Poem of the week: Present Tense by Michael Schmidt
Recalling Donne's sermon on Job 19:26, with a bit of Ovidian metamorphosis thrown in, this modern meditation on memory and resurrection shifts between past, present and futureResurrection takes various...
View ArticleTS Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes: a crucial hinge in his development | Roz Kaveney
A small fragment has never revealed so much. Look closely and you'll see Eliot reaching his pitch of emotional painTS Eliot's conversion to high Anglican Christianity came as a colossal shock to...
View ArticleAllen Ginsberg postcard condemns 'Red Lands' of eastern Europe
Beat legend's personal report of trip to communist bloc comes up for auction next monthA postcard from Allen Ginsberg, in which the Beat poet writes of how "communism just doesn't work" after...
View ArticleTadeusz Róewicz: poet of a decimated generation
The late Polish author's work bears witness to the worst of the 20th century without surrendering its human sympathyTadeusz Róewicz, who has died at the age of 92, was one of the great European...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Cradle Cap
by Fiona BensonIt begins as a roughness,then spreads to a lichenous crustthat helmets your head for months,and for months a cuckoo-spit salvewets down your scalpas we try to soak it off.Continue...
View ArticleTS Eliot and the politics of culture | Roz Kaveney
The poet's meditative writings in the late 1920s and early 30s mask a certain chillTS Eliot was one of the most intellectually adroit of poets, a fine mind with a breadth of cultural and other...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Work by Niall Campbell
A consideration of how to write finds unexpected analogies with everything from whalers to nurses to waitersNiall Campbell's first full-length collection, Moontide, published last week by Bloodaxe,...
View ArticleThe secret life of Laurie Lee, artist in pictures
He was the much loved author of Cider With Rosie. But in another life, Laurie Lee dreamed of being an artist. His daughter Jessy Lee shares his secret side These are edited extracts from Laurie Lee: A...
View ArticleHow well do you know your May Day literature? quiz
Whether as a beacon of labour solidarity, a herald of summer or a good excuse for a day off, May Day means something to most of us. How much do you know about the writing it has inspired? Continue...
View ArticleCan Shakespeare and Keats address today's food security challenges?
As part of a joint EU and Welsh Assembly project, a group of academics hope that linking fiction with farming can prepare food producers for futureLiterature is full of references to food. Think of...
View ArticleReaders recommend: songs about keys and locks | Peter Kimpton
Padlocks to deadlocks, lockets to lockdowns, skeletons to safes, turn in your key and lock songs to open a new combinationThousands of times he turned, and then entered. He was a conduit to dreams, a...
View ArticleRhys Ifans to play Dylan Thomas in film of poet's last days
John Malkovich will also star in biopic about the New York death of hard-drinking Under Milk Wood writerRhys Ifans to star in adaptation of Under Milk WoodRhys Ifans will play Dylan Thomas in a biopic...
View ArticlePoster poems: Owls | Billy Mills
These awesome creatures have inspired much poetry. Now it's your turn let your muse take flightDriving home late the other week I was startled by a sudden apparition that flew out of the night, passed...
View ArticleRosemary Tonks obituary
Poet and novelist who turned her back on the literary world for four decadesThe poet Rosemary Tonks, who has died aged 85, famously "disappeared" in the 1970s. The author of two poetry collections and...
View ArticleStandard Twin Fantasy by Sam Riviere review an elliptical amuse-bouche
David Wheatley on the pleasures of caustic glamour and stylised paranoiaA whole secret history of contemporary poetry could be written from its chapbooks and pamphlets, those lo-fi leftovers from a...
View ArticleMy father and his other children
Raffaella Barker, daughter of the poet George Barker, grew up thinking she had four siblings. Then she found out she was actually number 11 of his considerable brood of 15My big family crept up on me,...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Knowing the Code
by Stewart Conn(for David and Mim)Continue reading...
View ArticleGeorge Szirtes: what being bilingual means for my writing and identity
Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes writes in both English and his native tongue. He contemplates bilingualism and belongingSometimes language seems no more than a piece of tissue paper carried on the...
View ArticleI Put a Spell on You review John Burnside's path less travelled
In this digressive, consuming 'anti-memoir' the poet traces his development in prose that's full of wondersJohn Burnside's I Put a Spell on You is an anti-memoir. It involves trying to give himself the...
View ArticleTadeusz Róewicz obituary
Poet and dramatist haunted by the second world war and the suffering of PolandThe terrible experiences of his native Poland and of his generation were vividly expressed in the poetry and plays of...
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