Sample delights from the CLPE poetry award 2015 shortlist
Looking for great children’s poetry? Check out the brilliant collections that have been shortlisted for this year’s Centre for Literacy in Primary Education prize and sample some of the poems – plus...
View ArticleWhy is children's poetry so invisible?
Chrissie Gittins says it’s time to get confident about children’s poetry, children love it – so publishers, bookshops and libraries should stop hiding it and start celebrating Tell us your favourite...
View ArticleIrish poet WB Yeats honoured with worldwide 150th birthday celebrations
From a new Irish stamp to a public reading by Fiona Shaw, global events in honour of ‘a great public and private poet’ beginOpen thread: which is your favourite Yeats poem?The 150th anniversary of the...
View ArticleOpen thread: which is your favourite WB Yeats poem?
In the 150th anniversary year of the Irish poet, pick your favourite workNews: Yeats honoured with worldwide celebrationsWould you rather arise and go now, slouch towards Bethlehem, or seek to tell the...
View ArticleWhen politics meets poetry: what the humanities bring to policymaking
Insights from the humanities deserve greater attention in debates about the role of evidence and expertise in policy. Poets don’t often pop up at infrastructure conferences. But a few months ago, at a...
View ArticleEnoh Meyomesse, Cameroonian writer and activist, released from prison
Meyomesse walks free from jail in Yaoundé after three years of lobbying by free speech campaigners The Cameroonian poet, essayist and political activist Enoh Meyomesse has been released from prison...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: Audiology
by Sean O’BrienI hear an elevator sweating in New Orleans,Water folding black on black in tanks deep under Carthage,Unfracked oil in LancashireAnd what you’re thinking. It’s the truth –There goes your...
View ArticleSwooning over Rupert Brooke | Katharine Whitehorn
The First World War poets stirred the imagination not just with their words but also with their photographsTen days ago the Times headlined the fact that Rupert Brooke was a womaniser. I look forward...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Selling His Soul by Sophie Hannah
The formal conservatism of Sophie Hannah’s Selling His Soul does nothing to restrict this elegant love poem’s unsettling messageSelling His SoulWhen someone says they have a poet’s soulYou can imagine...
View ArticleTemples of literature: writers' houses – in pictures
From the abbey where Byron partied to the house where Agatha Christie tested out her whodunnits, Nick Channer tells the inside story of the homes behind some of the great works of English literature•...
View ArticleHow well do you know the Romantic poets? - quiz
We're two centuries on from the high watermark of a heroic age for writers. From deathless couplets to dieting tips, test your knowledge of the lives and works of Byron and co Continue reading...
View ArticleBeata Duncan obituary
My mother, Beata Duncan, who has died aged 93, was a much-loved poet and performer. Her work was published by John Rettie’s Hearing Eye Press, in several Arts Council anthologies, national journals and...
View ArticleThe National's Bryce Dessner on the American landscapes that inspire him
Ahead of a concert series in London of new music exploring the American musical landscape, the musician selects seven works that provide fertile ground for his imaginationRobert Frank: The Americans......
View ArticleWole Soyinka leads candidates for Oxford professor of poetry
Nigerian Nobel laureate receives strong support to win 300-year-old position, held in the past by writers from Matthew Arnold to Seamus HeaneyNobel laureate and political activist Wole Soyinka has put...
View ArticlePoems by JH Prynne review – ‘the ultimate poet of “anti-pathos”’
Distance and difficulty, yes. But there’s also pleasure in the Stockhausen of modern poetryIn The Making of the Reader, David Trotter proposes a useful distinction between “pathos” and what he terms...
View ArticleMark Doty: ‘This book is not a leisurely meditation on mortality. This is my...
The American poet and Aids chronicler talks about drugs, gardening, break-up tattoos and letting go after years of being strongIn 2008 the American poet Mark Doty was awarded the National Book award...
View ArticleShould the poet laureate have to write about the royal birth?
Princess Charlotte is now a week old, but so far there has been no news of a Carol Ann Duffy poem to commemorate her birthIt’s now a week since Princess Charlotte was born and, as we went to press,...
View ArticlePoem of the week: from Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
The tumultuous energy of this 17th-century soliloquy remains alive with the terrors that follow a deal with the devilFAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus, Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be...
View ArticleSimon Armitage joins field for Oxford professor of poetry
Bestselling ‘self-schooled’ poet nominated alongside Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and three others for prestigious positionSimon Armitage has thrown his hat into the ring to be the next professor of...
View ArticleAn anthology of poetry on climate change
UK’s poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy introduces a series of new work from a variety of poets commissioned specially for the Keep it in the Ground projectRead Vertigo by Alice OswaldIf information was all...
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