Go long
Hilary Menos reviews Notes on the Sonnets by Luke Kennard (Penned in the Margins, 2021), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021
Archive
A Harp So Strung with Rain
by Michael Grieve — It was a long forgotten folk saying / I thought, though one that neither she nor I / had any means of bringing to the open. / Neither our luck nor expertise nor will / would serve us well
Two Poetries: Spender, Poetry and Ideology
Chris Edgoose considers Stephen Spender, revolutionary poetry and the need for trust between writers and readers of poetry
I was nothing but a heretic cormorant
Rory Waterman reviews The European Eel by Steve Ely (Longbarrow, 2021)
I think you get it, John
by Jill Munro — You seem to understand, John, what a poem means, / how it promises whatever has been cannot disappear // as if it had never been. A friend asked me to write / a Kenopsia, strange name
Beyond the Bubble
Matthew Stewart asks how poetry can reach out to a wider readership
Three pamphlets: Richie McCaffery, Phoebe Stuckes and Julia Bird
Mat Riches reviews Coping Stones by Richie McCaffery, Emma Simon reviews The One Girl Gremlin by Phoebe Stuckes and Hilary Menos reviews is, thinks Pearl by Julia Bird
Here is Bernie Saunders in Mittens
by Roy Marshall — next to Churchill at Yalta; at a bar mitzvah; being painted / by Bob Ross; on skyscraper beam above 1920’s New York. // Bernie responded to the explosion of memes
We need to pay attention to those who are calling it like they see it
In Conversation: The Friday Poem talks to James Conor Patterson about the four-way auction over his debut collection with Picador, the real Newry and why poetry is capturing the zeitgeist
Like a bride with a posy of stout
Steven Lovatt reviews Cheryl’s Destinies by Stephen Sexton (Penguin, 2021)
Pathé News Visits the Ace of Spades
by Matthew Paul — The crew don’t capture Noël and Ivor snorting cocaine / off the black-marble bar; the gargoyles they actually film / are me and my pals: Marcel waves
Punk Poetry – bitten the dust or alive and well?
Hilary Menos looks back at the poets who embodied the spirit of punk in the 1970s and 80s and asks where are the punk poets of today?