Readers recommend: misanthropic songs | Peter Kimpton
Hatred of humankind? Youve got to love it. Dark humour, sharp lyrics and moving music will be among your song suggestionsFrom Horace to Huxley, Hogarth to Pope, Molière to Brass Eyes Chris Morris,...
View ArticlePoster poems: Sappho
The passionate words of Sappho have been reinterpreted with each modern age; now it is your turn pen new versions of her musings on moonlight and deathWith International Translation Day fast...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Poem to a Friend Feeling Out of His Element
by Tony RobertsTurgenev tells of a little French drummercaught by the peasants of Smolenskafter the sack of Moscow and how,as they were preparing to cram himdown a hole in the Gniloterka River,a...
View ArticlePoem of the week: A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General by...
This verdict on the passing of a publicly celebrated warrior is fuelled by a bracing contemptHate is as fine a motivator of the muse as love, and who better to provide an angry Poem of the week than...
View ArticleMaya Angelou hip-hop album, recorded with her blessing, due out
Caged Bird Songs includes some vocals which the late author, who 'loved' the project, laid down especiallyMaya Angelou's grandson has spoken about one of the late author's final projects: an album, due...
View ArticleNext Generation of 20 hotly-tipped poets announced by Poetry Book Society
Women including Mercury music prize-nominated performance poet Kate Tempest lead charge of new authors predicted for great things in the coming yearsFrom former heroin addict Sam Willetts to the hit...
View ArticleCrowdfunding campaign hopes to save William Blakes cottage for nation
Fundraisers looking to raise £520,000 to buy the house where, he wrote, Heaven opens here on all sides her golden GatesA campaign to crowdfund the £520,000 needed to buy the cottage on the Sussex coast...
View ArticleLiterary prodigies - make a start on our quiz
Poetry's 'Next Generation' has just been announced a good moment to find out if you're a rising star or an old hand with our quiz on bookish early achievers'Next Generation' of 20 hotly-tipped poets...
View ArticlePoet, performer, novelist: the rise of the uncategorisable Kate Tempest
Mercury nomination and place on prestigious list of poets are well-deserved accolades for bright young performerTrying to categorise Kate Tempest is something akin to untangling a basket of eels; her...
View ArticleKate Tempest: a winning wielder of words | Observer profile
The rapper-cum-poet has achieved an unprecedented double: nominated for the Mercury prize and acclaimed by an august poetry society. Not bad for a woman who used to 'rap at riot cops'Perfect storm....
View ArticleEdward Hirsch: Many of us carry the dead around with us. We shouldnt feel...
The celebrated American poet had theorised about the nature of the elegy. And then his own son died in a drug-related accident, and he was left searching for words to describe his loss. Tim Adams meets...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Sea and the Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins
These ringing lines register the complex music of nature heard from the Welsh coast, set against the sordid human worldGerard Manley Hopkins was inspired by the charm and instress of Wales and also by...
View ArticleThree-hundred year-old poem in support of British union goes on sale
Copy of Elkanah Settles Carmen irenicum surfaces just as Scotland readies itself for independence voteQueen Anne I is depicted as a proud, jealous defender of a united Britain in a 1707 poem about...
View ArticleClive James adds new poem to valedictory work
In Japanese Maple, the terminally ill author writes that he expects autumn will end the gameYour death, near now, is of an easy sort / So slow a fading out brings no real pain, writes Clive James in a...
View ArticleWhy Clive Jamess Japanese Maple is so much more than a poem | George Szirtes
Because we know James is dying, his poem ranks alongside Tichborne, Owen or Marvell in the canon of valedictory farewellsIn his key book of 1972, Ways of Seeing, John Berger presented us with an image...
View ArticleThank you, Clive, for words of sweet beauty | @guardianletters
The Japanese maple is one of my favourite trees. Clive James could not have known the impact of his poem (17 September) for me. I am a Methodist chaplain in a large hospital. On Wednesday I was at the...
View ArticleSophie Hannah: 'I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer. I'm snobby...
The poet and bestselling crime novelist talks to Alison Flood about taking on Agatha Christie's PoirotThis month, sitting in a London cafe, his famous moustache exquisite, his little grey cells as busy...
View ArticleThe Gathering review a layered feeling for place and history
Hafod y Llan farm, SnowdoniaGillian Clarke and Louise Ann Wilsons pastoral Welsh installation leaves its mark on the memoryIt begins each September: yr helfa, the gathering of sheep from the higher...
View ArticleYoung Pacific islanders are not climate change victims they're fighting | Nic...
A young performance artist from the Marshall Islands will tell this weeks UN climate summit that its time for action and shes not aloneOn Tuesday, a young woman from the Marshall Islands will stand...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Snow by Vidyan Ravinthiran
This fine, metaphysical work is as much a love poem as a love letter to that flaky white stuffI like the way this weeks poem begins by arguing not noisily, but with quietly casual insistence. Snow by...
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