When I began Zion Offramp in the summer of 2015—at first without title, then under another title best forgotten—I knew little of where I was going, only that I wanted to attempt a poem of substantial ...

Can I read or write? No sir. Speak loud and clearly? Yes. Can I sing my homeland? I tell him the hills I left when soldiers made me a soldier. Cigar Man nods. His nib moves on as a blackbird addresses ...

Translated from the Russian by Max Lawton. The novel’s “blue lard” is a substance developed at a top-secret facility in the remote Soviet Union. The facility holds numerous clones of Russian writers, ...

With their free-use households and interdicts on jealousy. Placing a ban on Dionysus, Pan, Leto, Krishna, Brahma, Seeta, Durga et al, this is the angry arsehole who would screw My Runiad, replacing ...

By John Wilkinson. These adages were prepared for students at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, whom I met to talk about their poetry on the afternoon of March 19th 2023. It surprised me that they should ...

Not a bundle of laughs, the New Testament, let’s be honest. And yet there is a subtle realignment constantly going on, which qualifies the texts for examination as the overall work of a humourist.

And two more poems.By Clive Watkins. Intercontinental by day in a pillar of a cloud . . . by night in a pillar of fire . . . —Exodus 13:21 hirty-two-thousand feet and cruising westward, my head ...

In the magnifying glass of the poetic word, Modernism is the history of the twentieth century; it was, you may remember a turbulent history—utopian hopes, political polarisation, prejudice, wars, and ...

Arab slavers prey upon the tribes. Leopold’s ghost will never sleep, Pinched and prodded everywhere by amputated hands. Allah and Jehovah have both behaved like vultures over Africa, Imagining a ...

Not at all. Purple covered the couch he chose to lay her down on. Pillows supported her head, and he was glad to share that bed. Bring about a union of her contours and his inclination. Then came the ...

Now Charlie’s 1930s Martin was a commodity. It had been made in a market, made for money by people working for money. And yet. Such love and devotion had been poured into its creation, such pride, ...

It had been a long day. Starting before dawn, my wife, Ornella Trevisan, and I had driven down from Reading to be in Dorchester in good time for the beginning of a symposium organised by the Thomas ...