Insult to Injury – Simon Armitage’s The Not Dead
An officer, fresh from Helmand, played us the mobile phone footage: the excited chatter and the puny rifle cracks were alien …
Tag Archives: poems
The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering – Olivia Byard’s Strange Horses
When I took my wife’s call, I thought she was trapped in the wreckage of a car. Her brain was …
No Gypsy Wedding – David Morley’s The Invisible Kings
Donkeys were still hitched to lamp-posts in County Limerick in the ’80s and our village was the sort of place …
Kissing a Saint’s Stomach Lining – Adam Thorpe’s Voluntary
The strangest thing I’ve kissed is a section of stomach lining belonging to the Blessed Ralph Sherwin. He’s an old …
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Matthew Stewart’s Inventing Truth
In the family album there’s a snap of a tiny boy pressing his gift of a Matchbox car into the …
The trouble with poetry – how we get teaching it wrong
‘Would anyone care to join me / in flicking a few pebbles in the direction / of teachers who are …
Dancing in the Dhark – Imtiaz Dharker’s Leaving Fingerprints
Buy Leaving Fingerprints from Amazon On Berlin’s Bernauer Straße the wheat around The Chapel of Reconciliation was tanning in the summer …
Braiding a windowpane – Don Paterson’s Rain
Buy Rain from Faber and Faber A friend of mine who was born and bred in Reading, a place whose …
This scepter’d isle: Andrew Motion’s The Cinder Path
Buy The Cinder Path from Faber and Faber On Andrew Motion‘s last night as Poet Laureate he decided to return …
A Watery Grave: Helen Dunmore’s The Malarkey
Buy The Malarkey from Amazon I’ll never forget waiting for that notorious cutpurses’ cash cow: Rome’s number 64 bus. Locals …
Poor Rude Lines 