Jim Causley, Luke Thompson: Clay Hymnal: Poems of Jack Clemo review – finely...
(Westwords Publications) Five months on from Forgotten Kingdom, one of the finest singers in the English folk revival returns with another adventurous album, again inspired by his west country roots....
View ArticleThorn tree tangle of pagans and poets
Langley Bush, Cambridgeshire A bronze age grave, Roman shrine, gibbet mound, parish marker, gypsy haunt - centuries of decisions and deaths right hereOdd, the durable significance of some places. You...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: The Will
by Bernard O’DonoghueWhen they discovered that my grandfatherwas going, unexpectedly, to die youngof meningitis, they naturally set aboutensuring that his wife would not inheritthe farm. They assembled...
View ArticleYves Bonnefoy obituary
French poet and essayist who believed in the sacredness of the here and now“I would like to bring together, almost identify, poetry and hope.” So wrote the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, who has died aged...
View ArticleRural life and scenery inspired by John Clare | Letters
Writing evocatively about Langley Bush (Country diary, 29 July), Simon Ingram mentions the shrub planted by the John Clare Society to replace the hawthorn whose ruthless removal had so upset John...
View ArticlePoem of the week: You, Lizard-like by Lynne Hjelmgaard
Moving in sudden flickers and flashes, this is a character study as elusive as its governing reptilian imageYou, Lizard-likeexpert at loss, loyal to none,slip into unknown spaces, clawsdigging quickly...
View ArticleOmar Musa: Dead Centre review – an uneven but vital slice of hip-hop and poetry
Novelist, poet, TedX speaker and now rapper – Musa’s way with words and sentiments deserves to be heard on any forum he choosesThere’s not much in the way of hip-hop alumni from Queanbeyan, NSW. Even...
View ArticleThe Very Quiet Foreign Girls poetry group - podcast
When Kate Clanchy began teaching the children of refugees, she sought out those silenced by trauma and loss. Their weekly sessions released a torrent of untold storiesContinue reading...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: Hiding in plain sight
by Denise RileyI try to find you, yet you are not here.I’ve studied absence, fought to fill it in – courage comes easier with a grasp of why.A secret’s camouflaged when unconcealed.I chose to not...
View ArticleMark Rylance: how Robert Bly changed my life
Ahead of a new film about Robert Bly, Mark Rylance recalls how the poet helped him to live with lossI was raised in Milwaukee up to 1978, when I was 18. My father was an English teacher, so I must have...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Ifs by Caroline Norton
A wry, pastoral fantasy aimed at romantic types, this all-but forgotten poem irresistibly recalls one of the most famous. And arguably outdoes itOH! If the winds could whisper what they hear,When...
View ArticlePoster poems: fear
From the personal to the global, there is an uneasy abundance of things to be scared of at the moment. Dare you face up to some in verse?Fear is all around us at the moment. Every time you read or...
View ArticlePEN/Nabokov award relaunched to promote 'global voices' in US
The $50,000 prize will honour a living international author whose work is ‘of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship’A new $50,000 (£38,500) literary prize for international authors,...
View ArticleThe Remedies by Katharine Towers review – a fanciful talking cure
Towers’s beautiful second collection takes flower remedies and imagines how each plant would deal with the malady it was supposed to correctHow often is a poetry collection a collection? It is a rare...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Backyard, Hoboken, Summer by Alvin Feinman
This sketch of a drowsy domestic scene is also a complex meditation on the deep structures of perceptionBackyard, Hoboken, SummerThe sun beating on his brainAnd a cat slouching on the woodpileAnd flies...
View ArticleFalling Awake by Alice Oswald review – a dazzling celebration of nature
Music meets myth in Oswald’s dreamlike visions of a West Country landscapeThe first thing to say about Alice Oswald’s eagerly awaited book is that it does not disappoint. Her characteristic, Ted...
View ArticleLemn Sissay: ‘I would die if I didn’t live in the present’
The poet’s early years of rejection and isolation left him with emotional scars, but it helped shape him as an artist. As his new collection is published, he talks about growing up and finding his...
View ArticlePoem of the week: My Mother’s Language by Abdellatif Laâbi
In plain free verse, the dissident Moroccan writer records both the damage done by a repressive regime and his love for his late motherMy Mother’s LanguageIt’s been twenty years since I last saw my...
View ArticlePeggy Poole obituary
“How we spent a lifetime dying / raised our glasses clowning / lest anyone should mark / that we were lost, crying / in the dark.” These lines from her poem On the Death of Stevie Smith show the solemn...
View Article'The legacy Langston left us': Harlem artists hope to reclaim Hughes home
Renée Watson and other artists want to turn the historical Langston Hughes house into a not-for-profit collective to preserve Harlem’s cultural legacyAll that signifies the legacy of a house once...
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