Midnight, early February. Moonlight, trapped
between the snow still falling and the white earth,
is luminous from our sloped roof to the firs
that edge the common land. In the white curve
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‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’
Midnight, early February. Moonlight, trapped
between the snow still falling and the white earth,
is luminous from our sloped roof to the firs
that edge the common land. In the white curve
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‘I alone know a running stream
that is recovery partly and dim sweat
of a day-fever’
A poem by Rowan Evans.
‘Humour is a thread we hang onto. It punctures through the fog of guilt.’
Momtaza Mehri in conversation with Warsan Shire.
‘Something shifted in me that night. A small voice in my head said, maybe you can make a way for yourself as a poet here, too.’
Mary Jean Chan in conversation with Andrew McMillan.
‘There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’
An essay by Jason Allen-Paisant from Granta 159: What Do You See?
‘I have started to see that nothing is itself’
A poem by Jason Allen-Paisant from Granta 154: I’ve Been Away for a While.
Fiona Benson’s collection Bright Travellers, received the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection and the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second book, Vertigo & Ghost, is the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2019, the Roehampton Prize for Best Poetry Colleciton 2019, and is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
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‘She offered herself in return / for her decimated town.’
‘Oarsman on the Drowning of Nisus’s Daughter Scylla’, ‘Pasiphaë on Her Granddaughter, Apemosyne’ and ‘The Chimp House’ by Fiona Benson.
Two poems by Fiona Benson, whose Vertigo & Ghost is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
‘days I talked with Zeus / I ate only ice / felt the blood trouble and burn / under my skin’
‘I’ve always wanted to write from the gut, to write instinctively rather than cerebrally.’
‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’
‘Was soccer a sign? I don’t think so, nearly all the girls had boyfriends, except for Greice and Kelli, and I didn’t have one because I was a puta, as they used to say, I hooked up with everybody.’
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