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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…
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…
Poet
Hilaire Belloc
B. 1870 D. 1953
…Belloc was educated at Cardinal Newman’s Oratory School. Although not legally obliged to do so, on leaving school, Belloc served a term of military service with the French army. Back…
Poet
Mark Strand
B. 1934 D. 2014
…listen to here, both ‘The Webern Variations’ and ‘Poem After the Seven Last Words’ were commissioned by the Bretano String Quartet to be performed with the Webern Quartets and the…
Poem
…as I walked, a balloon sinking back down its own string after the decision. The baby would have had to sleep in a drawer. Immortalists (not you who refuse to…
Poem
Epilogue – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1995 - Bernardine Evaristo
…marvel at Rio, lushly subdued, panoramically shimmering beneath me. I feel its blank stone eyes follow me in this sexing city of beached homens with corrugated stomachs, g-string bonitas with…
Poem
Josephine Baker finds herself - Patience Agbabi
…I say Yes. She’s crossing the Star Bar like it’s a catwalk. So sleek! A string of pearls, her flapper dress studded with low-cut diamonds through my skin, straight to…
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…
Poet
Cilla McQueen
B. 1949
…a geographical edge of existence but at Earth’s chronological closing too. In ‘Joanna’, this existential search is concerned with the worth of an individual life. In ‘To an Unknown Poet’,…
Poem
…much further south than this. This time she’ll pay attention to the names – not just the English, Portuguese and Dutch, the splicings and accretions of the years. She’ll search…
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…
Poet
Galway Kinnell
B. 1927 D. 2014
…be a person . . . you’d be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone.” It is this search for the essential that marks out Kinnell’s poetic territory:…
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…
Poet
Jamie McKendrick
B. 1955
…Livy with the contemporary in the form of the first Gulf War, or the equally troubling multiplications of morals and menace in ‘Six Characters in Search of Something.’ McKendrick’s delivery…
Poet
Matthew Hollis
B. 1971
…least.” Hollis’ introduction to ‘Isostasy’ gives a definition of the title’s technical term, and he also provides insights into the stories behind poems, or help with necessary information, where such…
Poem
…shipments of frozen lamb to New Zealand, and potatoes to Ireland, instead of troops. We expect they will benefit from limited self-government in the long term. A restoration project is…
Poet
Annie Freud
B. 1948
…Freud. Her parents separated when she was four, and she lived with both sets of grandparents; London, in term-time and on the Suffolk coast in the holidays until her mother…
Poet
Jane Hirshfield
B. 1953
…of many of her poems: the term, she says, is used as it is “in the mining industry, where a substance is disassembled and analysed to determine the strengths and…