Poem of the week: Storm in Brooklyn Subway by Menna Elfyn
A collective dash for shelter in the city takes on a spiritual, near-religious power
Storm in Brooklyn Subway
Thistle of rain.
We seek temple from tempest,
litany in lightning,
Category Poetry
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Iris Murdoch’s poems on bisexuality to be published – read one exclusively here
Drawn mostly from notebooks discovered in the attic of the late novelist and philosopher’s Oxford home, a new collection spans 60 years and touches on deeply personal themes
A previously unpublished series of poems by the late novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch is to be printed, shedding new light on her life and relationships, and marking the first time the writer’s bisexuality has been explored in her published works of fiction or poetry.
Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936–1995, to be published on 6 November, brings together decades of work that Murdoch largely kept private, stored for years in a chest in her Oxford home.
Joelle Taylor: ‘I picked up The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in a swoon of nine-year-old despair’
The poet and playwright on queer classics, cinematic TS Eliot and the comforts of a ghost story
My earliest reading memory
I was around five when my mum first pulled out Clement C Moore’s The Night Before Christmas, a bumper blue book with vivid illustrations. There was such suspense in the poem, such inexorable music, the sonic possibilities matching the mystery.
My favourite book growing up
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. I used to spend every spare moment in Bacup library, Lancashire, bag of sweets to the right and a book open before me. I had read all of Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books, thought Famous Five were all a bit dry, and picked up Weirdstone in a swoon of nine-year-old despair. The darkness was delicious, exciting because many of the landmarks in the story were from my local area.
‘After the reading, the poets hold each other’: what happens when Ukraine’s largest literary festival comes under Russian attack
Fiona Benson was invited to Lviv’s BookForum by Ukrainian poet-soldier Artur Dron’. She recounts falling in love with the city and its thriving literary culture, before an air raid siren sounds
I had been working on Exeter University’s Ukrainian Wartime Poetry project for two years when the invitation came to travel to the country’s largest literary festival. I didn’t exactly relish the prospect of a journey to a war zone, but I was assured that visiting BookForum in Lviv, a city so far west it’s practically in Poland, would be safe. I had been leading poetry workshops with exiles and editing translations of Ukrainian poetry, including soldier Artur Dron‘’s collection We Were Here, published last November. So, when Artur and his translator – the incredible poet Yuliya Musakovska – asked me and language professor Hugh Roberts to attend, I couldn’t say no.
What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with the city: its gorgeous architecture, its cafes, its parks full of trees, and its writers. Lviv’s inspired, robust literary culture puts the UK’s own underfunded, last-gasp scene to shame. On the first night of the Forum, Hugh and I attended a nonstop music and poetry event in a nightclub at which both Artur and Yuliya read their poems, and revealed what utter rock stars they truly are. I don’t know why I was surprised; We Were Here, written on the frontline before Artur was even 22, is a masterpiece. It is full of lucid, clear-eyed accounts of his experiences in the trenches and on the battlefield, elegies for his comrades, humane portraits of the suffering of bereaved civilians and furious adaptations of liturgies and prayers. One of his poems is published below.
Poem of the week: My Mother by Claude McKay
Two sonnets absorb with calm clarity a boy’s anguish at his mother’s loss
My Mother
Reg wished me to go with him to the field,
I paused because I did not want to go;
But in her quiet way she made me yield
Reluctantly, for she was breathing low.
Her hand she slowly lifted from her lap
And, smiling sadly in the old sweet way,
She pointed to the nail where hung my cap.
Her eyes said: I shall last another day.
But scarcely had we reached the distant place,
When o’er the hills we heard a faint bell ringing;
A boy came running up with frightened face;
We knew the fatal news that he was bringing.
I heard him listlessly, without a moan,
Although the only one I loved was gone.
The Poems of Seamus Heaney review – collected works reveal his colossal achievement
The complete works, including previously unpublished poems and expert notes, are brought together in one volume for the first time
Baudelaire introduced ordinary objects into poetry – likening the sky to a pan lid – and by doing so revolutionised poetic language. Likewise, Seamus Heaney introduced Northern Irish vernacular into the English lyric, peppering his lines with words like glarry, the Ulster word for muddy; kesh, from Irish ceis, a wickerwork causeway; and dailigone, “daylight gone” or dusk, from Ulster-Scots. It is this that gives his writing a mulchy richness and cultural resonance that remain unique in contemporary poetry. One of the key poems in North (1975) is a version of Baudelaire’s The Digging Skeleton, to which Heaney brings an Irish flavour – the skeletons dig the earth “like navvies”. It’s especially rich as digging for Heaney is also a metaphor for writing, while the archaeological metaphor resonates with the darkly symbolic bog poems.
Bringing all Heaney’s poems together in one volume, this collection lets us see for the first time all the archaeological layers that make up his oeuvre, from the talismanic Death of a Naturalist (1966) to the visionary long poem Station Island (1984), on to the parables of The Haw Lantern (1987) and the intimacies of The Human Chain (2010), the last volume published during the poet’s lifetime. A key poem in that collection, Chanson d’Aventure, describes his journey to hospital in an ambulance following a stroke: “Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked / In position for the drive”. The book also makes available at last Heaney’s prose poems, Stations (1975), released in a small press edition by Ulsterman Publications, which Heaney effectively kept under wraps as he felt the publication of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns – “a work of complete authority” – had stolen his thunder in this form.
Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as
“In a retired vale…a sequestered grove”
And I’ll confound the Lethe in Moyola
By coming through Back Park down from Grove Hill
Across Long Rigs on to the riverbank –
Which way, by happy chance, will take me past
Seamus Heaney’s unpublished poems to be released — read one exclusively here
The Poems of Seamus Heaney, out on Thursday, will feature all 12 of the revered Irish author’s collections alongside uncollected works and 25 poems yet to be published
A trove of unpublished poems by the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney is set to be printed alongside his collected and uncollected poems, published together for the first time.
The Poems of Seamus Heaney will feature his 12 collections interspersed with poems published in magazines, journals and newspapers, plus 25 poems selected from Heaney’s large number of unpublished works.
Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar is an unpublished poem by Seamus Heaney extracted from The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis, to be published by Faber & Faber on 9 October 2025 (£40). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
‘Great range and power’: TS Eliot poetry prize shortlist announced
Ten poets, including Tom Paulin and Sarah Howe, appear on the shortlist for the £25,000 award, which judges described as offering ‘something for everyone’
Tom Paulin and Sarah Howe are among the poets shortlisted for this year’s £25,000 TS Eliot prize, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious award for a single volume of poetry.
The shortlist features 10 collections from established names and new voices, ranging from meditations on illness and inheritance to explorations of ecological collapse and exile.
Poem of the week: To a Lady that Desired I Would Love Her by Thomas Carew
The 17th-century ‘server at table’ to Charles I puts a wry spin on courtly wooing
To a Lady that Desired I Would Love Her
Now you have freely given me leave to love,
What will you doe?
Shall I your mirth, or passion move,
When I begin to wooe;
Will you torment, or scorn, or love me too?
‘My poems are part of my flesh’: Palestinian poet Batool Abu Akleen on life in Gaza
At just 20, the poet is one of the most vivid witnesses to the conflict. She talks about dreams of Oxford, the deaths of friends and how tragedy has shaped the person she has become
Batool Abu Akleen was having lunch in the seaside apartment that has become the latest refuge for her family of seven, when a missile struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza City. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window shook,” she says. Within an instant, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that was reported around the world. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the nonchalance of someone numbed by living with horror.
But this impression is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding a language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies.