Distracted by eyelashes
Steven Lovatt reviews Men Who Feed Pigeons by Selima Hill (Bloodaxe, 2021)
Archive
The Solvent Properties of Water
by Sarah Hymas — We'd been talking about our childhoods, / how foreign they were to the world we navigated now, / yet how, somehow, we were still those girls / who peered under rocks and poked at the cracks
Palimpsest
In the second of our series on over-used words in poetry, Chris Edgoose takes on 'palimpsest'
Essential poetry from Wayleave Press
Richie McCaffery reviews two Wayleave Press pamphlets — Rib by Sharon Black and After by Jane Routh
Saturday Morning
by Martin Figura — That paving slab the working week / squared away and set to rest, leave them / to their tea, their Chronicle, the felt pen reek / of circled ads, let unencumbered men // go, go, hungover in their dinted vans
Sort of Irish and sort of famous
Rory Waterman reveals the story behind his poem 'Like Father'
Hearts pressed with aspic
Emma Simon reviews Field Requiem by Sheri Benning (Carcanet, 2021)
Portrait of my mother as a hop-picker
by Liz Cashdan — She would never have done hop-picking / so this portrait is going to be difficult. / She hated the open air, the sunshine, // meeting up with ordinary folk
Castaway Companions
Castaway poet Anne-Marie Fyfe chooses three poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop to take to a desert island
Reading Banville
by Tim Relf — Cicatrice gets me googling, / as does horrent, minatory and coevals. Ditto deckle, flocculent and satyr. How / can I have got to 50 and not know so many words? How / can I have gone through this
Out of the Blue
Feature: Top prizes aren’t necessarily the preserve of established poets. The Friday Poem talks to five previously unpublished poets who won the biggest poetry competition in the UK