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Poem
A Daughter’s First Term at University - Harry Guest
You’ve said good-bye. She’s standing in the car-park. You know there are mallards on that pool in the quadrangle. A Virginia Creeper sprawls crimson by her balcony. Later a heron will visit those fields beyond suburbs but now she has…
Poem
Six Characters in Search of Something - Jamie McKendrick
A friend of mine met the son of a man who it seems was eaten by a polar bear in Iceland where the bear had stepped ashore rafted from Greenland on an ice-floe. The father of the man who met…
Poet
Hilaire Belloc
B. 1870 D. 1953
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was a larger-than-life character who is now best known for his Cautionary Verses but who also wrote fiction, essays, history, biography and huge numbers of letters. He was born in a village just outside Paris on the…
Poet
Mark Strand
B. 1934 D. 2014
Mark Strand was born in 1934 on Prince Edward Island, Canada and grew up in the United States. He was a shy dreamy child, and claimed not to have been very bright at school. When he was a year old,…
Poem
It isn’t New Year yet so happy what? Till then it’s Boxing Day every morning. Empty bags hang off the radiator. Chilly: hot cold Cordelia position. Did it mean we didn’t love each other that morning he…
Poem
Epilogue – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1995 - Bernardine Evaristo
CORCOVADO, Christ the Redeemer, hold flirty Rio in its outstretched arm-span, beneficent padre, 700 meters up canopied mountain. I hike the forest incline to awe at its monolithic pleated hem, marvel at Rio, lushly subdued, panoramically shimmering beneath me. I…
Poem
Josephine Baker finds herself - Patience Agbabi
She picked me up like a slow-burning fuse. I was down that girls’ club used to run in Brixton, on acid for fuel. Lipstick lesbians, techno so hardcore it’s spewing out Audis. She samples my heartbeat and mixes it with…
Poem
The Palanquin-Bearers - Sarojini Naidu
Lightly, O lightly we bear her along, She sways like a flower in the wind of our song; She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream, She floats like a laugh from the lips…
Poet
Cilla McQueen
B. 1949
Born in Birmingham, England, Cilla McQueen moved to New Zealand when she was four years old. She ranks amongst the finest poets of her generation, with honours which include three New Zealand Book Awards, the 2009 Prime Minister’s Award for…
Poem
Up the Severn River from Lent to Eastertide Millions and millions of slithy elvers glide, Millions, billions of glassy bright Little wormy fish, Chewed-string fish, Slithery dithery fish, In the dead of night. Up the gleaming river miles and miles…
Poem
She comes swimming to you, following da Gama’s wake. The twisting Nile won’t take her halfway far enough. No, don’t imagine sirens – mermaid beauty is too delicate and quick. Nor does she have that radiance, Botticelli’s Venus glow. No…
Poet
Jamie McKendrick
B. 1955
Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955, and lives in Oxford, where he teaches part-time and reviews poetry and the visual arts for a number of newspapers and magazines. He is the author of six collections of poetry: The…
Poem
Dear Hearing World - Raymond Antrobus
I have left Earth in search of sounder orbits, a solar system where the space between a star and a planet isn’t empty. I have left a white beard of noise in my place and many of you won’t know…
Poet
Galway Kinnell
B. 1927 D. 2014
Galway Kinnell (1927 – 2014) grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and was educated at Princeton and Rochester University. He joined in the radical political movements of the 1960s, working for the Congress on Racial Equality and protesting against the…
Poem
I walk in-a Brixtan markit, believin I a respectable man, you know. An wha happn? Policeman come straight up an search mi bag! Man – straight to mi. Like them did a-wait fi mi. Come search mi bag, man….
Poet
Lorine Niedecker
B. 1903 D. 1970
When Lorine Niedecker died of a brain haemorrhage in 1970 at the age of 67, her work was virtually unknown outside contemporary circles. Indeed, some of the closest members of her family didn’t even know she wrote poetry. Five days…
Poem
Snake River Country I now remembered slowly how I came, I, sometime living, sometime with a name, Creeping by iron ways across the bare Wastes of Wyoming, turning in despair, Changing and turning, till the fall of night, Then…