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Two Poems

Jack Gilbert

‘Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America. / The heart is a foreign country whose language none / of us is good at. ’

Cyan

Paul Farley

‘I’m holding out. / I’m blue in the face.’

The Woman in the Moon

Carol Ann Duffy

‘Darlings, I write to you from the moon’

Elegy

Sean O’Brien

‘It seems there's no such thing as history. / We must have dreamed the world you've vanished from.’

Poem
(To A)

Harold Pinter

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

From the Flood Plain

Jamie McKendrick

‘No flood as parched as this’

Après

Jamie McKendrick

‘greener / for an alien crop of hogweed higher / than us’

Eel Tail

Alice Oswald

‘untranslatable hissed interruptions / unspeakable wide chapped lips’

End of the Pier Show

Michael Hofmann

‘They were fascinated / by what they seemed to have contained.’

The Swing

Don Paterson

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

The Joy of Difficulty

Lavinia Greenlaw

‘did you breathe differently / as if equipped with an aqualung’

17 Melbourne Road

Oliver Reynolds

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

Somewhere the Wave

Derek Mahon

‘a voice, not quite a voice, in the sea distance / listening to its own thin cetaceous whistle’

High Table

Craig Raine

‘The inescapable smoke of her gown’