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Channel: Poetry | The Guardian

Weekend podcast: Marina Hyde on Boris’s last hurrah, the world’s favourite poem, and decoding midlife fashion

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With Partygate and the former PM back in the news, we ask if we’ve finally reached peak Boris (1m35s)? With one billion streams, what makes John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours possibly the world’s favourite poem (8m27s)? And Viv Groskop navigates the mixed messages of the women’s fiftysomethings clothing market (21m40s)

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On my radar: Ali Smith’s cultural highlights

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The award-winning Scottish author on a brilliant exhibition in Paris, a talismanic collection of new poetry and an apocalyptic novel like no other

Born in Inverness in 1962, Ali Smith has published 12 novels, including How to Be Both, which won the Women’s prize for fiction, the Goldsmiths prize and the Costa novel of the year award, and her “seasonal quartet”, starting withAutumnin 2016. She has been shortlisted twice for both the Booker prize and the Orange prize with Hotel World and The Accidental, and has also published several short story collections, plays and nonfiction. Next, she is chair of the judges for the 2023 Rathbones Folio prize, the winner of which is announced on 27 March. She lives in Cambridge.

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Poem of the week: here yet be dragons by Lucille Clifton

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This short poem with a vast moral force field examines humanity, the monsters of racism, misogyny and militarism, and asks the reader a crucial, mind-stopping question

so many languages have fallen
off of the edge of the world
into the dragon’s mouth. some

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Top 10 stories about wolves

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Writers including Angela Carter, Karen Russell and Jiang Rong have looked into the eyes of an animal that roams widely through our stories and stalks our collective imagination

Is it because wolves are one of the most widely distributed land mammals on earth – from tideline to tundra, desert to grassland – that they also roam so widely through our stories? Or is it because of what we share as apex predators, both of us known to wander away from our families when we are young, mate for life, raise young collaboratively and, as Plato pointed out, sometimes kill our own kind? To consider a wolf is to grapple with an animal that conjures both the familiar – our dogs; ourselves – and the foreign. The wolf will not be tamed, but neither is it likely to hunt us. The animal looms far larger in our psyches than we likely do in its. But what exactly is the animal we have created in our stories and our minds? “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov. “That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.”

From fable to fairytale to wilderness adventure novel, the wolf has very often been cast as antagonist; a spectre of danger and the unknown. The very mention of “howling in the distance” has, like the creaking door, become a sort of atmospheric shorthand for looming threat or eerie uncertainty. There is also, though, a well of wolf stories that nod to the trope of evil wolf before subverting it. Having written my first book, Wolfish, about the solo journey of one famous Oregon wolf alongside my own coming-of-age departure from home, I am fascinated by the biological reality of wolves, but also in dissecting what I have come to think of as the “cultural taxidermy” of our lupine symbols.

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Mariluz Escribano Pueo: the late Spanish poet finally finding acclaim

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Child of Spanish civil war is attaining readership and recognition that eluded her in her lifetime

The defining moment in Mariluz Escribano Pueo’s life came when the Spanish poet, activist and teacher was not quite nine months old.

On 11 September 1936, three weeks after their family friend Federico García Lorca had suffered a similar fate, Escribano’s father, Agustín, was shot dead against the wall of Granada cemetery.

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Poem of ‘beauty, wit and grace’ about fathers and sons wins National Poetry Competition

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Ex-New York cab driver Lee Stockdale wins £5,000 after My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert beat 17,000 other poems

A poem of “beauty, wit and grace” that explores an encounter between the living and the dead has won the National Poetry Competition for a single poem in English.

Lee Stockdale’s My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert was chosen as the winner by judges Jason Allen-Paisant, Greta Stoddart and Michael Symmons Roberts from more than 17,000 poems entered into the competition from poets in 103 countries.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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DM Thomas obituary

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Author, poet and scholar of Russian literature whose greatest success came with his controversial 1981 novel The White Hotel

The greatest notoriety – and critical and sales success – enjoyed by the writer DM Thomas, who has died aged 88, came with his controversial novel The White Hotel (1981), inspired by his readings of Sigmund Freud and by Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Holocaust novel Babi Yar. Thomas’s novel combined these two influences in a driving, non-naturalistic plot centred on Lisa Erdman, a fictional patient of Freud’s, who progresses through sexual obsession to being shot down by Nazis in a ravine outside Kyiv.

The sex and violence were described in lingering, some said lubricious, detail. Although the novel was variously hailed – by Graham Greene and Time magazine, among others – as a powerful new departure in fiction, and an insight into the dark heart of the 20th century, it was attacked by some as pornographic and misogynistic.

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Philip Larkin: ‘writing in the language of ordinary people’ – archive, 31 March 1973

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31 March 1973: Larkin talks about his approach to life and poetry as well as his efforts in editing the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse

The University of Hull is literally redbrick: squat, square blocks unrelieved by black painted window frames and meticulous green swards of grass you could not possibly set foot on. The impression is of some council estate of learning. Dr Philip Larkin’s study is severely comfortable – polished wood, high ceiling, carpet, abstract still life, grotesque photograph of an ape. A desk, fit for six company directors, is set out with studied carelessness for the business of the day. White padded armchairs are set to one side for conversations which do not require the librarian to defend his status behind a dozen feet of pine. Tea is Lapsang Souchong and weak. The ambience is of impeccable gentility which constrains you to whisper although Dr Larkin, being a mite deaf, insists that you converse as though he were 20 feet away.

Once there was a host of golden daffs, now there are cycle clips and holy ends. Dr (honorary, Belfast) Larkin’s poem Church Going is among the most anthologised modern English verse, second only to The Whitsun Weddings, and he wrote that too. The poet supposes his second volume of poems, The Less Deceived, must have sold around 10,000 copies – and this is the man who pens three poems each year and takes nine years to fill a Faber volume. He has only read his poems publicly once and that was at a party when he might not have been quite sober. He gives an overwhelming impression of not much caring for the business at all.

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What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in March

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Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

In this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they have been reading recently. This month, recommendations include a searing poetry collection, a brilliant history of dancefloors and unputdownable novels. Tell us in the comments what you have been reading.

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The best recent poetry – review roundup

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Self-Portrait As Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant; A Tower Built Downwards by Yang Lian; Artifice by Lavinia Singer; Master of Distances by Jordi Doce; Customs by Solmaz Sharif

Self-Portrait As Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant (Carcanet, £12.99)
This indispensable collection explores Shakespeare’s pernicious archetype, observing how “the Moor remains invisible, despite the obsession with his body”. Yet Allen-Paisant makes the historical impasse an occasion for deep, generous interrogation of masculinity, and a linked elevation of the maternal that is at the heart of so many Caribbean and other families: “I’ve been leaning in- / to my mother tongue.” This book’s mother tongue belongs to “Mama”, a grandmother who raised the narrator. “Daddy”, meanwhile, remains a longed-for absence, “Un-Dad”. In this context of father-hunger, the “African soldier” who became the Moor of Venice at least stands for presence. Enriched by historical research, Self-Portrait As Othello celebrates representation, understanding and speech as acts of glorious resistance.

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Poem of the week: Not It by Caitlin Doyle

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A children’s game conveys the panic-inducing sensation of reaching adulthood, of being ‘It’ before being ready

“Not It!” we’d shout before a round
of backyard hide-and-seek,
the last to say it left behind
to count down in the dark

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The Rossettis review – lurid, luscious-lipped beauties drown out the family’s real talent

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Tate Britain, London
Dante Gabriel’s paintings are shown up by his sister Christina’s poetry in this baffling, overblown exhibition about the decidedly non-revolutionary pre-Raphaelites

It’s obvious, from the very first room of Tate Britain’s overblown, baffling celebration of the “radical” and “revolutionary” pre-Raphaelites, who was the real talent in the Rossetti family: the poet Christina Rossetti. You can hear readings of her poems here, including Colour, which praises colours in almost childlike, spiritually clear images: “What is yellow? pears are yellow, / Rich and ripe and mellow.”

Unfortunately as you listen, you are obliged to look at her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1849-50 painting The Annunciation, displayed like the icon it isn’t in the middle of the space. Where Christina’s images have a crystalline exactitude that makes them pretty much timeless, this work is strictly for buffs of Victoriana. It is like some sort of taxidermy exhibit, a leaden quotation of medieval art that’s neither properly medieval, nor bitingly modern.

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The Home Child by Liz Berry review – a long injustice

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Based on the life of the author’s great-aunt, this verse novel about forced child emigration from the UK to Canada is a profound act of witness

Liz Berry’s first poetry collection, 2014’s Black Country, fused the personal and political with disarming tenderness, its soaring imagery and soft dialect words from the West Midlands making beautiful whorls in the grain and flow of its music. The same was true of her poetry pamphlet, The Republic of Motherhood, in 2018. Now comes The Home Child, a novel in poetry: not continuous narrative, but a sequence of lyrical snapshots illuminating a story that is not only heartbreaking but also, essentially, true.

The Home Child is the story of Berry’s great-aunt Eliza Showell. When her mother died in 1908, Eliza was packed off at the age of 12 from a children’s emigration home in Birmingham to rural Nova Scotia, and put to work as an indentured domestic servant. She never returned, never raised a family, never saw her brothers again, and died in a care home. Between 1860 and 1960, Britain sent more than 100,000 “home children” to Canada. They were orphans, or had families too poor to care for them. In 2010, Canada’s Year of the British Home Child, Berry discovered Eliza’s small gravestone, paid for by her employers, in Cape Breton. After losing her mother and her childhood home, Eliza was pursued by the irony of that word “home” right to the grave.

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‘Plenty to savour’, ‘sensual’, ‘a great gift’: the best Australian books out in April

‘I’m CBE, I’m poet laureate so I’m clearly not a republican am I?’: Simon Armitage

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When Simon Armitage left his job as a probation worker to become a full-time poet his dad was horrified. Is the former young subversive turned royal appointee now part of the establishment?

I’m wandering around Yorkshire Sculpture Park looking for the poet laureate. Simon Armitage decided we should meet at this beautiful outdoor gallery.The park is just off the M1, seven miles from Wakefield. Dotted with Henry Moores and Barbara Hepworths and Damien Hirsts, this could be the world’s most opulent golf course.It’s about as far from rough-hewn Yorkshire – the inspiration for much of Armitage’s poetry – as you can get. In the cafe, where we are due to meet, flat whites sell at £3.90 a pop.

But there is no sign of the poet. I wander downstairs. Nothing. There are two huge entrances at either end of the visitors’ centre. As I head for one, I’m sure he’s going to walk through the other. It feels like a Morecambe and Wise sketch. I head back to the cafe. This time Armitage is sat at a table, perfectly settled, flicking through his phone, a pot of tea to the side. He glances up at me, like a lugubrious owl. Armitage tells me he got back from Australia a week ago, has spent the past six days touring libraries country-wide and is knackered. His voice is familiar – clear, dourly rhythmic, vowels hard and flat as paving stone.

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The new LGBTQ+ lit list, chosen by writers

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From sensational memoirs to sublime poetry, Douglas Stuart, Ali Smith, Colm Tóibín and others share lesser-known books about queer life that deserve to be classics, introduced by playwright Mark Ravenhill

It was a mention in a David Bowie interview when I was 15 that led me to William Burroughs’s 1971 novel The Wild Boys, bought in a secondhand bookshop in Brighton with money from my paper round. I was confused by Burroughs’s cut-up style and his jagged apocalyptic vision, entirely different from the Dickens and Shakespeare that we’d been introduced to in school. Here was a world of dissident queer teenagers, of lurid sex. I was puzzled, embarrassed, titillated. I carried the book in my school bag – a concealed weapon – and, when I was sure that I couldn’t be seen, read a few pages at a time.

Growing up a young queer in the early 1980s, I was a sleeper agent in an enemy territory: identity concealed beneath a carefully constructed alias, cautiously speaking an alien language, waiting for a sign from the mother country, unsure if the war would ever end. The only place to find a coded signal of resistance was in the pages of a book.

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Poem of the week: The Place I Am by Peter Bennet

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The boundaries between place and self become intriguingly fuzzy in this painterly reflection

I have become a master of the craft
of moulding, patiently and with precision,
lethargy into shapes of hours and days.
My cast of mind requires a library
of books I wrote myself, sufficient booze
and shabby furniture. Beyond
the balcony is marshy coast. My gaze
slides along pewter-coloured horizontals
that evening sunlight turns to bronze.
It is a habitat where rare plants learn
to live with salt, and birds nest on the ground.
It is the place I am. It should be empty
of any presence otherwise.
Rage and tales of unmapped quicksand
are not discouraging enough.
The landscape fades. I fade. I mourn its beauty
leached into sketch and photograph
or into notebooks that birdwatchers carry.
The sea is close. I fear death by erosion.
It has grown dark but now the sky is starry.
I’ll jot down where I’d like my body found
but not by whom. I think that’s better left.
And better left, I also think, is when.
The airport glows inland. A homing plane
blinks across the ankles of Orion.

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Plot by Claudia Rankine review – the lives of mothers

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The award-winning author of Citizen turns her mind to the complexities of balancing art and parenting

Twenty years ago, the poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine, hailed for Citizen– an original, unnerving and unforgettable scrutiny of racism in the US and winner of the 2015 Forward prize – was involved in a more inward undertaking. She had been reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse– and Woolf seems to have become for her, as happens to many readers, a muse of sorts. In the novel, there is a point at which Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay revels in a mind at liberty, “free for the strangest adventures” and observes: “When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.” Rankine’s own project is about the imagined limits to that freedom. Her narrator is pregnant, uncertain whether to become a mother. Rankine was aware Woolf had decided against having children because of mental instability and her narrator wonders whether a mother and an artist can be expected to coexist. Plot is an arresting curiosity: an embattled, intense, extended prose poem, published in the UK for the first time.

Rankine, although a mother herself, was not pregnant when she wrote it. If there are autobiographical elements, they are stitched invisibly into narratives from elsewhere. It is a bracing, discomfiting and complicated read partly because it breaks a taboo. It is often oppressively assumed that women will necessarily rejoice at pregnancy but this work involves a complicated dredging of doubt, an examination of the visceral and cerebral burden of pregnancy, a deliberate losing of the “plot” (the word encompassing several meanings).

Plot by Claudia Rankine is published by Penguin (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Solmaz Sharif: ‘I don’t shy away from hurting the reader’

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The Iranian-American poet on puncturing comfort, staying an apostate and her teenage love of RL Stine

The poet Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents in 1983 and raised in the US, moving between Texas, Alabama and California as a child. Her first poetry collection, Look– a finalist for the 2016 National Book award – used vocabulary from a US Department of Defense dictionary to interrogate the language of warfare. Now she’s followed it up with Customs, which the New York Times called “witty and incisive”, adding that Sharif “masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief”. The collection will be published by Bloomsbury on 27 April. Sharif spoke to me from her home near UC Berkeley, where she is an assistant professor of English.

You said in a recent interview that you think of your poems as “laced with arsenic”. What are you seeking to do to your readers?
I don’t shy away from hurting the reader. There’s a lot of talk about writing as triggering and traumatic and I think it very much is. It exists in that moment of crisis, making that moment alive in us over and over again. And in that way, it’s mean and it’s hurtful. And I find it useful to just be very direct about that and take accountability. I do think that there are certain comforts and eases that must be punctured, that must be poisoned, quite frankly.

Customs by Solmaz Sharif is published by Bloomsbury (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Poem of the week: The Bin-Men Go on Strike by Raymond Queneau

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Discovering treasure in what the world has discarded, this freewheeling reverie carries with it radical ideas about art

it’s strike day for the bin-men
it’s a lucky day for us
we can play ragpicker or peddler
junk dealer who knows even antiquarian
there’s a little of everything
it’s a tough call
between the eyeless armless noseless doll
the tin of sardines that lost all its sardines on the way
the can of French peas that lost all its French peas on the way
the ripped homework which unfastened a zero with some bother
the tube of toothpaste several rollersteams ran over
bone fish-bone cotton ball
yes it’s a tough call

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