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A Bleed of Blue

Amy Key

‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’

Two Poems

Amit Chaudhuri

‘It was chick peas that kept you alive.’

The Want

Cyrus Simonoff

‘It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it.’

On Diane di Prima

Iris Cushing

‘Sex flowed into art, art flowed into livelihood, livelihood flowed into poetry, poetry flowed into friendship, friendship flowed into sex. The entirety of this life was sacred.’

Withstances

Rowan Evans

‘yours is no magic    is only wyrm sickness’

The Lye of the Land

Derek Gow

‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’

In Conversation

Ruth Padel & Ilya Kaminsky

‘Lines collect for years, but once in a while these lines meet up, and wink at other lines, go tangoing and make out, and a baby gets born – which is to say a stanza or if I am lucky the whole poem.’

Ways of Knowing

Lauren Wallach

‘Maybe I was born with this face the way moths are born with the ability to blend in with bark, to survive.’

Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin

Robert Becker

‘This place, where the temperature drops noticeably as you walk into it from the road, survived William Stanley Merwin as equal parts oasis, stage set and work of art.’

Scapegoat

Katharine Quarmby

‘In 2000 the Disability Rights Commission was founded, to push for equal rights for disabled people. It had a major job on its hands, listening to and acting on individual cases – access, transport, discrimination – and getting the 2005 Disability Discrimination Act onto the statute book.’

Introduction

Isabella Tree

‘Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in such clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future.’