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Louis MacNeice’sbest pieceshave a philosophical cast and an untidy metre that only makes them neater. https://poems-for-you.com/poems/mru8-entirely/ In this poem, as usual, MacNeice is counting beats, or stresses, rather than syllables. Every stanza has eight lines, which…

Peter Sansommay be handsomebut his syntax is whatmakes him hot. Here is a handful of sentences, stripped of the line-breaks, from poems in ‘Lanyard’ (Carcanet, 2022), which book we considered in the Finding Poetry book…

Christopher Reidis forced to concede,whenever he gets the blues,that he edited the letters of both Heaney and Hughes. A man of letters. And with regards to Hughes and Heaney, Reid also edited their poems, when he…

Jeffrey Harrison’s collections are published in the US and not available through Griffin Books, except his selected poems ‘The Names for Things’ published by the excellent Waywiser Press, which was my own first introduction to…

Louis Jenkinswrites a sentenceand then another. No heartachesabout line-breaks. One way I think about poems is as generalised jokes.  Reductionist, for sure — but if a joke is a short text that amuses, then a poem is a…

Kim Addonizioskewers you ab initio.Her first lineshave tines. These notes were written to introduce Addonizio to the Finding Poetry book club, at a meeting in which we considered ‘Wild Nights’, a selected poems published by…