Robert Burns and the yes campaign
Scotland's national poet is is a formidable rhetorical resource for Alex Salmond. Here are seven verses ripe for appropriation Scottish writers on the referendum Essay: Scottish independence literature...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Squawks and Speech by Ian Gregson
Peter is dead it is up to his abandoned parrot to detail his absence in a narrative of fits, starts and circlesThis week's poem, Squawks and Speech by Ian Gregson, is a vivid and disconcerting...
View ArticleTelling the story of the first world war with 2014 technology
The Guardian's special projects editor, Francesca Panetta, outlines how we created an innovative multimedia guide to the first world warToday we launched our most recent multimedia interactive to...
View ArticleLetter: 'Gerard Benson and the Barrow Poets were electrifying'
I first encountered the fabulous Gerard Benson in the very early 1970s when the Barrow Poets played in a scrubby basement in the Sir Christopher Wren pub in the old Paternoster Square, by St Paul's...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Jack Woolley's Dream
by Tony Williamsi.m. Arnold PetersContinue reading...
View ArticleHaunting 1914 poem inspires composer of Westminster Abbey's war vigil anthem
Abbey choir commissions David Matthews, whose grandfather died weeks before armisticeAs Britain has remembered and commemorated the first world war, which plunged Europe into darkness and despair 100...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Virginia Woolf's Angels 1919 by Patricia McCarthy
Two contrasting varieties of 'angel' provide a dynamic image of the writer's sense of liberation, and subtle premonitions of her fateThis week's poem, Virginia Woolf's Angels 1919, comes from Patricia...
View ArticleReading American cities: New York in books
In our new summer series, Charlotte Jones collates the perfect literary companions for four US city breaks. This week, the metropolis that has inspired writers from John Dos Passos to Don DeLilloFrom...
View ArticleFree of the Taliban, Pakistans Pashtun poets revive their craft
Amid the chaos of refugee life, traditional verse is flourishing again as troops seek to drive militants from North WaziristanFor more than five centuries, poets in remote north-western Pakistan have...
View ArticleHedd Wyn: poetry that echoes from the first world war
He was born on a farm in Gwynedd and died with half a million others at Passchendaele. In between he wrote some of Wales's most moving poetry. A century on, his nephew has dedicated himself to keeping...
View ArticleTop 10 war poems
This week marks a century since the outbreak of the first world war. Chosen from 1,000 years of English writing about war, poet and Oxford professor Jon Stallworthy selects some of the best attempts to...
View ArticleBattle lines: what Chaucer and Eminem have in common
The author of The Rap Canterbury Tales explains how the ideals of poetry and performance that Chaucer championed live on in hip-hop cultureThe Canterbury Tales may seem an odd point of departure for a...
View ArticleWhy you should ignore the superlatives on book jackets
Cover blurbs aren't reviews, they're advertisements that offer no space for balanced, nuanced positivityDo you agree? And have you seen any over-the-top examples? Share them in the comment thread...
View ArticleBeowulf review all the violence and excitement of an action movie
Tron, GlasgowA Greek chorus of narrators exploits Seamus Heaney's robust text for every bit of its narrative drive in this dramatic readingGrendel is dead. Beowulf is victorious. The mood is of...
View ArticlePoster poems: Cars | Billy Mills
They can be vehicles for many subjects, so please rev up your imaginative engines and see where this month's topic takes youTowards the end of 1955, Marianne Moore was invited to submit suggestions for...
View ArticleTerror by Toby Martinez de las Rivas review a symphony of psalms
This collection of meditations on fear reveals Martinez de las Rivas's visionary dispositionJeremy Paxman, chair of this year's Forward prize judging panel, might be happier with Reader's Digest, but...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: 1st March: Ain Kiniyya
by Yves Berger, translated by John BergerSpring covers with a greenexiles never forgetthe hills where wandering herdsgraze the growing grassContinue reading...
View ArticleThe Stairwell review Michael Longley's shortcuts to the heart
Birth and death are never far apart in the Irish poet's cherishable new collectionOne of the most moving things about Michael Longley's tenth collection is the way in which he considers death, giving...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Book by FT Prince
A metaphysical love poem that orchestrates a wealth of feeling at the edges of body and soulThis week's poem, The Book, is by the South African poet, FT (Frank Templeton) Prince, who died 11 years ago...
View ArticleClive James publishes valedictory poems
Work combines sorrow with his characteristic humour, comparing his own plight to Napoleon's in The Emperor's Last WordsInterview: Clive JamesTwo new poems by Clive James see the gravely ill author and...
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