Category Poetry

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Seamus Heaney’s unpublished poems to be released — read one exclusively here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A trove of unpublished poems by the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney is set to be printed alongside his collected and uncollected poems, published together for the first time.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with poems published in magazines, journals and newspapers, plus 25 poems selected from Heaney’s large number of unpublished works.

Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar is an unpublished poem by Seamus Heaney extracted from The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis, to be published by Faber &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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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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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