Poems
How I Did It: ‘protest of the physical’
The long poem which makes up the centre of physical took about two years to write and then another three to sculpt into the version that exists in this collection. Around 2010 three things happened; I graduated from undergraduate study, I found out I’d got a grant to go on a free Arvon course and,…
Andrew McMillan‘Epithalamium in Twenty Six Creatures’
The air holds highways, paths; perches firm as knowledge. Like nouns are held by verbs: windhover, hawk. The doing is the thing. A slink, a splash, a slick gleam of dark: splitting the river’s glass together, wearing the water’s name. Dog mother, dog father, chasing sun over the blue-blind snow, loping home to winter. Small…
Sally Douglas‘Elegy for Retired Crayola® Colours’
I unroll a teal-blue sky to draw the day on its awning. With nubs of wax I shape chimeras in clouds of lemon yellow and magic mint. I layer raw umber over blizzard blue, match mulberry to orange-red. I peel the paper casing from the black crayon to seal the techni-coloured page with night. I’ve…
Sarah Byrne
How I Did It: ‘Crocodile’
As a child I loved the London Natural History Museum. One free afternoon in the summer of 2010, I went back nostalgically with my husband only to regret the heat and school holiday hordes. I found myself lingering in front of a case that contained rounded stones in a range of sizes, quills lacking feathers,…
Sarah Howe‘The Yeti’
I met the Yeti in Tibet. In the Lhakpa La, by the Rongbuk glacier, northeast of Everest, we met. I: [the ice in my eyes] … Dad? And, he: [doing seemingly nothing but shuffling around in the snow] He was, I knew, founded on grains of truth. Host to his parasites, scalp to hallux, hair…
Jeremy Noel-TodHow I Did It: ‘the Interrupters’
the Interrupters no two can meet the way we have met WS Graham a foyet like the day of the dead for it is full with missing children this is how violence starts, first the perception of a slight of an insult within the context of a culture that has taught the imperative that you…
sjfowlerHow I Did It: ‘The Ballad of the Small-Boned Daughter’
Shafilea Ahmed died in September 2003 aged 17. She was a British Pakistani girl from Warrington, Cheshire. She was a beautiful and spirited girl who was murdered in a so called ‘honour killing’ by her parents. Like so many others I watched the long gruesome trial in 2012 when her parents were finally convicted of…
Mona ArshiHow I Did It: ‘Mort-Dieu’
It’s tempting to look at the title poem of An Aviary of Small Birds, as it not only expresses a literary influence (in particular, the poem references a mythical bird the Octobrine as coined by Pablo Neruda) but also encapsulates the high note I was reaching for, as a lyric and an elegy. However, the…
Karen McCarthy Woolf‘Dare You Blow it Out’
Slugs ease in round half eleven. Double, teeth on her graphite tourniquet, looms up the wall. Ceiling’s Brownian mandala. Candle, eating its amygdala, gives a masonic wink to Minton glaze on the mantel, vase and jug, that aluminium lamp, as an artist would bring them to life I expect. COMMENT “I imagine tutor Tom…
Manda Joyce‘Lady Boondaburra’s Spring’
Again the him came and fought that other one spur on spur they rousing such a splash ‘til he’s growl and stung swum off – he I never seen once, nor him that’s done his business with me, come to think. No mind me. Clutch me hatchling oval, all those dawn-rises and down-suns, all them…
Mel Denham‘An Armadillo Takes To The Stage At London Zoo’
I’m really not cut out for showbiz. I may look tough in my leathery armour, but inside my heart is soft as mud. I’m not flashy. I don’t have the meerkats’ swagger. Nobody gasps when an armadillo shuffles in. You’d think with all these plates of bone covering my body, I wouldn’t be so thin-skinned….
Alexandra English‘Polar Bears, Auckland Zoo, Summer 1963’
Dark mucky eyes. Muzzles pant, sniff air, mad with the scent of humans, or seals. I hold my toffee apple and dangle a red jandalled foot through bars above their pit. Bears sway in sync, contained in white, a concrete code for snow. Polar bears attack only when hungry, or provoked—I imagine blood, shreds of skin, knuckles…
Cherllisha SilvaHow I Did It: ‘witchbundle’
Creating the premise for your poem is a tricky enough task on any given day. Besides the obvious self-critical murmurings of ‘is this worth writing about’, once you have an idea you then need to conjure your pen (or fingers) to create some magical syntax that relays your thoughts to the reader. How many hurdles…
Robert HarperAppy Economics
That was is a pound that i was at your house in 1 of the most famous cancer certainly the one most houston straight up in the problems the multinational global village of international capital were here to stay and everybody’s studies economics to understand economics is hard to visual i cannot allusion discount to…
Ira Lightman‘The Empty House’
Open to the windswept world, Home of lost leaves And forgotten feathers. Faint whisperings of sound, Which may be mice, Or maybe smaller life, Or may be just the walls, Settling down to dust. Stagnant, still air, Turns the grime of years Into insipid icing, Distilling scents of solitude To assail the senses. Wood is…
Martin Pallot‘The Funeral’
A card came, summoning me to a funeral. The identity of the deceased was not supplied, so I was puzzled: I couldn’t recall any friends or family members having passed away lately and my boss had been in bellowing good health when I’d left work on Friday. Still, I felt compelled to go; and so,…
Ben Rhys PalmerHow I Did It: ‘On Ninjas’
I don’t really know why I decided to write about ninjas–I knew about them in a general pop-culture way, like most people, but I hadn’t read up about or studied them in particular. I liked the fact that, as a subject, they were non-realistic, not part of everyday life. I also thought it would be…
Jane Yeh‘Apple picking’
Into the midnight of an apple tree, Arms aching over a crackle of ribs, I lift my son. He twists the fruit gently And breaks the stalk, shaking the withered twigs; I stoop as a rain of ripe shadows come down And the apple drops from his opened fist. It rolls among others on the…
Mark Asquith‘Communications Breakdown’
I was posting a letter to my mother to thank her for all the fish when I heard a woman’s voice. It seemed to be coming from the letterbox itself. ‘Get me out!’ it shouted. I looked around but there was no one there. Just me, the post box, the grassy verge. A cloudless sky….
Alexandra English‘Five-Stars’
Nothing’s too much trouble for our stellar host – he bellows loud hellos from his front door before our car-bound feet disrupt his gravel. Call-me-Toby ushers us to his spongey lemon couch for a slice of just-baked drizzling lemon sponge cake. He plunges into freshly brewed fairly-traded coffee, pours into bone-china, places onto Badger’s Bottom…
Jill Munro‘Camouflaged Beasts’
What you thought were autumn leaves herded against curb, spattered with bird shite, is an oil-slicked kitten that won’t be licked clean but continues to wander from the litter, tumble into a ditch and climb free, curious as sticking a fork in a socket, but camouflaged from predators like an owl feathered in sunflower yellow…
Charles Lauder Jr‘Andromeda Unchained’
A day after the accident on my twentieth birthday I’m told I’ll never see him again. Stretched on a narrow bed, with my leg fractured in four places and braced neck, I clutch the hospital bill. That night I dream there are snakes in our garden. Six gunmetal-silver, eight-foot boa constrictors slink towards the glass…
Vasiliki Albedo
How I Did It: ‘Poem in which the girl has no door on her mouth’
In Anne Carson’s essay The Gender of Sound (from Glass, Irony and God, printed as Glass and God in the UK edition, and strangely omitting The Gender of Sound altogether) she writes of ‘…the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo (daughter of Iambe in Athenian legend) who is described by Sophokles as “the girl with…
Rebecca Perry
How I Did It: ‘The Cattle Farmer’s Tale’
Imagination, being by definition un-willed, often comes in unexpectedly, the result of some chance encounter or coincidence. We can’t will ourselves into a genuinely imaginative space. We can work with what imagination provides – uncover the form, improve the syntax, work to complete the poem – but imagination itself is uncanny, unbiddable. Imagination always takes…
Maitreyabandhu
‘The Garage, Tours’
As to what’s here, I can give you some idea: Various artifacts that Grammie brought back from the Philippines – probably one box All part of life’s rich tapestry. Shoes and clothing – probably at least two large boxes or equivalent You can tell a man by his shoes. Your Dad’s…
Olivia Sprinkel