Neil Astley on Helen Dunmore

When The Apple Fall was first launched at Newcastle’s Morden Tower in 1983, a time in which very few poetry collections had been published by women, Helen Dumore was praised for her ‘ ability to combine the domestic with the universal- in poems remarkable for their rhythmical fluency and sensuousness’. Despite later on turning to …

An Interview with Fergus Allen:A Peacock on the Bathroom Roof

Fergus Allen Taken from an interview back in February 2011 , Joanna Blachnio interviews Fergus Allen about his poetry, life and his peacocks. A Peacock on the Bathroom Roof In the hall of Fergus Allen’s home in Berkshire, not far from the River Thames, a bunch of peacock feathers is immediately conspicuous – no mere …

The Year They Invented Modern Poetry

By Grevel Lindop Whether anyone is planning a celebration, I don’t know. But 2012 is an important anniversary, for it is – as far as any single year can be – the centenary of the invention of modern poetry in Britain. A big claim; but the linguistic, rhetorical and formal territory occupied by most contemporary …

Four Poems: Caroline Clark

Odysseus is Gone And slendering to his burning rim               Into the flat blue mist the sun               Drops out and all our day is done. I see it happening late –            your face becomes elsewhere        slendering like    that sun you’re sinking, sunken, gone            ocean-heavy to your bed and         we (the shadowing    land?) are soon bereft of you.            On days like these we        don’t get to wave    goodbye …

Some Kind of Love Poem (and other poems) M.G. Stephens

Some Kind of Love Poem From this position, love appears, or fromThat angle, there it is, though completelyUnexpected, even a surprise, andMaybe not even welcome, after all,There are so many other things to do,Like going to the gym or making listsOf things to do, love not being one ofThose items listed, and yet love is there,Unexpectedly …

Why So Much Talk About Language in Our Time? by Laura (Riding) Jackson

For a journal ostensibly about the living, written word, PN Review is suitably preoccupied with the language we use to express ourselves, and the techniques through which analysis of such expression is possible. Language is of course one of the most important aspects of our society, one of the few things that truly set us …

Adam Long Trigger Warning

Review: Sean O’Brien, Europa (Picador) £9.99 In PN Review 242, Adam Long reviewed Sean O’Brien’s Europa in an analysis of O’Brien’s ninth collection. In his ninth collection of poems, Europa, Sean O’Brien’s ‘tackles England and its relationship with Europe through their tangled history and into the uncertain future’, and ranges impressively from the legacy of the …

Rubber Stamps: Michael Augustin on his Visual Poems

By Michael Augustin A pair of scissors, a tube of glue, carton paper and a photocopy machine – such have been my beloved tools since I had moved from my old black and white fine line drawings to the fantastic field of collage. Readers of PN Review may remember samples of my work printed along with poems or essays by …

Silence and Breathing

In this week’s post from the PN Review archive we are sharing a poem by David Andrew . For more great poetry be sure to check out our website and Twitter for regular updates. … the subjects of literature in the finalanalysis are fairly limited, it’s essentiallyall about either betrayal or about loveor good luck.              – …

In Conversation: Alan Hollinghurst and John Fuller

Alan Hollinghurst: I was noticing some numerical coincidences. The first poems in your first book (Fairground Music, 1961) you wrote when you were seventeen in 1954, the year I was born. Then I met you when I was seventeen and became your pupil the following year and began to write under your encouragement. I think it was the time of Cannibals and …