Midnight, early February. Moonlight, trapped
between the snow still falling and the white earth,
is luminous from our sloped roof to the firs
that edge the common land. In the white curve
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‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’
Midnight, early February. Moonlight, trapped
between the snow still falling and the white earth,
is luminous from our sloped roof to the firs
that edge the common land. In the white curve
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
Fiona Benson’s collection Bright Travellers, received the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection and the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second book, Vertigo & Ghost, is the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2019, the Roehampton Prize for Best Poetry Colleciton 2019, and is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
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‘She offered herself in return / for her decimated town.’
‘Oarsman on the Drowning of Nisus’s Daughter Scylla’, ‘Pasiphaë on Her Granddaughter, Apemosyne’ and ‘The Chimp House’ by Fiona Benson.
Two poems by Fiona Benson, whose Vertigo & Ghost is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
‘days I talked with Zeus / I ate only ice / felt the blood trouble and burn / under my skin’
‘I’ve always wanted to write from the gut, to write instinctively rather than cerebrally.’
‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’
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