We Two Boys together Clinging /Walt Whitman
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...
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Alistair Appleton
Sep 42 min read
From Justine / Lawrence Durrell
Again, like my selection from Gravity’s Rainbow this ‘poem’ is actually prose. A little chipping from the strange crystal that is the...
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Alistair Appleton
May 282 min read
Kindness / Naomi Shihab Nye
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 ...
371 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 272 min read
Allerseelen / Paul Celan
Where to start with Celan? A Holocaust survivor whose pulverising poetry stretched the oppressor's language into transcendental shapes,...
262 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 192 min read
Fricatives / Eric Yip
This poem is shortlisted by the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem in 2024. And it's got it all: sexuality, race, power, language,...
238 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 121 min read
from XIVLINERS / Tom Raworth
I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the English (post?) modernist poet, Tom Rawoth back in 1990 when he was midway writing his great...
176 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 51 min read
Symbiosis / Em Gray
Em Gray is a neurodivergent poet from Brighton and this haptic, ticklish poem was commended in the Forward Prize this year. Simple as it...
467 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 271 min read
Eliza / Liz Berry
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...
421 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 202 min read
from Gravity's Rainbow / Thomas Pynchon
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...
286 views9 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 132 min read
Oh Do You Know the Flower Man / Kizziah Burton
Kizziah Burton lives and works in Hollywood. And this poem - shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2024 - is awash with florescence. And...
290 views1 comment
Alistair Appleton
Nov 27, 20231 min read
The Sabbath / W.H. Auden
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....
402 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Sep 13, 20231 min read
The Road Home / Gillian Allnutt
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...
502 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
Sep 5, 20232 min read
To Autumn / John Keats
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...
444 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
Aug 23, 20231 min read
A False Awakening /John Burnside
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...
598 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
Jun 6, 20233 min read
Sometimes A Wild God/ Tom Hirons
Something a little different. A long rollicking carnivalesque of a poem from Tom Hirons , a writer and mask-maker from Dartmoor. (The...
490 views14 comments
Alistair Appleton
May 6, 20232 min read
Coal Sarcophagus/William Haas
I don't usually care for prose-poems but there are, of course, some masterpieces. (Rimbaud, par example). But I have been really enjoying...
271 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 19, 20232 min read
Apertura d'ali (Wingspan) / Bartolo Cattafi
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...
236 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 10, 20232 min read
Moment / Wisława Szymborska
translated from Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh This beautiful poem was suggested by Mindsprings regular Mechteld-Hanna...
259 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 15, 20232 min read
The Fish / Marianne Moore
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...
221 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 21, 20232 min read
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet / John Berryman
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...
289 views4 comments
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