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Four Quartets review – TS Eliot's poems brilliantly danced

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Barbican, London
With unfussy, Cunningham-influenced movement alongside Kathleen Chalfont’s readings, Pam Tanowitz has distilled Eliot’s essence

Choreographer Pam Tanowitz has been quietly plying her trade in New York for more than two decades. She now arrives for the first time in London with Four Quartets, the first authorised dance version of TS Eliot’s 1943 work, with the poems read in full by the actor Kathleen Chalfant.

“Interesting” gets a bad rap as an adjective, but it’s no veiled slight to say Tanowitz’s choreography is truly that – brilliantly, intriguingly, compellingly so. She makes movement that is unfussy but full of detail, where you can never predict what happens next but when it does it makes perfect sense.

At the Barbican, London, until 25 May

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LEL by Lucasta Miller review – the scandalous death of a popular poet

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Did a love affair lead to the demise of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, one of the most famous and most exploited poets in early 19th-century Britain ?

In 1838 the newly married wife of the governor of Cape Coast Castle in West Africa was found dead in her room, having apparently poisoned herself. You can see why she might have been feeling defeated. George Maclean, responsible for keeping the peace in a large stretch of what is modern-day Ghana, had turned out to be a dour bully with a “country wife” and family already in residence. Then there was the melancholy discovery that, despite slavery being illegal, the fortress over which the new Mrs Maclean was expected to preside was kept shipshape by black “prisoners” guarded by soldiers with bayonets. Finally, there was the tropical climate, which spoiled everything: “Keys, scissors, everything rusts,” the 36-year-old bride wrote home miserably to her mother.

In the normal run of events the sad news of Mrs Maclean’s death would have warranted a short paragraph in the Times and a tactful side-stepping of whether this was actually suicide or an accidental overdose. But Mrs Maclean was not simply a disillusioned last-chance bride abandoned in a rotten corner of the burgeoning British empire. In her former life, as Letitia Landon, or rather LEL, she had been the most famous poet in Britain. For almost two decades she had spewed out – and sometimes it really did feel like an involuntary hurl – poetry that managed to be mawkish and sensational, coy and fruity. In poems – or songs as she liked to call them – with such titles as “The Fate of Adelaide” and “Romance and Reality”, LEL gushed tales of female passion and social ruin, all sufficiently coded so that nice girls could get away with reading them.

Landon’s life, for all its surface sheen, is actually a story about the bleakest kinds of female vulnerability

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Poem of the week: A Bit of Love by Helen Dunmore

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An elderly man reckons wryly with his diminished life in a resonant character study

A Bit of Love

He must stir himself. No more hiding
Behind the skill of hands
That are not his.

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The Making of Poetry by Adam Nicolson review – when Coleridge met the Wordsworths

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This investigation into the birth of the Romantic movement is the perfect marriage of poetry and place

In the 21st century, the creative act of authorship is the magic moment of the liberated and expressive self that is simultaneously more idolised and tantalising than ever before. The enigma of creativity – whence does inspiration spring? – remains at once the key to its allure and also its bewitching riddle. How to explain Shakespeare’s sonnets? Where is the wellspring of Moby-Dick? And what is the spell of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel?

English literature has many such magic moments: 1599 – the year of Hamlet, As You Like It and Julius Caesar– is one; 1922 – the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land– another. But none is more famous in English poetry than 1797-98, partly because its leading characters made it so, mythologising as they went. Still, the record of their imaginative frenzy is off the Richter scale. This was the year in which two young men of genius and their muse found the inspiration for Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Lyrical Ballads, among many others, and transformed the English literary imagination for ever.

When the poets were not at home, they were walking and talking, sometimes 20, 40, even 70 miles at a stretch

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Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith: The Peyote Dance review – over-egged mysticism

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(Bella Union)
Smith’s incantations over arid music, inspired by a French writer’s take on indigenous people, stray into appropriation

There’s not the slightest cause to doubt that Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli and Patti Smith have made precisely the album they wanted to make, inspired by the writings of Antonin Artaud, after a visit to the Rarámuri people of the Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico in 1936. Every word in its right place, every piece of instrumental colouration drawn just so. There will be people who will, in good faith, love The Peyote Dance, who will be entranced by Smith’s hallucinatory, incantatory improvisations, and by Soundwalk Collective’s austere, arid musical settings.

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Poem of the month: Something Like Dying, Maybe

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Last night, it was bright afternoon
Where I wandered. Pale faces all around me.
I walked and walked looking for a door,
For some cast-off garment, looking for myself
In the blank windows and the pale blank faces.

I found my wristwatch from ten years ago
And felt glad awhile.
When it didn’t matter anymore being lost,
The sky clouded over and the pavement went white.
I stared at my hands. Like new leaves,
Light breaking through from behind.

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The best recent poetry – review roundup

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Whereas by Layli Long Soldier; When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen; and Dear Big Gods by Mona Arshi

Layli Long Soldier’s formally inventive debut collection Whereas(Picador, £10.99) presents itself as poetic testimony and historic artefact, with genocide and cultural erasure informing her complex position as “a citizen of the United States and […] a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation”. Long Soldier’s lyrics, prose poems, erasures, cut-outs and resolutions embody her intimate relationship to “languageness” as being at once personal and political. In the book’s titular “Whereas Statements”, she interrogates “the history of the sentence” through the historical and current weaponisation of language against Native Americans by the US government. In what might be deemed the collection’s ars poetica, Long Soldier writes: “Whereas speaking, itself, is defiance”. As a document, Whereas issues a powerful riposte to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans in which there is neither recourse for the “560 federally recognised tribes in the US”, nor official admission of blame: “Whereas I could’ve but didn’t broach the subject of ‘genocide’ the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as ‘conflict’ for example”. Through questioning the territorial reach of poetic syntax and lineation, Long Soldier disrupts the hegemony of the English language over land rights and legal apology, thus reclaiming the white page as a space of multilingual protest.

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Poet and playwright Lemn Sissay wins the PEN Pinter prize

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Judges laud ability to forge beautiful words from sorrows as he sees it as sign to continue

Lemn Sissay has won the PEN Pinter prize, set up in memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Sissay, 52, who was an official poet for the London 2012 Olympics, grew up in care and has spoken about how he was imprisoned, bullied and physically abused by staff. He later made documentaries about the search for his family.

Writer Maureen Freely, one of the judges, said: ‘In his every work, Lemn Sissay returns to the underworld he inhabited as an unclaimed child. From his sorrows, he forges beautiful words and a thousand reasons to live and love.”

Related: Lemn Sissay: ‘A childhood in care almost broke me – I needed to shine a light on it’

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Poem of the week: Vocation by Carol Ann Duffy

Best books of 2019 so far

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Mark Haddon and Natalie Haynes took on Greek myth, Queenie made us laugh and Toni Morrison returned with essays. Here are our highlights across fiction, poetry, non-fiction and children’s books

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Stormzy's prize for new writers reveals inaugural winners

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Poet Monika Radojevic and novelist Hafsa Zayyan both receive the #Merky Books award, named after the rapper’s publishing imprint

Grime rapper Stormzy has chosen two winners for his inaugural #Merky Books new writers’ prize, with the award going to both a novel and a collection of poetry.

The half-Brazilian, half-Montenegrin Monika Radojevic has won for her collection of poetry, 23 and Me, alongside Hafsa Zayyan for her novel We Are All Birds of Uganda. The rapper welcomed the results, telling the winning pair: “A lot of talented people don’t fulfil their potential, they are so talented but they sit on it. I call it the beautiful shame. But you guys have the confidence to write, to do something about it, and that’s amazing.”

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The Guardian view on book prizes: the more the merrier

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The Booker prize may have lost some of its prestige, but that allows other awards – and different books – to shine

Once upon a time there was only one truly heavy-hitting literary prize in Britain – the Booker. Founded in 1969, it most forcefully made the cultural weather in the 1980s and 1990s, when a succession of celebrated authors, such as Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and AS Byatt, reached vast new audiences through the award. Times have changed. Questionable decisions have seen the Booker lose some of its prestige. The organisers’ decision to make American books eligible, while logical in many ways, has robbed the prize of its old, albeit somewhat eccentric, distinctiveness. But its slipping down the cultural pecking order is not necessarily to be mourned, since it also reflects another phenomenon: a growing diversity of book prizes.

Not least among these is the Women’s prize for fiction, which was founded in 1992 in response to the fact that the 1991 Booker prize judges had failed to shortlist a single female author. This week, the 2019 prize was won by Tayari Jones for her novel An American Marriage, the story of a middle-class African American couple whose lives are brutally disrupted when the husband, Roy, is wrongfully convicted of rape. The novel follows the travails of his wife, Celestial, who must, Penelope-like, find survival strategies during her husband’s enforced absence. Jones’s book is a worthy successor to previous winners of the prize such as Andrea Levy’s Small Island that have proved to be important, lasting and popular, but that never made the Booker.

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Simon Armitage: ‘I always thought, if Ted Hughes can do it why can’t I?’

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Grit, wit and a focus on the everyday made the 21st poet laureate a popular choice. He shares his plans for his tenure, his aversion to ‘big P political poetry’ and the rejected poem that got him started

Simon Armitage wrote his first poem when he was 10 for a school assignment. “I didn’t know what a poem was. I knew it was short, so that was appealing,” he confesses when we meet at the London offices of Faber, which has published his work for more than 25 years and where his books – 28 in all – take up a couple of shelves on an impressively appointed bookcase. His teacher selected six poems to put on the wall; Armitage’s wasn’t among them. “What particularly upset me was that for the first time, maybe ever with a bit of writing, I’d actually put some effort in,” he recalls. “And I was quite pleased with the thing I’d made. So not to be among the chosen was a setback.” Sometimes he wonders if he has been pursuing a “career of revenge” ever since. On 10 May Armitage succeeded Carol Ann Duffy to become the 21st poet laureate: as he jokes each time he finishes a poem, “Stick that on your board, mister!”

The official call from No 10 kept being delayed – “she’s quite busy, apparently” – but after Theresa May had congratulated him and outlined the job requirements (there aren’t any), they had a chat about geography (in which they are both graduates: May from Oxford, Armitage from Portsmouth Poly). “Five minutes and that was it.”

He collected Queen's gold medal last month. The winner is traditionally introduced to the Queen by the poet laureate – in this case, himself

Big P political poetry rarely works. Poetry is the art of subtlety and to meet these subjects head-on isn’t my style

Related: 'Simon Armitage knows where the heffalump traps are': Andrew Motion on how to be poet laureate

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Document casts new light on Chaucer 'rape' case

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The poet’s reputation has long been questioned over charge of ‘raptus’. But term may have meant abduction of a bride for his young ward, says academic

A document from the 14th century has emerged that sheds new light on the charge of “rape” brought against The Canterbury Tales author Geoffrey Chaucer in 1380.

A cloud of suspicion has hung over the writer since 1870, after the discovery of a legal document declaring that Cecily Chaumpaigne had agreed to release Chaucer from all actions concerning her rape: “De raptu meo”. Debate has raged over the case ever since because of the term “raptus”, which could mean either rape or abduction.

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Student discovers lost Siegfried Sassoon poem to young lover

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Heartfelt handwritten lines from the war poet ‘fell into the lap’ of researcher who was trawling through theatre director’s letters

It is a poem of only eight lines, but those lines are filled with tender emotion for a young man who was the author’s lover. The words are all the more poignant as the poem dates from a time – the 1920s – when he could never have written openly of homosexual love.

The previously unknown love poem is by Siegfried Sassoon, one of the greatest war poets, and is being published for the first time today in the Observer.

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Ocean Vuong: ‘As a child I would ask: What’s napalm?’

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How did a Vietnamese refugee come to write what many are hailing as the great American novel?

While he was an undergraduate, Ocean Vuong formed the habit of writing at night. During the day, he studied literature at Brooklyn College and worked in a cafe. At night, he stayed up writing poems. It wasn’t just the sense of isolation that comes from being the only one awake, when “you look out of the window and it’s completely dark and you’re at sea in this little ship”. It was more that writing in the off-hours relaxed his knack for self-criticism. “You get the last word of the day,” he says. “The editor in your head – the nagging, insecure, worrisome social editor – starts to retire. When that editor falls asleep, I get to do what I want. The cat’s out to play.”

The poems that came out of those night-time efforts were published in 2016 as Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the success of which still amazes the author – the book won a Whiting award that year, and in 2017 scooped both the Forward prize and the TS Eliot prize. Vuong, who is 30, was not from a background from which writers traditionally emerge. As a two-year-old, he had been brought to the US from Vietnam as a refugee and settled with his family in the working-class town of Hartford, Connecticut. No one in his family spoke English. When his father left, his mother got work in a nail salon, menial work for little reward and a quality of life that Vuong had no particular expectation of exceeding. If Night Sky tackled the absent father as myth, then his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, reckons with the mother and grandmother who raised him and it is the influence of these women – courageous, difficult, devastated by the ripple effect of the Vietnam war – that forms the spine of the novel and asks the central question: after trauma, how do we love?

A student on a prestigious writing programme said to Vuong: 'You’re so lucky – you’re gay and from war'

I wanted to say: these lives, of women, and even of poor white people – these lives are worthy of literature

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Letter: Henry Graham obituary

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Henry Graham contributed three poems to the 1967 anthology The Liverpool Scene. It was an association he came to regret. In no way was Graham a “pop poet”, despite writing the line “a three-piece suite for my sweet,” with its nod to the Searchers’ hit Sweets for My Sweet in Good Luck to You, Kafka, You’ll Need It Boss. He also featured in Pete Roche’s anthology Love Love Love, as a result of which he appeared on John Peel’s Night Ride on Radio 1 in 1968.

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Poem of the week: New Order by Fred Johnston

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A cancer scare provides a strange and agonised source of inspiration

New Order

I enter a new order of things
learn the language of blood-tests, platelets,
reticulocytes, an Absolute Neutrophil Count,
lymphocytes
, even the chance, however remote,
of Rocky Mountain spotted fever –
somehow I am in that zone where blood will out
where all things are fatal until proven innocent.

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Ralph Windle obituary

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My partner, Ralph Windle, who has died aged 88, was a prolific author, having previously been a successful businessman and academic.

His alter ego, a wise and seemingly omniscient sheep named Bertie Ramsbottom, was one of Ralph’s creative triumphs, whose satirical but hopeful poetry enabled him to expound on a wide range of sociopolitical and business issues, appearing in the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and elsewhere.

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Here's to bandit country: the Irish border, writing's new frontier

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Once overshadowed by Dublin and Belfast, the border regions are finally being recognised for inspiring some of Ireland’s best writing – and it’s not all about Brexit

Ask anyone where they think about when they think about Irish writing and they’ll probably say Dublin or Belfast. When it comes to writers from the border regions, they may mention Brian Friel or Seamus Heaney, but for most people, the border between the republic and Northern Ireland is usually regarded as an area whose existence is contentious, where terms are unfavourable and the writing is characteristically unfeminine. It is an area that Labour’s former secretary of state for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees referred to as “bandit country” in 1974, and perceptions have been slow to shift.

Yet the region has catalysed some of the country’s finest writing and never more so than today. Since the Good Friday agreement, the border region is no longer the insular, provincial place you’ve read about. These days it’s the setting for hit TV comedies about teenage friendships, Michael Portillo train documentaries, pioneering city of culture bids, and parody Twitter accounts. Suddenly the border seems the whip-smart, funny and sophisticated breeding ground its inhabitants always knew it was. It’s also become a political centre of attention again, thanks to Brexit, and its writers and artists are no longer willing to relinquish control of its narrative.

There’s me at the Brexit negotiations. pic.twitter.com/sVuFOahZ3o

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