A Different Kind of Prison & Philomel by Patricia McCarthy
A Different Kind of Prison They were always there at the window when I awoke, nostrils squashed against the pane,…
How’s your eldest? asked Andrew the barber.
Daily unwanted meetings On the underground train His black brush of a moustache glistening (Obviously dyed). He’d told me…
Poem in which my Mother is Monica Galetti
I am a child. In our yellow kitchen before school she whistles breakfast from the London smog and plates…
The Crossing
‘When any of the fugitives said, “Let me go over”, the men of Gilead said to him…”Say Shibboleth,” and…
Rua Do Olival (Street Point 17)
And if she leant lonesome on the sill, they’re talking by their shops, one of them that is filled…
A Literary Landscape
Winter Migrants, Tom Pickard, Carcanet, 2016, 74pp, £9.99 (paperback) Quennets, Philip Terry, Carcanet, 2016, 135pp, £12.99 (paperback) Tom…
I was walking
that bit more quickly then less purposefully down a sunlit road that ran from traffic-lights at the town’s or…
An Old Photograph, dated 1945
My sister has found an old photograph Of me holding a bucket and spade, On a beach fringed by…
Crickadarn
From the top of the slope, among the desire lines of crows, looking down to the house and its…
Wooden Spoon
Not knives or pans. The genius of a kitchen is the wooden spoon, that archaic thing – a dugout…
Two Daughters
There was once a widowed lord with two comely daughters. Though the loss of his wife brought the lord…
The Upper River at Christmas
It is late December, a mild midwinter’s day ——in the week that stumbles ————between Christmas and New Year when…
how to pronounce Peckham
*After Nate Marshall’s Pronounce pĕk Fold your lips like uniform of de … boy. Parents said it was when…
Notes Made Long Ago
Sun and moonlight scattered in furrows, only red clay remembers turning blade of plough while iron soon forgets…
Unkindness of Ravens
12 February, 1554 In the silence of winter Lady Jane Grey, brittle as a stalk of fern. Rime…
2.6 million hearts
Wars do not have holidays (employers claim they are self-employed) Their job has to be fulfilled, At any cost,…
They Don’t Make Gods For Non-Believers
Poetry Prize 2016 judges Andrew McMillan and Rebecca Perry on ‘They Don’t Make Gods For Non-Believers’: We were instantly…
The Truth About Figs
Poetry Prize 2016 judges Andrew McMillan and Rebecca Perry on ‘The Truth About Figs’: It would be easy to…
Botticelli’s Annunciation
Gabriel coming down the mountain, Gabriel with his face like wax. Sound of his wings, what does he bring?…
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