Don Paterson

‘the honest fulcrum of the hour / that engineers our ghost’

Don Paterson

‘One, perhaps his psalter, / the other, a manuscript, or a portable altar.’

Don Paterson

Don Paterson reads his poem, ‘The Self-Illuminated’ in memoriam Peter Porter, from Granta 119: Britain.

Holly Pester

‘I went to Ilford alone / was handed a pink laminated square’

Pascale Petit

‘His sheets smell of formalin. / She feels as if her insides // are outside her, in a freezer.’

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘It looks like life, or its oasis.’

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘It was a cruelty I first tried to blame on nature, / Then on growing up, on falling off, on it being / Just an old myth.’

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘No more, no longer the sweet difference / Between real and dream I knew.’

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘I once had had a thought / About a thought I once had had.’

Carl Phillips

‘I can almost see again: we’ll drown anyway’

Harold Pinter

‘I shall miss you so much when I am dead’

Katha Pollitt

‘Nobody wanted to hear / about the rain or its father / or leviathan slicing the deeps / at the black edge of the world / under the cold blue light of the Pleiades.’

Daniel Poppick

‘Over an exit, and deeply dreaming / A guard brutally splayed’

Jana Prikryl

‘he cut out small talk / not hearing it, convincingly deaf to its nothing’

D. Ptryrczwz

‘she was not among those / I’d expected I might meet’

Ellen Rachlin

‘Theory cannot be tangible fact / like driving on I-95 to get to a lecture / on supernovae.’

Craig Raine

‘The inescapable smoke of her gown’

Swati Rana

‘Imagine all the prodigal / People, hoping only to / Escape every human mistake.’

Claudia Rankine

‘Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue’

Barbara Ras

‘nothing in those early evenings free / of care could have prepared you’

Oliver Reynolds

‘A room at the top of the street / preserving his life in sunlight’

Adrienne Rich

‘Consider yourself / a trombone blowing unheard.’

Adrienne Rich

‘Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver / when you lift your eyes. It’s the glare.’

Robin Robertson

Peter Robinson

‘I swelter in the dusk / and chase the flies, abstractedly, / until I half forget them.’

Sophie Robinson

‘you can call my price by any name and she will come just the same’

Matthew Rohrer

‘Even astronauts describe / our air as thick enough to slice / and spread on toast for breakfast.’

Sumana Roy

‘It is difficult to imagine a history of trees / without man in it. Man as tree, Tree as tale.’

Mary Ruefle

‘Those flowers belong to the dead.’

Mary Ruefle

‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’

Mary Ruefle

‘Life continually circled in cold inaccessible serenity around unhappy Earth’

Mary Ruefle

‘One of the loveliest possibilities / is that the truth is made of glass’

Armand Garnet Ruffo

‘It was / a line that signaled absolute forgetting / and it made me want to weep into my drink’

Armand Garnet Ruffo

‘the earth will heal / eventually / magnificently / when our species / is gone’

Salman Rushdie

‘Let me tell you, boyo, bach: I love this place, where green hills shelter me from fear.’

Salman Rushdie

‘Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face? / Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place’.