Poster poems: lawns
Nature tamed or nature fighting to be wild again, the lawn is a great site for summer thoughts. Let's see what you can roll out for this month's challengeSummer is here at last it seems, with long...
View ArticleWigan poet Louise Fazackerley: 'Artists come from Wigan; they rarely stay here'
The performance poet winner of the Radio 3 Verb New Voices award on moving to London, rubbing shoulders with Jarvis Cocker, and the poetry inspired by her soldier husband's return from AfghanistanIt's...
View ArticleThe Living Option: Selected Poems by Karen Solie review
A poet of the modern long-distance journey, Solie embraces the moment and observes the anxieties that come with choiceBorn in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in central Canada, Karen Solie now lives in...
View ArticleThe 10 best recordings of poets
From Alfred Lord Tennyson to Alice Oswald, Andrew Motion chooses his favourite recordings of poems read aloud by those who wrote themHear and download all of the recordings at poetryarchive.org, and...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Square Man
by Melissa Lee-HoughtonYou're a square man. Everything about you is square: your face, your chin, your body,the squareness of your opinions,the squareness of your emotional life.With so many sides and...
View ArticleLetter: Geoffrey Godbert on Rosemary Tonks. 'She gave the impression of a...
I first met Rosemary Tonks at the Group poetry meetings held in the 1970s at Edward Lucie-Smith's Chelsea house. She immediately gave the impression of a coiled spring waiting and needing to be...
View ArticleBright Travellers review Fiona Benson's impressive first collection
Fiona Benson transforms life's surprises, accidents and let-downs into poems of great beauty in her bold debutYou might think Bright Travellers a fey title, but not once you have encountered the poem...
View ArticleJeremy Paxman, elitism, and poetry for ordinary people | @guardianletters
George Szirtes (Poetry is felt, not fathomed, 3 June) seems unaware that his oddly elitist dismissal of "the People" (twice), and their alleged inability to "get" a "difficult" Eliot or Auden, seem to...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Desert Flowers by Keith Douglas
Not long before his cruelly early death, Douglas matched the grim reality of war with a lyric passionSeventy years ago, the poet Keith Douglas was killed during the Allied invasion of Normandy on 9...
View ArticleEdinburgh Book festival: a palpable passion for literature
Whether you are rubbing shoulders with world leaders, grilling the latest literary stars or simply reclining in Charlotte Square with a glass of wine, Edinburgh is a book festival like no otherWhen I...
View ArticleElder by David Constantine review a new collection as the poet turns 70
Constantine's lifelong devotion to the classics and to German is in evidence in poems that neither avoid death nor permit it to belittle life's giftsThe publication of David Constantine's Elder marks...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: When Considering the Long, Long Journey of 28,000...
by Kei MillerTo them who knew to break free from dark hold of shipsContinue reading...
View ArticleFredrik Sjöberg: 'I realised I had to write my book for people not interested...
Fredrik Sjöberg spent seven years hunting hoverflies on a small Swedish island and then wrote a genre-defying memoir about it'It's somewhere between a flute and an opium pipe," explains Fredrik...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Ecce Puer by James Joyce
The death of his father and birth of his grandson prompted a return to poetry for Joyce and perhaps his finest work in the mediumBloomsday is 16 June, and what better poem to bring to a celebration of...
View ArticleBaudelaire dismissed Victor Hugo as 'an idiot' in unseen letter
In contrast to public praise of Les Misérables author, correspondence reveals private contemptVictor Hugo, revered author of Les Misérables and towering French literary giant, was also something of a...
View ArticlePablo Neruda poems 'of extraordinary quality' discovered
More than 20 unseen works found, which his publisher says amount to 'a literary event of universal significance'More than 20 unpublished poems by Pablo Neruda works of "extraordinary quality" according...
View ArticleAlexander Pope: in his own image
The marble bust of Alexander Pope, created by Roubiliac, shows the writer as he wanted to be seen by posterity. But the face still reveals his constant pain and wildnessAlexander Pope hasn't been a...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: That Was the Summer
by Kit WrightThat was the summer as I recall,the man next door and I beganto call each other Sir,in a kind of roguish formality ormock-combative collusion. Why,I cannot say, but keep it upwe somehow...
View ArticlePark Notes review beautifully crafted ruminations on Regent's Park
Sarah Pickstone gathers writings from Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Olivia Laing and others to fine effectWe are often invited to think of London's parks as the lungs of the city, its breathing spaces....
View ArticleAll quiet on the Welsh front: reliving the horrors of Mametz
It was a five-day fight for a square mile of Somme trees that left thousands dead. Now National Theatre Wales are recreating the Battle of Mametz Wood on a sheep farmIt was the sound of the gunfire...
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