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How to draw… a summer evening – in pictures

Carolina Rabei has illustrated Walter de la Mare’s glorious celebration of a balmy Summer Evening – here’s her step-by-step guide on how you can do it tooContinue reading...

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Carol Ann Duffy introduces poems for our love of bookshops

The poet laureate is leading the Shore to Shore tour of Britain in celebration of independent sellers. She introduces new work by Clive James, Jackie Kay and Alan JenkinsThe Shore to Shore tour – in...

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John Cooper Clarke: ‘Impotent rage is my default setting'

The poet, 67, on late fatherhood, not liking crowds, and being a control freakIt only takes one person to change a lot of minds. I went to what can only be described as a slum school in Salford – rough...

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Forward prizes reveal shortlists of poems from 'the age of migration'

‘Very dynamic’ finalists for the awards show influences from Greenlandic, Caribbean creole, Scots, and Kurdish languagesFrom Kurdish writer Choman Hardi’s poetry telling the stories of the survivors of...

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Poem of the week: Death makes dead metaphor revive by Denise Riley

With nods to both Emily Dickinson and the hymns of Isaac Watts, this finds a mineral solidity in its metaphors of life and deathDeath makes dead metaphor reviveDeath makes dead metaphor revive,Turn...

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Penguin Modern Poets series gets 21st-century relaunch

Iconic brand, which brought together groups of writers – including the bestselling Mersey poets – will release contemporary collections showcasing ‘a new golden age’Penguin’s iconic Modern Poets...

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Why music is the beating heart of my poetry

CLippa nominated poet John Lyons grew up in Trinidad in the 1930s and 40s where singing and tellings stories were as natural a part of his life as breathing. Now in his 80s, here’s why music still...

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Sam Gardiner obituary

Hard-hitting but witty Northern Irish poetSam Gardiner, who has died aged 79, was a distinguished member of the generation of Northern Irish poets that also included Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and...

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This is the 1.17 to nirvana: how a Yorkshire commute became a work of art

Bouquets beneath the Humber bridge, the mayor of Gibraltar in his trunks, windfarms and mudflats … the train ride from Goole to Hull has become a symphony of storiesA short while after leaving Hessle...

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How the year without summer gave us dark masterpieces

Clouds from a huge volcano plunged the world into endless winter in 1816. Crops failed, famine and disease spread – and great poets and composers of the day responded with works of gloomy geniusIn...

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After Orlando: Gay Love, a poem by Carol Ann Duffy

A new poem by the poet laureate, written in the aftermath of the Orlando shootingsThis writer is gay,and the priest, in the old love of his church,kneeling to pray.The farmer is gay, baling the gold...

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Dreams in literature - a nightmarish quiz!

On 18 June 1816, Mary Shelley had a dream that inspired Frankenstein. Before and since, dreaming has provided much literary inspiration – have you been awake to it?Which literary softie said: “I think...

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New Selected Poems by Derek Mahon review – lyrics of crystalline wonder

A diptych of early and late work displays a consistency of skill and wit across 40 years‘Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground,” wrote the young Derek Mahon in “In Carrowdore Churchyard”,...

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Poem about struggle 'to love this world as it is' goes viral

Poet Maggie Smith’s Good Bones has been shared thousands of times since its launch on WednesdayA poem by US poet Maggie Smith that tackles “how hard it is to love this world as it is, and to teach my...

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Poetry can heal – it helped me through depression

After my illness, I walked alone through Spain, with an anthology of verse chosen by friendsIn Dante’s time, books were sold in apothecary shops: literature as medicine. I learned this when I was very...

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The Saturday poem: Piercings

by Harry GilesIt took two looks to see him,head whipped and jaw loosed, silent moviewise. The boy who broke me in, my nut, my skin, up, who said a break- down would do you good. The changesnuck him...

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‘The only way I could really talk about his suicide was in a poem’

When their half-brother took a fatal overdose, twins Matthew and Michael Dickman wrote a series of poems in his honour. Now, the collection is breaking taboos about suicide and inviting comparisons...

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Poem of the week: Tourists by Ruth Bidgood

A warm pastiche of an 18th-century travelogue, this is a touching portrait of the tourist’s comical but sincere search for exaltation in WalesTouristsWarner, setting out eagerly from Bathat five on a...

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Sarah Crossan wins the Carnegie medal with verse novel One

A novel written in free verse takes the Carnegie for the first time in the medal’s illustrious historyFind out who won the inaugural Amnesty CILIP honoursChris Riddell wins the Kate Greenaway medal...

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Five poets go on tour: Carol Ann Duffy's travel diary begins

The poet laureate begins a series of reports from the Shore to Shore poetry tour, where she is travelling with Gillian Clarke, Imtiaz Dharker, Jackie Kay and John Sampson‘No drugs on the bus’: Carol...

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