Patricia Lockwood: ‘I’m a show-off, a clown’
The poet and author, best known for her long poem Rape Joke, talks about her extraordinary memoir, Priestdaddy, and growing up in the midwestIf you had no idea who Patricia Lockwood was and encountered...
View ArticleOna Gritz: 'I had spent more than enough time hiding and pretending'
For years, the poet and author tried to keep her cerebral palsy secret, until motherhood and a new love taught her to make peace with her body and share her experienceThere are ways to cover for the...
View ArticleMaking a mess of the iambic pentameter | Letters
A reader’s suggestion that ‘The mess we inherited from Labour’ is an iambic pentameter draws howls of protestHarold Mozley (Letters, 29 April) is wrong. “The mess we inherited from Labour” is an iambic...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Signals from the Simple Life by Lorna Goodison
In short, striking lines, the poet focuses on key moments when individuals are most intimately attuned to their communitySignals from the Simple LifeA red clothtight aroundher browand he knowsshe is...
View Article'I was dehumanised': Lemn Sissay on hearing his harrowing abuse report live...
In a blistering one-off show, poet Lemn Sissay heard – for the first time – the record of his suffering as a child in care. He explains why the theatre was the safest place to relive his beatings and...
View ArticleDaljit Nagra: ‘I love playing rock albums to get my heartbeat racing’
The poet on why he writes on the go, the importance of rock music to the creative process and why he likes nothing more than ‘a few tiffs’ with a poemNo desk, or office as such, I tend to write my...
View ArticleClive James: ‘I have put aside Shakespeare, to remind myself that others can...
The best artists are a bit like children and the best critics are a bit like artistsMatthew Arnold once called them “the barren, optimistic sophistries”: the bright new beliefs that were going to...
View ArticleThe Inky Digit of Defiance review – Tony Harrison turns 80
The arts are never far from politics in this collection of Harrison’s prose from the past half-century, edited by Edith Hall Thirty years ago in Greece a friend drove the poet and dramatist Tony...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: There are no boring people in this world
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko 1932-2017, translated by Boris DralyukThere are no boring people in this world.Each fate is like the history of a planet.And no two planets are alike at all.Each is distinct –...
View ArticleKate Tempest review – a fleeting, thrilling whirlwind of emotion
Brighton DomeThe poet/rapper/pop star packs a powerful musical punch as the indefinable chronicler of the ageTwo years ago, Kate Tempest topped the bill at The Great Escape, Brighton’s jamboree of new...
View ArticlePoem of the week: WCW by Lachlan Mackinnon
A tribute to a master of modernist poetry, this is also an unusually approachable poem in praise of ordinary human enduranceWCWSaxifrage, said William Carlos Williams, was his flowerbecause it split...
View ArticleNight Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong review – violence, delicacy and...
The poet’s debut reveals a master of juxtaposition willing to tell difficult stories with courageOcean Vuong was born on a rice farm outside Saigon, in 1988, and spent a year in a refugee camp in the...
View ArticleTony Harrison at 80 - books podcast
Vanessa Redgrave, Blake Morrison and Melvyn Bragg are among the stars of page and stage who celebrate one of the UK’s most versatile – and angry – poetsIn this week’s podcast we join a star-studded...
View ArticleDylan Thomas prize goes to Australian 'genius' Fiona McFarlane
Short story collection The High Places, which skips continents, eras and genre, takes £30,000 awardFiona McFarlane has won the £30,000 International Dylan Thomas prize for her “deliciously unsettling”...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: Concerning loss and theft
by Henry NormalI’ve lost something valuable or had it stolenSo I’m forced to retrace my mundane actionsthese tiny harbingers whose whispersnow mock with megaphonesThe margin of errorI’ve recently...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Sin Visits Me by Malika Booker
Ghost story and erotic dream swim together in this joyous, defiant assertion of free spiritSin Visits MeThey say a dead woman can’t run from her coffin.How moonshine can orchestrate nuff wild...
View ArticleSilage by Bethany W Pope review – poetry as salvation
This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escapeIn modern poetry, let’s face it, not a lot happens, unless you are writing a novel in...
View ArticleBritish Museum by Daljit Nagra review – a questing, questioning third volume
The poet breaks new, more political ground in a significant departure of styleWhen Daljit Nagra’s mischievous and distinctive first book of poems won the Forward debut prize 10 years ago, it prompted a...
View ArticleJeremy Mulford obituary
My friend Jeremy Mulford, who has died aged 79, was a poet, publisher and editor who founded Falling Wall Press in the early 1970s as a way of disseminating radical pamphlets on education and the...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Wedding by Alice Oswald
Skilfully moving through changing similes, this outstanding modern sonnet pays tribute to the balancing act of loveWeddingFrom time to time our love is like a sailand when the sail begins to...
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