Poetry and Politics

Poets, more than any other kind of writers or artists, are called upon to defend their impulses and pretensions. This is particularly true in times…

Lost Poets’ Society

Mad About Poetry

Translating the poem, and the reader into the world of the poem

Acts of Hope

Poets can be parochial, powerful languages encouraging the sense that there is no need to look beyond their borders. Set against that, there is Osip…

Fictions of Otherness

Poets are of course free to do what they want. But a translation which requires the disappearance of the original poet, where we can never…

Hauntings

Mark Granier’s poems are full of skies and hauntings, the missing, the dead, time’s erasures, ‘the slow shift of light’, the closely observing eye lighting…

The Thing Itself

Harvard told Helen Vendler they didn’t want her – or any woman – teaching there. Later, having established a foothold in academia, she settled on…

Well, Kerrang!!!

Michael Hofmann is a poet, essayist and translator. The latter activity, he has said, he undertakes partially to compensate for the slimness of his poetic…

Astonished at Everything

Generosity and largeness of vision seem to meet happily in the poems of Uruguayan-French writer Jules Supervielle, which seem to cover great distances in short…