The swing was picked up for the boys,
for the here-and-here-to-stay
and only she knew why it was
I dug so solemnly


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The swing was picked up for the boys,
for the here-and-here-to-stay
and only she knew why it was
I dug so solemnly
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Don Paterson works as a poetry editor and as a jazz guitarist, and lectures in creative writing at the University of St Andrews. In 2003 his poetry collection Landing Light won the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is the author of several other poetry collections, including Rain, Orpheus and 40 Sonnets.
More about the author →‘The beasts of the forest drove me out. / The villagers barred their doors. / The gods turned the page.’
Don Paterson reads his poem, ‘The Self-Illuminated’ in memoriam Peter Porter, from Granta 119: Britain.
‘One, perhaps his psalter, / the other, a manuscript, or a portable altar.’
‘There is nobody to blame but the Communist Party. They had absolute control during the fifty years it took to destroy Beijing, and they had the chance to develop a modern, civilized city.’
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