America's independence from Britain resounds in its poetry
The tradition of individual spirit in the US has been handed down since Walt Whitman. On Independence Day, Jay Parini salutes the poets who have captured the song of AmericaLast week, over breakfast,...
View ArticlePoster poems: Islands | Billy Mills
There are myriad landfalls available for the poetic imagination. This month, please set off on your own voyages of verse discoveryRereading Shakespeare's The Tempest recently, I was struck again by the...
View ArticleMichael Morpurgo on the first world war books podcast
The creator of War Horse explores how the first world war still looms large in our imagination with members of the Guardian Children's books site Continue reading...
View ArticleMoontide by Niall Campbell review a poetic symphony in the Outer Hebrides
Campbell's first collection of poems is full of striking moments illuminated by powerful lyric impulsesStare long enough at a landscape and it stares back at you. I hadn't expected to find the truth of...
View ArticleFire, torment and villainy await Chris Grayling in novel punishment for...
Novelist Kathy Lette plans revenge on justice secretary Chris Grayling by giving his name to a corrupt character in her next novel. But what could other dastardly Graylings get up to in future fiction...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: The Catch
by Ben WilkinsonFor you, the catch wasn't something caught:not word or contender, attention or fire.Not the almost-missed train, or the sortof wave surfers might wait an entire lifetime for. Not the...
View ArticleLearning to Make an Oud in Nazareth review Ruth Padel's new collection...
Musical instruments of east and west appear in the search for common ground in Ruth Padel's accomplished new collection"Making is our defence against the dark," is the last line of Ruth Padel's new...
View ArticleHear great poets of the past via the Poetry Archive
Thanks to the recently relaunched website, you can listen to the likes of Tennyson and Sylvia Plath reading their own verseListening to Andrew Motion on a recent You and Yours talking about the...
View ArticlePoem of the week: A Dream by Matthew Arnold
A reverie on a Swiss mountain stream's descent is packed with sensuous details, carrying the reader down to an allegorical seaJohn Cowper Powys described Matthew Arnold in The Pleasures of Literature...
View ArticleLetter: Gerard Benson asked for paper and pen and wrote a poem on the spot
In the late 1960s and 70s, when the Barrow Poets toured the US and Canada four times under the auspices of the impresario Sol Hurok, Gerard Benson was a vibrant and sometimes flamboyant performer. I...
View ArticleBertolt Brecht's poems to 'one of his great loves' come to fervent life
Passionate love poems exchanged with the actor Margarete Steffin are to be read live in translation for the first timeIn 1931 German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht met a young actor, a woman called...
View ArticleScroobius Pip and Kate Pullinger on self-publishing books podcast
As writers of all kinds turn to publishing themselves in increasing numbers, we talk to Kate Pullinger, Tom Chalmers and the inimitable Scroobius Pip about the pleasures and perils of going it alone...
View ArticleWhos the poet: Pamela Anderson or Sylvia Plath? Take our quiz
Actor, model and former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson has published a 1,209-word epic poem, expressing her feelings after she filed for a second divorce from her two-time husband Rick Salomon. Its...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Extremophile
by Sheenagh PughTwo miles below the light, bacterialive without sun, thrive on sulphurin a cave of radioactive rock,and, blind in the night of the ocean floor,molluscs that feed only on woodwait for...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Dreamhorse by Jon Stallworthy
A children's toy provides the sunny springboard for a canter from the past into a future shadowed with the regrets of ageThis week's poem by Jon Stallworthy comes from his 2004 collection, Body...
View ArticleBarry Cole obituary
My friend Barry Cole, who has died aged 77, gained early recognition as a poet and novelist. In 1968 his first collection of poems, Moonsearch, which became a Poetry Book Society recommendation, was...
View ArticleAutomatic for the people: Jackie Kay's robot poem for Milton Keynes
Why is a robot writing poetry in a shopping centre in Milton Keynes? It's all about Jackie Kay finding her birth mother and losing her to dementiaIf, as Wordsworth said, poetry is human emotion...
View ArticleA book for the beach: I Put a Spell on You by John Burnside
This is a book that will change you and your understanding of life and do so without taking up too much of your holiday timeThe requirement for summer reading used to be a vast, compelling book....
View ArticleTony Mitton wins CLPE poetry award
Newsflash:Tony Mitton fights off competition from a starry shortlist to win UK's only prize for published children's poetryTony Mitton has been named winner of the Centre for Literacy in Primary...
View ArticleRobert Crawford: 'The only major English novel set in Scotland is To the...
The award-winning poet and biographer tells Nicholas Wroeabout Dickens, Daveheart and devolutionGuessing where Robert Crawford stands on the question of Scottish independence is not difficult. As a...
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