BLOG

I promised myself to read more Walt Whitman this month. I always had a slight allergy to his loose-limbed lines but inspired by my visit...

Again, like my selection from Gravity’s Rainbow this ‘poem’ is actually prose. A little chipping from the strange crystal that is the...

Naomi Shihab Nye is an American-Palestinian poet who lives in San Antonio. Her poetry is much garlanded and she has been Young People’s ...

Where to start with Celan? A Holocaust survivor whose pulverising poetry stretched the oppressor's language into transcendental shapes,...

This poem is shortlisted by the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem in 2024. And it's got it all: sexuality, race, power, language,...

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the English (post?) modernist poet, Tom Rawoth back in 1990 when he was midway writing his great...

Em Gray is a neurodivergent poet from Brighton and this haptic, ticklish poem was commended in the Forward Prize this year. Simple as it...

This beautiful Queen-Mab-like poem is from Liz Berry's collection Home Child describing the life of a 12-year-old orphan, Eliza Showell...

GR is, of course, not a poem. It's a 900-page novel. Fifty years old this year. But I was so bruised, amused, amazed by it that I wanted...

Kizziah Burton lives and works in Hollywood. And this poem - shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2024 - is awash with florescence. And...

Some pungent Wystan in this moment when it's hard to remain very positive about humanity's inherent goodness. It's such a lapidary poem....

Gillian Allnutt is a British poet from the Northeast of the country and the recipient of the Queen's Prize for poetry. This poem is from...

Just in case you think I don't like any poetry before 1920, here is the sumptuous "Ode to Autumn" by Keats. Familiar as it is, it's...

I stumbled across this delicious poem in the London Review of Books (which is my only source of news these days). Burnside is a Scottish...

Something a little different. A long rollicking carnivalesque of a poem from Tom Hirons , a writer and mask-maker from Dartmoor. (The...

I don't usually care for prose-poems but there are, of course, some masterpieces. (Rimbaud, par example). But I have been really enjoying...

Cattafi was one of the generation of post-war Italian poets I was inspired to read at university in the 1980s. He lived through the...

translated from Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh This beautiful poem was suggested by Mindsprings regular Mechteld-Hanna...

Marianne Moore is one of the greats of American modernism. Friend of TS Eliot and one of the most distinctive voices of the age. And this...

Since we're nearing Mother's Day I thought I'd post this extraordinary section of John Berryman's 1953 sequence. Ann Bradstreet was the...