The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

The Frip

Part of a painting showing the inside of a house and a long corridor. The lighting suggests it could be evening.

A basic beginning in tegnsprog

Carl Tomlinson reviews The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly (Carcanet, 2023)
Abstract image showing a black circle on a white background containing blue, orange and red splodges. Some spill over the page outside the circle. Landsick? Maybe.

Our version of the sea not quite knowing how to touch the land

Mat Riches reviews Landsick by Genevieve Carver (Broken Sleep Books, 2023)
Watercolour showing green grass, white flowers and two leafy trees with a light blue sky.

A lesson for all

Rowan Bell on Ukrainian-American graphic artist Paul Peter Piech and his bold illustrations of poetry
Pen and ink slightly washed out picture of a man's face.

The weight of history

Matthew Paul reviews Selected Poems 1983–2023 by Ian Parks (Calder Valley Poetry, 2023)
A study in blue. It looks like a close up of large heads of coral in an eerie blue light.

Unfashionable almost to the point of provocation

Victoria Moul reviews Arctic Elegies by Peter Davidson (Carcanet, 2022)
Martyn Crucefix looking at the camera. He has short brownish hair and a blue check shirt.

We are always saying goodbye

Castaway Martyn Crucefix chooses poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edward Thomas and Rainer Maria Rilke to take to his desert island
Print (an old one by the, look of it) showing a large (for 'large' read enormous) snail with much smaller people wearing hats trying to subdue it with ropes. Some policemen wave sticks and seem to be engaged in a dance ... but maybe it's more sinister! Who knows?

Working off the movement of the earth in space

D.A. Prince reviews Dynamo by Luke Samuel Yates (The Poetry Business, 2023)
A pencil sketch, grey on a cream background. Looks like the branches of a tree.

Letters to Linda

Hilary Menos responds to Letters to Katłįà by Linda France, winner of the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year prize 2022-2023,
Caricature of Baudelaire. Drawn in 1911, it shows him with wavy black hair, trademark piercing eyes and a moustache.

The Censored Women of Les Fleurs du Mal

Pedro Baños Gallego on the 'forbidden' poems in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal
Section of book cover. Here we have another in our endless series of abstract art poetry book covers. This is probably from a painting. splashes of bright colours and faded splurges in muted shades blend together as a background whilst bold horizontal slashes of red paint dominate the foreground.

All the blues and greens

Isabelle Thompson reviews Say It With Me by Vanessa Lampert (Seren, 2023)
Pastel shades, probably watercolour, showing a bedroom interior with an open window and a traditional iron bedstead.

These moments, rare and marvellous

Jane Routh reviews The Guest Room by Diana Hendry (Worple Press, 2022)
A posterised image of Britney Spears.

Untitled

The Frip looks at how to find the right title for your poem (or at least not the wrong one)