Explore poetry
A Meeting of Minds with Henry David Thoreau
Andrew Motion
‘What am I doing here more than looking – / which I would stop / only to help things through their vanishing’
A Spell For Going Safely Forth By Day
Jynne Martin
‘The hunter pushes a bullet beneath his tongue to fix his aim, / or is it to stave off his thirst?
All the Good Help
Togara Muzanenhamo
‘He will not understand her fascination / for rain, these summer months of water / that somehow keep the money coming in.’
Ange Mlinko | First Sentence
Ange Mlinko
‘I rediscovered the efficacy of meter (or the ‘contrast between fixity and flux’) when I was stuck in a shark tunnel with my kids and was afraid I was coming down with a panic attack.’
Biographical Detail
Ángel González Muñiz
‘The cockroaches in my house complain because I read at night’.
Biscotti Boys / On Men Who Wear Living as Loosely as Their Suits
Momtaza Mehri
‘salmaan the second son & his mama’s seventh seal by way of underwater & underemployment’
Blueberries
James Lasdun
‘I’m talking to you old man. / Listen to me as you step inside this garden’
Come Again/Woods
Maureen N. McLane
‘They party in the woods / as if they were meant for pleasure / not timber.’
Dark Night
Ben Okri
‘On a night when my soul was damp / I found in the street a dark lamp. / The moon was cold and green, / The sky had a sinister sheen’
Darling
Chelsey Minnis
‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell. / Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’
Dilation
Ben Lerner
‘We need to harness the vaguely erotic disappointment that attends the realization you aren’t being followed.’
Elegy
Sean O’Brien
‘It seems there's no such thing as history. / We must have dreamed the world you've vanished from.’
Eliphaz
Raven Leilani
‘I sent messages in nine point font / arcing through the Internet, asking him / do you believe in our heavenly Father?’
Extinction
Sharmistha Mohanty
‘even more it was a wish for boundless spaces, a wish for the inexpressibly wide and broad, for the unharnessing of human life’ – New poetry by Sharmistha Mohanty.
Fabric
Richard Meier
‘At midnight on our third and final date / I stepped inside her Edwardian conversion / to find a stripped-pine, bookless space.’
from White Butterflies of Night
Jaan Kaplinski
‘I don’t remember whether I believed that I could just / abandon one life to begin another’
Fyodor Denisovich Konstantinov
Lev Ozerov
‘A piece of boxwood, gripped in a vise, / waits on the workbench for his knife.’ Poetry by Lev Ozerov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, and introduced by Robert Chandler.
Hunters in the Snow
Andrew Motion
‘The hunters have all failed, / the three hunters and their forlorn dogs / now arriving home from the mountain / which thunders above their village’
I had wondered about the signs of burning
John Kinsella
‘None of it made sense. The house shows / no signs – the old core of the house as it is now – / of fire, of giving up the ghost.’
In the village of the mothers
Vénus Khoury-Ghata
‘The wells are kept for the use of the dead who splash the / walls with their silence.’
It was discovered that gut bacteria were responsible
Kathryn Maris
‘Each bacterium was entitled to pay / a fee in the form of mitochondrial energy to purchase / a ‘dream token’ to be dropped into a Potential Well.’
I’m more the drunken slut kind of feminist, or A Treatise on Political Philosophy at the Apex of American Empire
Megan Levad
‘Out of the Zeitgeist / and onto the party barge.’
Meeting the psychiatrist’s wife
Lorraine Mariner
‘The psychiatrist’s wife / has a dress the colour / of that bottle of claret / you shouldn’t have drunk / last night.’
Mouse Trails
Noelle Kocot
‘What I am equipped to do is different / Than what I have been called for.’
