The Lies of Owls
Rebecca Ferrier explores truth, doubt, and lies in poetry, and looks at how poems can act as windows into our past selves
Archive
New, hopeful arrangements
Christopher Arksey chooses poems by Philip Larkin, Christopher Reid and U.A. Fanthorpe to take to his desert island
Ah, bostid is the golden bowel!
Steven Lovatt on dialect poetry
A tinderbox to light all the world’s wanting
Rachael Matthews reviews The Home Child by Liz Berry (Chatto & Windus, 2023)
This barter of enthusiasm 8
Roy Marshall, Kathryn Gray and Mark Anthony Owen choose poems by Suzannah Evans, James Fenton and Connie Bensley
The Wheel
by Kathryn Bevis — It begins like this: in January a single stitch / slips from her needles. By Candlemas, / her paintings, shelves of knick-knacks start / to stray
Snowday
by Ian Harker — The cars are falling with long sighs / down Monk Bridge Road, their tanks empty / and the beck grinding to a halt
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life
Sarah Mnatzaganian gives us a tour of her poetry bookshelf
Learning to read with Mallarmé, the most obscure of all poets
Bertrand Marchal discusses why Mallarmé wanted to make poetry so difficult for readers to understand
No one wears Brooches anymore
Hilary Menos reviews Savage Tales by Tara Bergin (Carcanet, 2022
The Climbing Frame
by Sarah Corbett — Square of hot concrete and new plimsolls / pulled on, elastic at the front, the soft/snap / over my heels & I leap up
What are poets really after?
Helena Nelson considers the pros and cons of the ‘after’ epigraph, poetry’s exclusive codes, and the necessary art of bluffing