During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we’ve been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key authors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. For our 250th issue we launched the PN Review 250 Collection here on The Poetry Archive, which includes poems from twenty-five contributors to the magazine over the years.

To mark our fiftieth anniversary, this new selection gathers fifty poems from contributors and includes a number of poems that first appeared in the magazine, from John Ashbery’s ‘What is Poetry’ from PN Review 4 in 1978 and Denise Riley’s ‘Dark Looks’ from issue 100 in 1994 to Marilyn Hacker’s ‘Elegy for a Soldier’ on the death of June Jordan, which appeared in PNR 147 in 2002 and Andrew Wynn Owen’s ‘A Sign at CERN’ from PNR 229 in 2016. As ever we include voices from around the world and across the generations. As contributing editor Anthony Vahni Capildeo puts it: ‘A book can absorb a reader into a world of its own as if it were the one and only. A magazine like PN Review, on the other hand, refracts many aspects of our manifold being in a shared world. I love seeing difference, even creative disagreement, between one set of covers.’

We’ll be celebrating throughout the year: look out for announcements of our events in the autumn, and subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox.

You can also visit the PN Review website by clicking here.