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Self-Portrait as Amnesiac
John Burnside
‘Shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty / pomegranates drying in a bowl, / mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats.’
Two Poems
Kimiko Hahn
‘Certainly the tide or the dog striding along the sluff of seaweed, / this afternoon – brown, light green, black green, white and red.’
Why A Colored Girl Will Slice You If You Talk Wrong About Motown
Patricia Smith
‘Their newborn children grew / like streetlights. We grew like insurance payments. / We grew like resentment.’
Waterloo East
Lorraine Mariner
‘On one of those mornings / when I felt like resigning / from my life.’
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’
New Hotel Krakow
Adam Zagajewski
‘Now someone else lives in that apartment, / strange people, the scent of a strange life.’
A poem by Adam Zagajewski.
The Making of the English Landscape
Simon Armitage
It’s too late now to start collecting football shirts,/bringing them back from trips abroad as souvenirs:
Face to Face
Tomas Tranströmer
ʻThe birds refused to fly and the soul / grated against the landscape.ʼ
Two Poems
Joe Wenderoth
‘At first you treat him as a nobility – / a miraculous figure(head) / with no real office. / Then he dies.’
Three Prose Poems
Sharmistha Mohanty
‘And the evening wind from over the sea makes that threadbare self billow like a tattered sail, all that resisted it now become the air on which it rises.’
The Emotional Life of Plants
Rae Armantrout
An exciton consists / of the escaped negative / (electron) / and the positive hole / it left behind.
The New Hieroglyphics
Les Murray
‘Rice in bowl with chopsticks / denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.’
