The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

The Frip

A young man with a small beard is reading poetry into a microphone, reading from a mobile phone and waving a clenched fist.

The air is full of love

Bruno Cooke checks out a Lyrical Lunacy poetry open mic night in Bangkok
Abstract black lines on a grey background. Some go up in a diagonal way describing, I dunno, possibly an upside down ice cream cone. Some curve upwards like branches of an abstract tree. Kinda jazzy man.

Flashes of brightwork

Victoria Moul reviews Something, I Forget by Angela Leighton (Carcanet, 2023)
Coloured drawing showing the mind map process. There is a small picture of a woman's head in the centre and lines of text on various colours running all over the page a little like the branches of a tree.

Everything so insistently next to everything else

Helena Nelson mind-maps Absence by Ali Lewis (Cheerio, 2024)
Image from a book illustrating the dialect poem 'The Lion and Albert' showing four people in Edwardian dress discussing something. The picture is titled 'The manager had to be sent for.'

Ah, bostid is the golden bowel!

Steven Lovatt on dialect poetry
Illustration showing a stylised dandelion head with the seeds blowing around. A red ribbon curls across the page.

A tinderbox to light all the world’s wanting

Rachael Matthews reviews The Home Child by Liz Berry (Chatto & Windus, 2023)
Paris at night in silhouette.

This barter of enthusiasm 8

Roy Marshall, Kathryn Gray and Mark Anthony Owen choose poems by Suzannah Evans, James Fenton and Connie Bensley
Photograph showing poetry books on a bookshelf.

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
An oil painting (done by some geezer called Manet) of Mallarmé. He has curly hair and a fine moustache of the handlebar persuasion. He is reading and smoking a big old cigar.

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
Ink line drawing on crumpled cartridge paper. A round face looks almost like a tribal mask with an open mouth and a block bad around and across the eyes (though we can still see the eyes). The nose is a triangle.

No one wears Brooches anymore

Hilary Menos reviews Savage Tales by Tara Bergin (Carcanet, 2022
Image showing the painting 'The Goldfish' by Paul Klee. It shows, unsurprisingly, a goldfish on a textured blue background; there are other small fish artfully arranged (well it is your actual Paul Klee innit) in the corners.

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
Section of a book cover. The background is blue and parts of the letters A and F are shown in a bold yellow font.

To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things

Rory Waterman reviews This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A. E. Stallings (Carcanet, 2022)
A textured image showing a dark red line drawing on a white and red background. The drawing shows what looks like an open hand holding maybe small cruciform shaped flowers in its palm.

How else were you to mend lineage?

Isabelle Thompson reviews Ixora by Prerana Kumar (Guillemot Press, 2023)