Gaza Advent 3: This is how I cook my grief by Batool Abu Akleen

The third poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Batool Abu Akleen. This is how I cook my grief, … More

Gaza Advent 2: Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi

The second poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Sarah al Bohassi. Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi … More

Welcome to this series of Gaza Advent blog posts. Every Sunday during Advent I will post a link to a … More

Starting tomorrow, to mark the season of Advent, a new blog series celebrating the work of poets from Gaza and … More

I was listening to Radio 4 the other day. (You might think this unremarkable, but it was. I still have … More

Dear Thomas A. Clark I won’t lie, until recently I hadn’t heard of you. (We could talk for a long … More

But at some point you have to make the jump. How does this work in practice? First I am struck … More

The occupational hazard of going to things where other writers are also present is that they will always at some … More

We have been to a thing. Breaking with this blog’s tradition of oblique references to low-level gossip and self-recrimination at … More

I do not have brilliant form with Louise Glück. I seem to remember the Poetry Book Society choosing or recommending … More

In August last year I wrote about Tom Paulin’s poem of hurt and slow healing ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. It wasn’t … More

A colleague of mine said to me at the end of a lecture the other day that she wished I … More

This morning, as on every morning for the last two weeks, the wood was loud with birdsong. I heard robin, … More

After Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election, I posted one of the very few poems to this blog … More

I can’t write poems in recent weeks either. It’s not the first time it’s happened. And it’s not worth going … More

Happy new year, everyone. I’ve been doing a bit of tidying up on some of the pages of this blog. … More

The final poem in our Palestine Advent series is Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, … More

The twenty-third poem in our Palestine Advent series is Without Mercy, by Mourid Barghouti, translated by Radwa Ashour. Without Mercy, … More