Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Poetry

Two Poems

Eric Anderson

‘Wanting to get it all in, like / Xerxes tipping his army’s arrows / with saltpeter / so to ignite the Grecian sky.’

Handkerchief

Ghassan Zaqtan

‘Nothing’s left to say between us / everything went / into the train that hid its whistle.’

Observations on the Ground

Mary Ruefle

‘Those flowers belong to the dead.’

A Cloudless Sky

Michael Dickman

‘A cloudless sky and I’m back / an ice-cold sky-blue rag / for my eyes’

Two Poems

John Balaban

‘Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. / In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. / Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.’

Two Poems

Joe Wenderoth

‘At first you treat him as a nobility – / a miraculous figure(head) / with no real office. / Then he dies.’

Eternities

Charles Simic

‘Could they be the same person?’

Passing Place

Helen Mort

‘Stall here and let the world / go past, the way / the world well might / on heather-coloured days like this,’

String Theory

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

‘On tenterhooks / you think how string constricts, how / it connects, how you followed it back / to Rawtenstall.’

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.’

Postscript

John Burnside

'the trees / are slender in the way that things / are almost, though not quite / absent'

Revelations

Ange Mlinko

‘I think of this when raising my eyes / to a filigreed cross in a sanctuary‘’

The Mountain

Christopher DeWeese

‘When the oxygen thins, / the world gets less reciprocal.’