Tishani Doshi: Saying it out loud
Tishani Doshi’s Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is an unflinching, tender, witty and wise collection of poems about danger, memory, beauty, time and tide, and transient but treasured joy. I catch up with her at the start of a marathon book tour that takes her from London and Newcastle to Ireland and Cornwall...
Girls are coming out of the woods
Girls are coming out of the woods, wrapped in cloaks and hoods, carrying iron bars and candles and a multitude of scars, collected on acres of premature grass and city buses, in temples and bars. Girls are coming out of the woods with panties tied around their lips, making such a noise, it’s impossible to...
Sarah Howe: Remaking memory
On 10 December 2015, Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe was awarded the revived Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award for her remarkable debut collection Loop of Jade. Also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and in the running for the T.S. Eliot Prize to be announced...
Pretending to wait for someone
Wanting to be Tinkerbell and take you in my arms— pearly pink flat shoes After seeing you off this morning, I glance at my toothpaste tube— the dent in it is new Sharing in the sun with you summer’s first tomato, skin firm yet delicate He loved another first— and so I am cast as...
Unmentioned in dispatches
Some of them never come home to fanfares, they dump their kitbags down at the door, kiss their wives and let their children wrestle them down to the kitchen floor, switch the telly on, pour out a whiskey, search for the local football score. Some of them skip the quayside welcome, dodge the bunting and...
Improvised explosive device
The blast from an improvised explosive device moves at 13,000 mph, gets as hot as 7,000 degrees and creates 400 tons of pressure per square inch. “No one survives that. We’re trying to save the kids at 25 meters and beyond.” – Ronald Glasser in the Army Times If this poem had wires coming out...
Animal scruples
Two poems from La Fontaine’s Selected Fables, relating that the natures of two-legged and four-legged creatures have a great deal in common. From a delightful new translation with an introduction and explanatory notes by Christopher Betts published by Oxford University Press, and illustrated throughout with Gustave Doré’s exquisite original engravings. The rat and the...
Manhattan
From a facsimile edition of Derek Jarman’s 1972 poetry collection A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, published by Text Centre to mark the 20th anniversary of the filmmaker’s death and illustrated from his personal collection of postcards. More info. Derek Jarman (1942–1994) was a filmmaker, painter, set designer for theatre and film, memoirist, and a...
The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement
After graduating from Cambridge in 1791, William Wordsworth travelled to France and found himself swept up in the ideals of the French Revolution (and, not unconnected, into the arms of the passionately rebellious Annette Vallon, with whom he fathered a daughter). The subsequent Reign of Terror and counter-revolution would modify his views on revolution as...
