Buried treasures: grave goods to inspire Michael Rosen elegies
Poet to write works inspired by mysterious objects – both grand and modest – found in ancient graves and kept at British MuseumAlmost 2,000 years after a precious bronze mirror was buried at the hip of...
View ArticleRiot review – Dublin drag star leads disparate mix of poetry and politics
Spiegeltent, Sydney festivalJesus is hit with pool noodles and a stripper throws chips at the crowd in a show that struggles to add up to the sum of its partsImagine an Avalanches song as a stage show...
View ArticleHilary Mantel and Alan Moore voice 'grave concerns' for John Clare archive
Authors fear that large collection of poet’s papers held by Northamptonshire libraries will be threatened by further cuts expected to its serviceHilary Mantel, Alan Moore and Simon Armitage have joined...
View ArticleJohn Clare archive under threat from library cuts | Letters
Writers and academics including Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman, Simon Armitage and Josie Long appeal to Northampton county council to preserve a unique collection of works by the great poet of the...
View ArticleMoor Mother review – howl of apocalyptic fury is kept to a whisper
The Islington, LondonA weedy sound system prevents the Philadelphian poet, musician and activist from tapping into true dreadPolice brutality, domestic violence, race riots and western imperialism –...
View ArticleThe Noise of a Fly by Douglas Dunn review – shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize
Larkin’s influence is still strong in this collection, which illuminates the natural world and the coming of old ageThe Hebrew for fly, zvuv, “is surely one of the most magically exact onomatopoeias in...
View ArticleSalt by David Harsent review – studies in human fear and frailty
These poems, rarely more than five lines long, ‘form a ricochet of echoes’If poems are like other people’s photographs in which we recognise ourselves, David Harsent’s writing catches us at our most...
View Article‘A tipping point’: women writers pledge to boycott gender biased books after...
After 2017’s Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets included only four women, 250 writers have agreed to boycott anthologies, conferences and festivals where women are not fairly representedIrish women...
View ArticleWhy my father Cecil Day-Lewis’s poem Walking Away stands the test of time |...
Sean Day-Lewis says the poem, quoted in a recent Guardian article, is as relevant today as it was when first published more than half a century agoIt was good to see the last couplet of my father’s...
View ArticleScott Walker: 'My last album was pretty perfect'
As Scott Walker publishes Sundog, a book of his lyrics, he talks about big-budget burnout, his debt to Britain, and why he’s a huge fan of FKA twigsA wintry afternoon and London’s roads are rammed with...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Moving On by Robyn Bolam
Reflecting on the traumatic changes that have transformed the city of Newcastle, a poet casts a steady gaze at its past and presentMoving OnIn the Haymarket a bus station has been transformedfrom...
View ArticleNewly seen letters show Philip Larkin's close relationship with mother
Philip and Eva Larkin corresponded twice weekly for about 35 years, with the pair exchanging minute details of one another’s daily livesHe was terrified of marriage, living a life of tangled...
View ArticleTS Eliot prize goes to Ocean Vuong's 'compellingly assured' debut collection
Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the debut collection by a poet who is the first literate person in his family, hailed as ‘the definitive arrival of a significant voice’ After becoming the first literate...
View ArticleJenny Joseph obituary
Popular poet with a disarming sense of the oddity and pathos of the human conditionThe poet Jenny Joseph, who has died aged 85, might well have wondered a little ruefully whether WH Auden was...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Carnival by Caitlin Doyle
Funfair rides provide a giddying setting for an ambiguous – and perilous – erotic merry-go-roundCarnivalPretty eyes, he said to you,let’s get ticketslet’s get twolet’s get on the tilt-a-whirlthen watch...
View ArticleLandeg White obituary
My friend and former colleague Landeg White, who has died at his home in Portugal aged 77, was an academic and poet, one of the most versatile and prolific of the Africanists who began work in the...
View ArticleThe Radio by Leontia Flynn review – sheer pleasure, no slog
Flynn’s entertaining new collection of poems really gets under the skin, with topics ranging from new motherhood to Alzheimer’sAnybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those...
View ArticleCollection of Sylvia Plath's possessions to be sold at auction
Proof of The Bell Jar among items shedding light on poet’s life and marriage to Ted HughesThe story of the last months of the life of Sylvia Plath is tracked on the flyleaves of the proof and author’s...
View ArticlePoetry world split over polemic attacking 'amateur' work by 'young female poets'
Writing in PN Review, Rebecca Watts has slammed the popularity of writers such as Rupi Kaur and Hollie McNish as ‘consumer-driven content’Giving a fresh meaning to the notion of a poetry slam, the...
View ArticleRobert Burns: was the beloved poet a 'Weinsteinian sex pest'?
Ahead of this year’s Burns Night, the 18th-century bard has come under harsh scrutiny from Liz Lochhead over his treatment of womenA year ago, Nicola Sturgeon marked Robert Burns’s 25 January birthday...
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