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A single missing word in the 1902 poem sparks a deeper look at rhythm, dialect and longing
Sea-Fever
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
The user-friendly short chapter format of Nicci Cloke’s Her Many Faces, designed for our internet-lowered attention spans, obscures the fact that this page-turning, multiple viewpoint thriller is actually a densely plotted novel full of amazing twists. This is the book you want to take on a long, boring journey you’re dreading. You’ll pray you finish it before you arrive at your destination.
Men in Love by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Faber has reissued Barbara Kingsolver’s titles The Lacuna, Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible.
An atheist’s complaint at the scant room made by the church for his personal commemoration of the dead
A Hundred Doors
God! I’m lighting candles again, still
The sentimental atheist, family
Names a kind of prayer or poem, my muse
Our Lady of a Hundred Doors.
After struggles with mental health and addiction, Max Wallis launched a poetry magazine – and it has transformed his life
One morning in February last year, I received an urgent call from the journalist Paul Burston, alerting me to alarming recent social media posts by a mutual friend, the poet and former model Max Wallis.
It seemed he had left his London flat in deep distress and was headed to a bridge. Our best guess was the Millennium footbridge by St Paul’s Cathedral. Then we heard that Max might have taken refuge inside the cathedral. While I scanned gaggles of tourists in the nave, he was intercepted and removed by ambulance. I was relieved to get a message later that evening that he was safe.
This posthumously published final collection confronts mortality, alongside the world’s almost unbearable beauty
John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late – his debut, The Hoop, didn’t appear until he was in his early 30s – but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year.
His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world’s edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn’t that it exists; it’s no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it’s the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words.
The relentless cycle of human violence plays out as a brutal symbolic game
Salt, Snow, Earth
Salt bites Snow.
Snow slaps Earth.
Earth pounds Salt.
A sharp and witty look at the treatment of people with disabilities conveys its anger with arresting artistry
Poem in which I’m a transnational drug smuggler
Humanity’s ancient relationship with bees is tracked from our earliest times through a history of ‘woman’s work’ to our collective peril today
Cuevas de la Araña (Spider Caves), Valencia, Spain, circa 6,000 BCE