A huge book, an immense book. Such adventure and variety, such industry, such subjugation of self. One perhaps should have guessed, but who knew? That

The uncomfortable relationship between poetry and power is probably as old as civilization, commencing when some ancient ruler in, say, Ur decided that a

They work saddle soap into the perished leather till it revives. Quicksilver rolls from the soldering iron’s feverish nib: I will not blub. The hasp and the firing-pin and the brace will have to be...

Simon Armitage explores Philip Larkin's poem Aubade.

Bhanu Kapil ’s writing over the past two decades has consisted mostly of prose poetry about relationships, patriarchal authority, racism, mental health, ...

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Daljit Nagra selects the best programmes from the BBC's poetry archive.

Wisława Szymborska has been exceptionally successful in translation. Her Map: Collected and last poems (2015), for instance, was recently listed in James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die...

When Oscar Wilde was arrested on April 6, 1895, onlookers assumed and reported that the luteous volume he carried was the Yellow Book (1894–7): as John

In Zaffar Kunial’s second full-length collection of poems, England is a land of “thorned blank verse, strange runes, folioed text” – a decipherable text

While a late thaw began in the boarded eavesI left exhausted, that city nobody leavesWithout being marked by it; signed onFor Newcastle-upon-Tyne and so to Spain,Renouncing the tightly corseted...

A panel of poets explore how poetry has tried to bridge the gap between ourselves and God.

There was me, that is Eggs (a gnome with priestly pretensions), and my three fellow player-adventurers, that is Big Baps (a peg-legged and concupiscent

Mina Loy was never one to be constrained. Her poem “There Is No Life or Death”, also claims that “There is no Space or Time / Only intensity, / And tame

However much poetry you have read, and however deeply you have thought about it, the recent Nobel prizewinner Louise Glück has read more, and has thought

Learn about the contest run by the Oscar Wilde Society. Can you be as witty as Wilde? We are now selecting the 2024 winners.

In a moving introduction to this rich collection, Kaveh Akbar, an Iranian poet living and teaching in the United States, writes of his history of alcohol

BBC Radio 4’s Beyond Belief is a long-running discussion series about the place and nature of faith in today’s world. In this special programme, recorded live at the Bradford Literature Festival,...

The title of C+nto, from the third-person singular past historic of the obsolete Italian cuntare (to recount), itself hints at the problem of lesbian

For Dimitris Papaioannou I tame you.(No you don’t).You were nude.You were intangible.You were unconvincing.You were vague.You claimed you were born from angels.You stank of the horrors of war.You...

A stark yellow speckin a civilizationof moss at my feet. You have grown amongstfeldspar and graphite,a jasper-glint of stem, five millimetersof amber buds –how can I take care of you? I think of my...

Taking a Closer Look at Poetry

The poet John Clegg recently tweeted the first verse of an old English sailors’ song, “Oh Yarmouth is a pretty town”, commenting that the first four lines “seem to me absolutely amazing, like nothing...

PBLJ - Issue 9 - Camille Ralphs Interviews A. E. Stallings

“Walk on air against your better judgement”: this line, from Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Gravel Walks”, appears both in his Nobel prize lecture and on his

The character of Sylvia Plath (1932–63), as we have been given to understand it, is one of volcanic contradictions. Her biographies appear to double every