EC: I wanted to ask you to what extent you regard your new book Pluto as a departure? The long poems explore your relationships, or, like the lyrical ‘Birthplace’, your home town. Writing poetry about personal subject matter is, you’ve said, unusual for [...]

Abdellatif Laâbi  The Rule of Barbarism (Translated by André Naffis-Sahely) Island Position $12.00 Ingeborg Bachmann  Enigma: Selected Poems (Translated by Mike Lyons and Patrick Drysdale) Ariadne $16.00 Manuel Rivas  The Disappearance of Snow (Translated by Lorna Shaughnessy) Shearsman £9.95   In his essay, The [...]

Sam Riviere  81 Austerities Faber £9.99 William Letford  Bevel Carcanet £9.95 Oli Hazzard  Between Two Windows Carcanet £9.95 Andrew Bailey  Zeal Enitharmon £9.99   Internet, you have ruined poetry. Must I list the ways? The slowness of print used to mean being a poet [...]

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 [...]

Mark Ford (Editor) London: A History In Verse Bellknap/Harvard $35.00 Jackie Kay, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (Editors) Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets Bloodaxe £12.00   In the excellent introduction to his ‘timely’ anthology, London: A History In [...]

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 [...]