Category: Poems

  • The Geography of Desire – A review of Siren by Kateri Lanthier

    The Geography of Desire – A review of Siren by Kateri Lanthier

    If you wanted to find a daughter abducted by a powerful man, you might need to cover a lot of territory. The earth mother Demeter gave wings to young women singers willing to search, but when they failed to find the man, she left them stuck on the rocks, singing to men who would be…

  • “The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself” – A Conversation with Alice Oswald

    “The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself” – A Conversation with Alice Oswald

    Alice Oswald’s collections include Dart, which won the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize, Woods etc. (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Hawthornden Prize), Weeds and Wildflowers (Ted Hughes Award) and, more recently, Memorial, which won the 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing. “Dunt,” included in this collection, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best…

  • “Rosily I Will Squander Myself”: A Review of 3 Summers by Lisa Robertson

    “Rosily I Will Squander Myself”: A Review of 3 Summers by Lisa Robertson

    Bear with me while I tell you, briefly, about Epicureanism: a philosophy about a world without divine judgment, where nothing you are or do in your lifetime is anything more than what it is. This is a world without sin but also without transcendent meaning. There are definitely gods, as befitting an idea forged in…

  • Self-Love

    Self-Love

    I do not know if I was given James Herriot books to read as a child because I wanted to be a veterinarian or if I wanted to be a veterinarian because I was given James Herriot books to read as a child but at one point in the books or maybe all the time…

  • The Night Prayer’s Lord, a Poem

    The Night Prayer’s Lord, a Poem

    The poem “The Night Prayer’s Lord” like most of the poems in my most recent collection, Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects (Wolsak & Wynn), pays homage to the late Irish poet Dorothy Molloy who, in 2004, died ten days before her first collection was published by Faber and Faber. Though I lived…

  • Two New Poems by George Elliott Clarke

    Two New Poems by George Elliott Clarke

    The poems happened completely by chance. This “chanciness” is deliberate. I begin to write something that’s vaguely about African slavery, and then a direction or impulse or voice imposes itself on the writing. These poems – Solomon 2 and Experience 1 – are based on my interpretation of how unlettered black (ex) slaves understood The…

  • XVII, from The Minutes

    XVII, from The Minutes

    Let’s begin: Come man know your span sing wilde curcles with no circumference where even the birds cannot pass an emptiness that contracts to a point no count is sure, there is no point to the act if you already know what will come to pass passes, bird- brained song man you know too well…

  • Hokkien Lesson 1: The Granddaughter’s Phrasebook

    Hokkien Lesson 1: The Granddaughter’s Phrasebook

    ang mo red hair jin sui very beautiful wah pah de leao see I will beat you to death wah zaiiyah I know wah gaiigee I can do it myself

  • Poem: My Life Aboard the Last Sailing Ship Carrying Cumberland Coal

    Poem: My Life Aboard the Last Sailing Ship Carrying Cumberland Coal

        You give your firstborn daughter A central-Asian name Meaning blue or water. Years later two bluebirds alight on either arm And an artist’s quick needlework Stitches birds to skin So even In your obsequies your fetlocks Wing away, appear then disappear. Of course Now you are a horse   With pale blue withers…

  • Poem: Three Studies of Fruit

    Poem: Three Studies of Fruit

      Have I painted these scenes? Or merely collected them? I will try to display them in pure colours, simplest form. i.   First: the orange of an orange1 in the dining room, Caroline is cutting the fruit for me and I am sitting on her lap when a cow rushes past the window startling…

  • Choice Poems: Zach Wells and Naomi Guttman

    Choice Poems: Zach Wells and Naomi Guttman

    The TRB team is pleased to announce Choice Poems, a semi-regular series of poems on Chirograph curated by the TRB’s Poetry Editor, Moez Surani. For this, the first Choice Poems post, we’re climbing under the covers and into a lover’s heart with a pairing of poems on love and temptation. Zach Wells shows how a lover…

  • OF NATURE: A Poem

    OF NATURE: A Poem

          a murder in The National Gallery the corpse evidence or art a bloodied face attracting files