Jim hardly sees the black and orange streamers which decorate the lobby for the costume ball, or the dish of pumpkin-seeds laid out in welcome on the table there.
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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.
‘Obscure repertoire is a sensible hiding-place for mediocre technique.’
‘At the end of the year, an ambulance brought Suseela home from hospital to die’.
‘I put my trophy on a high shelf, and at some stage laid it face down.’
‘In rapidly transforming societies, writers may lose the space they’ve built their imaginative lives around.’
