry as witness, he was [...]

Claudia Rankine Citizen Penguin £9.99 Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s most recent collection, opens in understated fashion: ‘When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows’. [...]

In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard [...]