‘This is where we knelt on walnut leaves in the town of the word’, writes Carolyn Forché in On the Island of Theologos, the last of five extraordinary poems by Forché that you can read in this issue of Poetry London. Elsewhere, [...]

Such is the reputation of Poetry London, and its poetry competition, that I knew the standard would be high and my choices would be tough. I had the privilege of judging this competition once before, when Kathryn Simmonds won with ‘Sunday at the [...]

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 [...]

Caleb Klaces on the improbable range of Christopher Middleton’s work Christopher Middleton Collected Later Poems Carcanet, £25.00   Christopher Middleton’s Collected Later Poems begins with something missing. The first poem, ‘For Preface a Lacuna’, has lost Saint Francis. Francis left his [...]

Peter Robinson on the aspirations of Derek Mahon’s ‘adaptations’ Derek Mahon Echo’s Grove Gallery, €22.50/€13.90 Derek Mahon’s ‘Echo’, subtitled ‘from the Latin of Ovid, Metamorphoses III, 356-402’, begins by explaining how she ‘can’t speak first but answers back’ and concludes: ‘the [...]

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 [...]