David Harewood: Kenya's eternal summer drove home climate impact
As the Homeland star joins fellow luminaries for a Shakespeare-themed climate campaign, he tells of the deep impression made by seeing dead cattle in KenyaA trip to northern Kenya six years ago...
View ArticleAndrew Motion on how to write a love poem
Penning poetry for the one you love? Here are five basic rules by Britain’s former poet laureateTraditionally, love poems were written in sonnet form, but they don’t have to be. Find the form that...
View ArticleMartin Green obituary
Writer, poet and publisher who was part of Soho’s bohemian world in the 1960sMartin Green, who has died aged 82, was a writer, poet and publisher. Among the many books he encouraged as an editor at...
View ArticleStraight from the heart: the best love letters
Valentine’s Day is coming, and with it a poll to identify the greatest ever love letters. Here’s our alternative list, but which epistle would you nominate?Just in time for Valentine’s Day, life...
View Article'Where are the libraries?' The literary radical fighting Sudan's crackdowns
As writers’ unions and book markets are banned by the government, the poet and journalist Mamoun Eltlib is fighting to preserve the city’s literary scene, writes Alia Gilbert“I believe that words can...
View ArticleSignior Dildo – and other perfect poems for Valentine’s Day
The antithesis of hearts-and-flowers romance, the poetry of the 2nd Earl of Rochester is prescient and moving tooIf you are looking for conventional love poetry for Valentine’s Day, the verse of John...
View ArticleWhy you can’t have love without lies
Love and honesty go hand in hand, right? Wrong. From Shakespeare’s sonnets to the plastic surgeries of Beverly Hills, the history of romance is also one of deceptionHow many times during a terrible...
View ArticleYoung Dickens in love: sugary, and waxing lyrical about gloves
A new exhibition explores the faltering relationship between the novelist and his first love Maria Beadnell – and the resulting, questionable, poetryA halting acrostic poem, ending with the sugary...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: 041
by Iain BanksMy lady’s voice on the phoneLike an electric thread of silkDrawing me back through night’s dark mazeTo a stormy cityA handful-hundred miles away.“There’s thunder,Can you hear it?”I...
View Article‘Readers of Iain Banks’s prose will find in his poems much that is familiar’
A poet before a novelist, Iain Banks worked on his only collection in the weeks before he diedIn a pub conversation in the autumn of 2012, long before he had any warning of his illness, Iain Banks told...
View ArticleTS Eliot’s restless ghost finds home in seaside idyll
Fifty years after poet’s death, his family’s summer retreat is to be turned into a fitting monument to his life and worksLast September, listeners to National Public Radio, the US equivalent of Radio...
View ArticleThere’s poetry in peas
A book of verse written in the kitchen has pierced my heart like a skewer. But I’m still puzzled by its infatuation with blackcurrant leavesIf some cooks take pleasure in even the most boring tasks,...
View ArticlePoetry Notebook 2006-2014 review – Clive James’s absorbing thoughts on verse
The great critic champions the poems that have given him most pleasure in this provocative collection of essaysClive James is never po-faced about poetry. He writes with the buoyant, aphoristic panache...
View ArticlePhilip Levine, former US poet laureate and Pulitzer winner, dies at 87
Poet died on Saturday, a month after being diagnosed with cancerWon Pulitzer Prize in 1995, for The Simple TruthPhilip Levine, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose intimate portraits of blue-collar life...
View ArticlePoem of the week: First Love by Joan Margarit
The Catalan poet explores brutality, love and death in a lifelong journey that begins with the secret purchase of a knife as a childFirst LoveIn the dreary Girona of my seven-year-old self,where...
View ArticleJ-Lo sparks quest to find ‘first editions’ of The Iliad
Reference to garage-sale copy of Greek epic poem in Jennifer Lopez thriller The Boy Next Door propels Homer up AbeBooks’ search rankingsA scene in Jennifer Lopez’s new film in which her character is...
View ArticleSri Lankan minister calls on poets to help unite a divided nation
Writers, actors and dancers asked to help heal the wounds of civil war as new government pushes for reconciliationFor centuries, the poets of Sri Lanka have sung the praises of the island nation’s...
View ArticleEugene Onegin review – lovestruck and snowblind in St Petersburg
Barbican, LondonRimas Tuminas’s production, though witty and full of memorable, inventive imagery, misses some of Pushkin’s deft lightnessAlthough Pushkin’s novel in verse has yielded a famous opera...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: Silentium
by Fyodor Tyutchev, translated by Robert ChandlerBe silent, hide away and letyour thoughts and longings rise and setin the deep places of your heart.Let dreams move silently as stars,in wonder more...
View ArticleA Woman Without a Country by Eavan Boland review – into the shadowlands history
Has a poetry of myth, legacy and lost lands become a one-size-fits-all historical elegy Eavan Boland’s “The Wife’s Lament”, a translation from the Anglo-Saxon, begins: “I sing this poem full of grief....
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