Category Poetry

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Poem of the week: An Explanation of Doily by Gwyneth Lewis

A strange, humorous, mysterious window out of trauma is both desolate and decorative

An Explanation of Doily
(for Adam Zagajewski)

You asked me last summer: ‘What is a doily?’
Sometimes, at lunch, I walk on the beach.
Today I was coatless. A storm cloud threatened,
dark as a spaceship. Should it pour,
a sister ship down in the water
would throw up grappling nets to the surface,
rain rise to soak me. Behind a sandbank,
waves touched the shore, no more than a shimmer.

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Tony Harrison, poet and dramatist, dies aged 88

Known for his outspoken politics, the author was acclaimed for work in theatre, opera, film and TV but wanted to be thought of as a poet above all

Tony Harrison, the award-winning poet and dramatist whose writings fuelled national conversations about class, obscenity and politics, has died at the age of 88, his publisher has confirmed.

Harrison, a major voice in British poetry since he published his first collection in 1964, wrote front-page dispatches for the Guardian from the Bosnian war, and scandalised the nation with his 1985 poem V. Written after football hooligans desecrated his parents’ gravestones, the expletive-laden work was described as a “torrent of filth” by the Daily Mail when it was broadcast on Channel 4, prompting an early-day motion in the Commons. It is now studied in schools.

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‘I was writing at my lowest ebb’: Scottish author Len Pennie on domestic abuse and the power of poetry

Len Pennie won praise and faced criticism for exploring domestic abuse in her award-winning debut. She talks about partying sober, writing in Scots, and why she’s rooting out stigma in her follow-up collection

When Len Pennie’s debut, poyums, won the discover book of the year prize at this year’s British Book awards, it was the first poetry collection to do so for 10 years, and the first winner written in Scots as well as English. It’s likely that the 25-year-old can claim another first: she must be the only winner to have had her ID checked at the awards ceremony to verify her age.

It’s true that Pennie is strikingly fresh-faced. She doesn’t drink alcohol (she often finds herself tidying up and doing the recycling at parties, and when I suggest that she must be a popular designated driver, she laughs and tells me she hasn’t got a licence. “I’m useless and sober!”). But she has been through experiences that by rights might put years on a person.

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What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in August

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

One of my favourite reads recently has been Childish Literature by Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a mixed-genre book of memoir, short fiction and poetry on the theme of parenting and new fatherhood, with lots of lucidity, humour and humility throughout.

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Poem of the week: Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border by Suji Kwock Kim

Kim’s meditation on the disruptions experienced by family members during the Korean war and North Korean dictatorship explores absence, searching and separation

Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border

By which a strip of land became a hole in time – Durs Grünbein

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Where to start with: John Burnside

Seán Hewitt, who introduces a new edition of the Scottish author’s final memoir, guides readers through his landmark works a year on from his death

John Burnside was one of those rare prolific writers whose quality and care was not diminished by the apparent ease with which words arrived. His life’s work is like a dark, glittering, ethereal yet earthy river of thought, full of angels, ghosts, nocturnes, animals. These are books as brimming with spirit and light as they are with eroticism and violence. If there is one word I would use to summarise Burnside’s work, it’s grace. He was a graceful writer, in terms of his elegance, but also one concerned with redemption and the moments of light that emerge from sorrow and great pain.

Burnside died in 2024 at the age of 69, not long after being awarded the David Cohen prize for literature, an award that recognises a lifetime’s achievement. Before that, he had won just about every award going in the poetry world: the Forward prize, the TS Eliot prize and the Whitbread book award among them.

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Poem of the week: Autumn by Vidyan Ravinthiran

Keats’s famous ode speaks across time and space to a 21st-century Sri Lankan, whose turbulent history catches on its mellow mood

Autumn
(after John Keats)

The fallen yellow leaves now oftener
flare red. Embers. Blown-up chilli-flakes.
The burning of the library at Jaffna.
Foreign dead about to break
the spell of here and now. Phantasms steal
into the peaceful lives we seem to have earned,
telling tales about what happened
to them, not us, and in a tongue I never learned.
This is my garden, my spade of blood meal
and from our kitchen the time-travelling smell
of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.

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