‘Generalisations about the national psyche – supposing there is one – must always be treated with suspicion.’
Generalizations about the national psyche – supposing there is one – must always be treated with suspicion. In 1997, the great crowds who mourned the death of the Princess of Wales with their tears, flowers and candles were taken as evidence that British behaviour had utterly changed. We were at…
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‘I want the poem to destroy time. / What are the ceremonies of forgetting?’
An elegy by Nick Laird for his father, Alastair Laird, who died in 2021 of Covid-19. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
‘In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur’
From Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia, published by Granta Books and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
‘My brother and I hurried through sloppy postures of praise, quiet as the light pooling around us.’
A poem by Kaveh Akbar, from his shortlisted collection Pilgrim Bell, first published in Granta 156: Interiors.
‘I wanted to and then / Remembered why I want to never’
Poetry by Shane McCrae, shortlisted for Cain Named the Animal.
‘Would / the apple be concerned / if I said it was not an apple’
Poems by Padraig Regan, from Some Integrity, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
‘Feelings of hate and despair dwindle as they pass down the generations.’
‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’
‘a voice, not quite a voice, in the sea distance / listening to its own thin cetaceous whistle’
