Why are booksellers afraid of children's poetry?
Teachers, parents and poets alike know how children thirst for poetry. Now it's up to booksellers and publishers to save it from extinctionChildren dive into poetry with the same natural ease as...
View ArticleKorean literature - books podcast
Smartphone cartoons, divided families and colourful fables Claire Armitstead travels to Seoul and take the temperature of Korean literary culture
View ArticleLetter: Michael Baldwin was an inspirational teacher who made a difference to...
I was a student at Whitelands College from 1962 to 1965, and remember Michael Baldwin so well as inspirational, urbane, intellectual and a person whose joy was transmitted to all who were taught by...
View ArticleLetters Composed During a Lull in the Fighting review 'aftermath of...
Andrew Motion is moved by Kevin Powers' collection of war poems, with its graphic battle scenes and search for meaning and solace away from the frontlineOur conception of "war poetry" is still...
View ArticleBook ban: poets protest at Pentonville prison - video
Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, leads a poetry reading outside London's Pentonville prison in a protest against the ban on sending books and other essentials to prisoners. Duffy is joined by Kathy...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Bernard and Cerinthe
by Linda France, winner of the National Poetry CompetitionIf a flower is always a velvet curtainonto some peepshow he never opens,
View ArticleLinda France wins National Poetry Competition with erotic botany story
Piece imagining an encounter between a buttoned-up man and a flirtatious flower scoops £5,000 prize, with Maggie Sawkins picking up Ted Hughes award for innovation in poetryA poem that imagines an...
View ArticleThe Poets' Wives review a thought-provoking study of life and art
David Park's evocative novellas examine the impact of art through the lives of three poets' wivesThe thorny relationship between art and life is probed powerfully by David Park in three absorbing...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Never Entered Mind by Tom Raworth
This avant-garde poem fizzes with a splintering energy that keeps the reader asking questions and constructing possible meaningsThere are no daffodils or pagans dancing in this week's poem, by Tom...
View ArticleTS Eliot: searching for sainthood amid hate speech and hurt
Some of the 20th century's finest poetry belongs to Eliot, yet any account of it must also keep track of the harm he didIn Murder in the Cathedral, Thomas Stearns Eliot has his namesake and mouthpiece...
View ArticleTed Hughes estate withdraws biographer's access
Jonathan Bate, working on private records for some years, has had permissions to quote blocked 'out of the blue'The contested life of one of Britain's best-loved poets has erupted into controversy once...
View Article'Unplug the unnecessary': the Chill Pill poetry collective respond to Earth...
Simon Mole and Mr Gee from the underground poetry collective Chill Pill create a performance inspired by news stories about the UN warning over the world's food supplies and how lights were switched...
View ArticleNoah: inspired by the Bible and Darren Aronofsky's seventh grade poem
Aronofsky celebrates the teacher who assigned him crucial homework by inviting her to the premiere and casting her as a corpseFor those unsated by all 150 minutes of Noah, the Biblical-eco-epic that's...
View ArticleLittle-seen Seamus Heaney poems published in literary 'map of Dublin'
Anthology If Ever You Go includes rare works set unusually for the Nobel laureate in his adopted cityTwo little-seen poems by the late Seamus Heaney are being collected for the first time in a new...
View ArticleKate Dunlop obituary
A poet and political activist, my mother, Kate Dunlop, who has died aged 73, was a passionate campaigner for justice and her local community.Born Catherine McElroy, in Bartley Green, Birmingham, to a...
View ArticleHow the actions of the Ted Hughes estate will change my biography
I spent four years immersing myself in every word Hughes wrote; now the estate's co-operation has been withdrawn. What next? Letter: Why the Ted Hughes estate withdrew biographer's permissionsJaguar in...
View ArticleBooks that make you cry: share your weepiest moments
Whether desolate or stirring, what are the lines in literature that turn on your tear ductsThere's a new anthology out shortly, called Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. Now, poems provide easy pickings in...
View ArticlePoster poems: Fruit
As spring begins to stir, the moment is ripe to consider the sweet natural bounty on its way and to share an early crop of verse on the subjectHaving survived the winds of winter, the plum tree outside...
View ArticleBorder review between the real and the imagined
Peter Bennet's poems embrace everything from the Hitler-loving Mitford sister to the Tyne salmon in 'its pelt of light'Border selects from Peter Bennet's recent books and adds new poems, so it's a good...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: Bad Dream
by David ConstantineThere was a path, the familiar path, the oneI've very often not yet ventured onAround a mountainside, cut level, a sheerFall right, a sheer wall left, a ledge a pairMight amble hand...
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