Today’s choice
Previous poems
Antony Dunn
Plainsong
Have you heard the one about
how I’m hoping to bow out –
playing guitar for the Cure
on a wide stage – the riff pure
as wind-bells in the twilight,
the crowd stretching beyond sight
into the dark and the rain –
smiling, not ageing, not in pain,
lost in the longing song, doubt
done with, drowning myself out?
Antony Dunn has published four collections of poems most recently, Bugs (Carcanet OxfordPoets) and Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). Winner of the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, he edited and introduced Ex Libris, a posthumous collection of poems by David Hughes (Valley Press). Antony is a regular tutor for The Poetry School and has taught many times for Arvon. He has worked on a number of translation projects with poets from Holland, Hungary, Israel and China. He has been Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York and the People Powered Press. Until 2018 he was Artistic Director of the Bridlington Poetry Festival. Antony lives in Leeds. Website: antonydunn.org
Yuanbing Zhang translates Hongri Yuan
Each Rock is A Potala Palace The sunshine is mellow wine and there are golden palaces inside the sun. Where a giant is its master, he told me that I was his shadow on the earth. I will still be much greater, like a mountain, each rock is a Potala...
Nina Parmenter
Weak Core I have hauled laundry, sucker-punched Tuesday, bent, switched and twisted, and my spine despises me. You have a weak core, she says. Should be pulling up and in, she says. Imagine a stuffed burlap sack half-hanging from a squealing...
Oz Hardwick
The Debussy Bus Stop Everything breaks sooner or later: keys, kettles, musical boxes, the clay hare on the mantelpiece. Out of habit, I carry the keys for all the houses I’ve left behind, and though I no longer remember which would fit...
Annie Kissack
Bellissimo at the Garden Party Spiked second-cousin to a daisy, All the joy and twice the size. I like your pincushion roundness and the plump solar illusion at your centre while all around you clump ragged rays of deepest pink, close packed as a...
Zoe Ellsmore
Six weeks after I could taste it for weeks after the birth - the metal rust, wet earth, smell of the birth I bled mountains of glistening rubies so the walls of our house swelled with the birth I waited in bare blue hospital rooms to see if I was...
Philip Foster
She goes to Germany I go to Germany and spend time with Klaus but he doesn’t tell Sue. We sit outside and play cards, we take out old photographs. It’s the time of insects, like wasps, which persist and make me nervous. Picture his older sisters...
Paul Grant
Something Sometimes Waking up I remember Exactly nothing Forget who And what I am, Forget why And when I look out the window See a blue sky A few clouds Go about doing Little of much And it's good Great even But slowly Memory Starts to crawl over...
Manon Ceridwen James
Gethsemane You tell me that the Vicar had said that God wanted your child for his garden, as I sit making careful notes in your wife’s chair. I always sit in the chair of the deceased like a macabre party game, though the music never stops for me....
Chris Lee
New English Phrasebook My psychiatrist suffers from low self-esteem. I only cut my forearms on Saturdays. I have no friends, just followers. We offer a mindfulness approach to social status readjustment. Your kiss tastes of micro-plastics. We have...