Explore poetry
The Self-Illuminated
Don Paterson
‘One, perhaps his psalter, / the other, a manuscript, or a portable altar.’
The Self-Illuminated
Don Paterson
Don Paterson reads his poem, ‘The Self-Illuminated’ in memoriam Peter Porter, from Granta 119: Britain.
Two Poems
Pascale Petit
‘His sheets smell of formalin. / She feels as if her insides // are outside her, in a freezer.’
Two Poems
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.’
Bird of Fire
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
‘No more, no longer the sweet difference / Between real and dream I knew.’
Abingdon Square Park
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
‘I once had had a thought / About a thought I once had had.’
Three Poems
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.’
Two Poems
Jana Prikryl
‘his balance / between person and / abstraction’s so stirring I want no other token for anything can happen’
The Passing of the Contemplative Life
D. Ptryrczwz
‘she was not among those / I’d expected I might meet’
Supernovae
Ellen Rachlin
‘Theory cannot be tangible fact / like driving on I-95 to get to a lecture / on supernovae.’
Walk Laramidia
Swati Rana
‘Imagine all the prodigal / People, hoping only to / Escape every human mistake.’
17 Melbourne Road
Oliver Reynolds
‘A room at the top of the street / preserving his life in sunlight’

Don’t Flinch
Adrienne Rich
‘Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver / when you lift your eyes. It’s the glare.’
Four Poems
Peter Robinson
‘I swelter in the dusk / and chase the flies, abstractedly, / until I half forget them.’

Mars is a Stupid Planet
Matthew Rohrer
‘Even astronauts describe / our air as thick enough to slice / and spread on toast for breakfast.’
The Afterlife of Trees and Their Lovers
Sumana Roy
‘It is difficult to imagine a history of trees / without man in it. Man as tree, Tree as tale.’
Beyond Sunset
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.’

Origin Myth
Mary Ruefle
‘Life continually circled in cold inaccessible serenity around unhappy Earth’
