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Poem
The Surrealists’ Summer Convention Came to Our City - Jo Shapcott
We were as lip as the guidebooks to the city. We had our ankle tendons severed to combat the heat. We dined on carp all summer: the magazines were full of recipes. The city fathers talked about a new…
Poem
You, Very Young, in New York - Hannah Sullivan
Rosy used to say that New York was a fairground. ‘You will know when it’s time, when the fair is over.’ But nothing seems to happen. You stand around On the same street corners, smoking, thin-elbowed, Looking down avenues…
Poem
A subset of the whole, we gathered in a corner of the architecture, listening with a smile to the sound, as heard inside the skull of the house, of the train, or was it rain, the sound of one…
Poem
Prelude to a New Fin-de-Siècle - David Gascoyne
Incessant urging, curt, peremptory: Write what you will, in verse, or otherwise, Intelligible, using simple metaphors. Address a reader not just hypothetical But flesh and blood in no need of harangues. The time has come. We’re on the very brink…
Poem
Your pattern pinned itself to the fray of me the first day. Not yet stitched, aligning fragile tissue, judging bias – the wounded cut carefully always holding their breath. When they remade you, I slept on a hospital couch…
Poem
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era - Oli Hazzard
Marge, let’s send a sadness telegram. I roamed under it as a tired, nude Maori. No trace, not one carton. Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak. Was it a car or a cat I saw? Amen, icy cinema….
Poem
After Heartease New England - Velma Pollard
It’s not no bird trapped underneath no bridge it is a soul bird wheeling towards a springe Lord teach wings how in the stark silence of these evenings in the fine chiselled rock spaces to fold and nest ‘use…
Poem
Here? Houses and hedge-clipping husbands and green-fingered women and children flighty as sparrows the universe of an orange tree ripening in season – HERE? Never! Surely there was always this grey artery planned for speed fumed with motoring winds…
Poem
I have a son I love as a father loves a son, a woman I love as a man loves a woman – such love is huge in its normality: no one makes any mention of the mountain adrift…
Poem
Jean Talon, Intendant of New France, To the King (1666) - Todd Swift
Majesty, may this arrive, after months of turmoil Carried by vassals chafed by violence yet calm As their tilting little world of wood falls to rise Bearing them like a nation on uneven histories Of current and wave, spume…
Keystone
Poet
August Kleinzahler
B. 1949
August Kleinzahler has been described as ‘an authentically American voice’. A review in the Economist of his fourth collection Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow said: “[the poems] twitch and jerk and snap their fingers at you… High and low vocabularies…
Poem
From Briggflatts From I Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells’ late spring. Dance tiptoe, bull, black against may. Ridiculous and lovely chase hurdling shadows morning into noon. May on the bull’s…
Poem
from The Kindly Ones (2) - Susan Hampton
And now a girl called Atalanta is walking round the stage in the head and hide of a boar, still-warm, still-bleeding, her war-trophy. Her boyfriend and his uncles are watching her. She’s almost buried under the wild pig, but…
Poet
Jim Carruth
B. 1963
Jim Carruth was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, in 1963. He grew up on his family’s far near Kilbarchan, and studied for a degree in Geology at Glasgow University. After spending time in Turkey, he returned to Scotland, where he now…
Poet
WS Merwin
B. 1927 D. 2019
In 2009, WS Merwin won the Pulizer Prize for poetry for the second time, with The Shadow of Sirius. In an interview soon afterward, Merwin recalls his earliest observations about poetry: “The idea of writing to me was from the…
Poet
Marianne Moore
B. 1887 D. 1972
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was born in St, Louis, Missouri. She grew up in her maternal grandfather’s house, where her mother acted as a housekeeper. Moore’s father, an inventor, was committed to an asylum. On his death, Moore moved with her…
Poet
William Carlos Williams
B. 1883 D. 1963
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) famously combined the two careers of doctor and writer, along the way founding a specifically American version of Modernism. He was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, the son of a New York businessman of British extraction…