Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort review – a bright new...
This exceptional collection from the Belarus-born poet digs into what happens when the self goes missing in an authoritarian regimeValzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus, moved to the US in 2005 and...
View ArticleSarah Holland-Batt on fighting for her father: ‘Watching someone decline can...
After her harrowing testimony at the aged care commission, the Australian poet’s luminous new collection bears witness to a life and troubled deathShortly after Sarah Holland-Batt’s father Tony was...
View Article‘The poems began to dance among themselves’: curating a fresh mixtape of...
A companion to 1998’s The Fire People, Kayo Chingonyi’s anthology creates a space for a new generation of voices to express the wide range of their workPutting together an anthology is, as the American...
View ArticleWilliam Brewer: ‘The Red Arrow isn’t a drug book, but…’
The American author on how his own experience of psychedelic therapy sparked his debut novel, and his poems about the opioid epidemicWilliam Brewer, 33, is the author of I Know Your Kind (2017), a...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Slow Waker by Thom Gunn
This portrait of a sleepy adolescent at breakfast is intensely affectionate – without ever sentimentalising youthSlow WakerI look at the nephew,eighteen, across the breakfast.He had to be called and...
View ArticlePoem of the week: 1963 by Meg Cox
A ‘youthful-memory’ poem from A Square of Sunlight, a debut collection from a poet who didn’t start writing until her 60s1963The house is in Chatou, a southwest suburb of Paris.It has proper French...
View ArticleThe love song of TS Eliot: intense letters reveal the passion behind the pen
The great poet’s newly released missives to his lost love put the lie to his aloof image – but were dismissed by the man himself as fantasyTo many who knew him, TS Eliot was considered a remote and...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Last Hope by Ben Wilkinson
This version of a sonnet by the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine has a down-to-earth lyricism recalling Philip Larkin’sLast HopeAfter VerlaineBustled about in this sputtering breezethe graveyard’s...
View Article‘Sleep with everyone! Be embarrassing!’ – the dada baroness who shocked society
She wore soup-can bras, made an explicit film with Man Ray – and may have inspired Marcel Duchamp’s upturned urinal. We explore a thrilling show celebrating the pacy life of ‘The Baroness’Towering over...
View ArticleThe best recent poetry – review roundup
Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley; More Fiya, edited by Kayo Chingonyi; The Lascaux Notebooks by Jean-Luc Champerret, edited and translated by Philip Terry; and Continuous Creation by Les MurrayQuiet by...
View ArticleTeenager Leila Mottley on writing her debut novel: ‘I’ve always done things...
The 19-year-old’s uncommonly assured book Nightcrawling, about marginalised lives in her home town of Oakland, has won fans including Dave Eggers and Ruth Ozeki“When I step away,” says Kiara, of her...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Air by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Moving elusively between private and public worlds, the poet finds grace in small, shared momentsAirFriend, I saw you sittingat the window of yourselfContinue reading...
View ArticleAll the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran review – a confrontation of pain and...
The aftermath of abuse is met head-on by subtle and delicate skill in the Vietnamese-American poet’s debut collectionSometimes, reading a poet for the first time is like meeting a person: the first...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Hang Gliders with Saxophones by Ian Pople
A vision of jazz’s iconic instrument as an acrobatic, airborne wonderThe saxophones circle in the airabove the moor, the thermal columnthat the breath supports.Continue reading...
View ArticleCountry diary: We rise and fall with the treecreepers outside
Yr Elenydd, Ceredigion: In a tiny chapel I sit among the devout, one eye on the windowSoft breezes sift through last year’s leaves. Beech-mast crackles underfoot. By the strait gate I enter Soar y...
View Article‘Landmark’ anthology 100 Queer Poems published for Pride month
Collection edited by Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan ‘questions and redefines’ the meaning of its title• Read a selection of the poems belowThis Pride month, a new anthology featuring the work of...
View ArticlePeter Scupham obituary
Poet and teacher whose work embraced a wide range from sinuously tender love poems to sharp literary parodiesPeter Scupham, who has died aged 89, began publishing his poetry relatively late: a...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Upon Wedlock, and the Death of Children by Edward Taylor
An extraordinary, theologically agile reflection on family life bears comparison with much more famous metaphysical poemsUpon Wedlock, and the Death of ChildrenA Curious Knot God made in Paradise,And...
View ArticleArtist Penny Goring: ‘David Bowie showed me that there was another world’
Brought up in a rough area, Goring drank heavily and never thought that she would make it as an artist. Finally, after a detour into ‘weird Facebook’, her freaky explorations of womanhood are getting...
View ArticleThe small town with a big potato that inspired a global poetry win
Robertson might be tiny but for poet and schoolteacher Peter Ramm, it is the secret weapon that helped him win the UK’s biggest prize for unpublished poetrySign up for the Rural Network email...
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