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My hero: Martha Gellhorn by Sinéad Morrissey
One of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century, Martha Gellhorn changed what it was possible for a woman to achievePoetry, wrote WH Auden, makes nothing happen. This may or may not be true,...
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The Saturday Poem: Last Winter
by Sinéad Morrisseywas not like last winter, we said, when winterhad ground its iron teeth in earnest: Belfastcolder than Moscow and a total lunar eclipsehanging its Chinese lantern over the...
View ArticleAmiri Baraka's funeral marked by rousing musical procession
Actor Danny Glover expected to officiate at ceremony for celebrated but controversial poet-playwright
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On my radar: Juliet Stevenson's cultural highlights
Juliet Stevenson, star of films, stage and TV series such as The Politician's Wife, on poetry, Iranian film and Mark TwainBorn in Essex, actress Juliet Stevenson, launched her stage career with the RSC...
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Pilgrim's Flower by Rachael Boast – review
Rachael Boast mediates between the past and present in her intoxicating new collectionThis is a book of poetry as homage – there is even a poem with that name which offers this definition: "homage...
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Poem of the week: The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Tennyson
Not a protest, but in no way a celebration of a disastrous historical event, it remains a compelling dramatisation of battleOnce enormously popular and much-memorised, this week's poem, Alfred...
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Funky Chaucer reboot by Patience Agbabi due for April launch
The award-winning poet's modern take on the Canterbury Tales to come complete with ladettes, rappers and self-help gurusThis April, when the "shoures soote" immortalised by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th...
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Juan Gelman obituary
Argentinian poet whose life and work were infused with the fight against his country's repressive regimes and the 'dirty war'The life of the Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, who has died aged 83, was a...
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Choose February's Reading group: William S Burroughs
The godfather of the Beats would have been 100 next month. Yet his appetite for controversy never lost its edge with age, as an inviting canon of work attests. Which shall we pick?William S Burroughs –...
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David Hockney: the poets that make me paint
A new retrospective reveals Hockney's 60-year obsession with literature – especially poetry. From Walt Whitman to William Blake, here are the writers that mean most to him"He still does not really...
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Speak, Old Parrot by Dannie Abse – review
With its seemingly simple, wry humour, Abse's late collection explores beauty and mortality with a deceptively light touchDannie Abse's 17th collection, shortlisted for this month's TS Eliot prize, is...
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The Saturday poem: The Day Etta Died
by John BurnsideI was marking a stack of essayson Frank O'Haraand each had a Wiki-paragraph to saywho Genet was, and whowas Billie Holiday– just as this poem stumbles to its end, predictablyremembering...
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Adam Foulds: 'As a kid my nightmares weren't about generic monsters, but real...
The poet and novelist on his latest book, a war story set in Africa and Sicily, and how poetry increasingly informs his proseAbout a third of the way into Adam Foulds's latest novel – In the Wolf's...
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Poem of the week: Psyche by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge's meditation on the soul moves swiftly from the butterfly's exalted state to the mundane misery of the caterpillarThis week's poem, Psyche, is one of Coleridge's Visionary Fragments, brief...
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José Emilio Pacheco obituary
Award-winning Mexican poet and author of the bestselling novel Battles in the DesertIn 2010, as he was on his way to collect the Cervantes prize, the Spanish-speaking world's prize for literature, from...
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Brecht's feelings about war cast in new light by emergence of teenage poems
Two newly attributed poems find Brecht, a writer later known for his trenchantly anti-war views, in surprisingly patriotic formTwo poems showing a teenage Bertolt Brecht urging "real German men, of...
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WB Yeats: looming larger through the mists of time
It is 75 years since Yeats died, but in Ireland his poetry is still part of our mental furnitureSeventy-five years after the death of William Butler Yeats, his brooding form still towers among the...
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Tyrrells spices up its crisp packets with image of fiery poet RS Thomas
Late Welsh nationalist is inadvertently used to promote English crisps – chilli-flavoured, of courseLip curled and eyes ablaze, an image of the fiery Welsh poet and clergyman RS Thomas has...
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Russian 'kills friend in argument over whether poetry or prose is better'
Investigators say drunken literary dispute led to 53-year-old former teacher, who preferred poetry, killing friend with knifeA former schoolteacher killed his friend after a drunken argument over which...
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Sappho: two previously unknown poems indubitably hers, says scholar
University of Oxford papyrologist convinced poems preserved on ancient papyrus are by seventh-century lyricist of LesbosRead one of the poems hereSappho is one of the most elusive and mysterious – as...
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