A new start after 60: ‘I became a performance poet at 62 – and finally I have...
Mary Dickins spent time in care as a teenager and always felt like an outsider. She suffered intense shyness, but taking to the stage has helped her find her voice Mary Dickins had been a spectator at...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Weep you no more, sad fountains by John Dowland
Song by Elizabeth I’s court musician is a lullaby in praise of sleep – but might it also be an elegy written ahead of time?Weep you no more, sad fountainsWeep you no more, sad fountains;What need you...
View ArticlePost your questions for Patti Smith
What would you ask the legendary punk musician, poet and memoirist – who says a new newsletter project has reinvented her approach to creativity?It didn’t take long for lockdown to be reframed as the...
View ArticleThe Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein review – upstaged by wedding...
Jermyn Street theatre, LondonThis fantasy ceremony for the modernist couple is too preoccupied with the famous men cavorting around themAttempting to combine absurdist farce, genuine tragedy and an...
View Article‘My music is singular to me’: Arooj Aftab, the brightest new star at this...
Informed by Urdu verse, mythological vultures and her brother’s death, the US-Pakistani musician’s latest album is unexpectedly up for one of the ‘big four’ prizes – and she’s only just left her day...
View ArticlePoem of the week: After Great Pain … by Emily Dickinson
With its Christian phraseology and powerful imagery, this 1862 verse is likely a response to a death in the American civil war After Great Pain …After great pain, a formal feeling comes –The Nerves sit...
View ArticleZimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga among this year’s Windham-Campbell...
Dangarembga, American writer Margo Jefferson and British playwright Winsome Pinnock are among eight recipients of the $165,000 grants, as the award marks its 10th anniversaryPulitzer prizewinning Margo...
View ArticleNational Poetry Competition has its youngest ever winner
At 19, Eric Yip scoops the £5,000 prize for his personal and political work, Fricatives. Read his ‘immensely ambitious and beautifully achieved poem’ hereA 19-year-old economics student from the...
View Article‘Infertility stung me’: Black motherhood and me – podcast
I assumed I would be part of the first generation to have full agency over my reproduction, but I was wrong. By Edna BonhommeRead the text version hereContinue reading...
View ArticleThe best recent poetry – review roundup
Cain Named the Animal by Shane McCrae; Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong; Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris; Panic Response by John McCullough; Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus by Signe GjessingCain Named...
View ArticleTo Katya, aged seven, in a bomb shelter in Kyiv | Ben Okri
In a new poem, the novelist and poet Ben Okri writes about what hope can grow out of the destruction in UkraineAll around you missilesAre falling. ChurchesYou once knew won’tBe there any more.The...
View ArticleOcean Vuong: ‘I was addicted to everything you could crush into a white powder’
The poet and novelist’s latest collection is his first book to be published since the death of his mother. He talks about loss, addiction and performing literary dragInside my head the war is...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen
A soldier’s vision of the hell of war resonates beyond its maker’s brief lifeStrange MeetingIt seemed that out of battle I escapedDown some profound dull tunnel, long since scoopedThrough granites...
View Article‘It takes your hand off the panic button’: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land 100...
TS Eliot’s modernist masterpiece has baffled and moved readers for a century. Now the poem has inspired a whole festival. Fans including Jeanette Winterson pin down its elusive, allusive powerOf all...
View ArticleRuth Bidgood obituary
My friend Ruth Bidgood, who has died aged 99, was one of the finest Welsh poets in English and one of the best British female poets of her generation. She was also a local historian who patiently...
View ArticleRoyal family shares poem in tribute to the late Prince Philip by poet laureate
The Patriarchs – An Elegy shared via royal social media accounts on first anniversary of Duke of Edinburgh’s deathThe royal family have shared a poem in tribute to the late Prince Philip on the first...
View ArticleTime Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong review – writing that demands all of your lungs
The Vietnamese-American poet’s second collection, written in the aftermath of his mother’s death, illustrates what it means to be out of controlThe parent-child relationship has been the nucleus of...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Nocturnal by Paul Bailey
Written for a former lover who quietly chose to die, this work’s uncluttered eloquence offers pure refreshmentNocturnalI knew a man once who wished he hadn’t been born.He meant what he said.He wasn’t a...
View ArticleThe Guardian view on TS Eliot’s modernism: between high and low culture |...
What the poet found in the most popular music hall artiste of his time shines a light on a misunderstood genius and the time he lived inThe year 1922 represented a turning point for culture. It marked...
View ArticleCountry diary: The blackbird’s song is no one-hit wonder
Ormeau, South Belfast: Its mellifluous melody has been an inspiration for poets and musicians, but what of its lesser-known, scratchy follow-up? It’s still dark, but the dawn chorus is in full swing....
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