The Lost Woman
Patricia Beer
My mother went with no more warning
Than a bright voice and a bad pain.
Home from school on a June morning
And where the brook goes under the lane
PN Review
Special Collection
A collection to celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth issue of PN Review.
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Foreword by Michael Schmidt, Editor of PN Review
The life expectancy of poetry magazines is often a butterfly’s span. Few reach ten issues, fewer still a hundred. To reach 250 issues over five decades is evidence of editorial tenacity and conviction. The twenty-five poems collected here are by poets who have been part of a long journey which has included an IRA bomb that destroyed the editorial offices in 1996, the turn of a millennium, the birth of the electric typewriter, the laptop computer and digital media, and much more. Four of the poets here featured in the very first issue of Poetry Nation (1973), and four feature in the 250th issue (November-December 2019). Paul Muldoon said, ‘It's been going so long that many of us have all but forgotten what the P and the N stand for. I think of them as opening and closing the word Provocation. And that's why I so love the magazine.' Here are poets who saw service in the First and Second World Wars and others who are relative newcomers on the poetry stage. Voices speak from the four corners of the Anglophone world. The poems celebrate risk and continuity. We celebrate with twenty-five memorable discoveries and epiphanies.
Page:
Dying
Tara Bergin
I waited until everyone was out of the house.
I waited until there was nothing on the horizon;
nothing in the diary;
nothing in my notebook;
A Different History
Sujata Bhatt
Great Pan is not dead;
he simply emigrated
to India.
Here, the gods roam freely,
Bookkeeping
Alison Brackenbury
which send cold judgement into the backbone which leave us, workless, shrunk at home staring in a sky grown black with leaves.These are not (you understand) the figures
On Not Writing As A West Indian Woman
Vahni Capildeo
If you get my drift. She –
not containing oceans,
nor a spice triangle,
won’t boast that cinnamon
Dad
Elaine Feinstein
Your old hat hurts me, and those black
fat raisins you liked to press into
my palm from your soft heavy hand:
I see you staggering back up the path
Elegy for a Soldier
Marilyn Hacker
The city where I knew you was swift.
A lover cabbed to Brooklyn (broke, but so what) after the night shift in a Second Avenue ...
Next Door Despised
Sophie Hannah
Next door despised
your city. The would much prefer a town.
Your tree – they’d like a twig.
Your oil rig,
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era
Oli Hazzard
Marge, let’s send a sadness telegram.
I roamed under it as a tired, nude Maori.
No trace, not one carton.
Inscription for a Scented Garden for the Blind
John Heath Stubbs
Wayfarer, pause. Although you may not see,
Earth's bright children, herbs and flowers, are here:
It is their small essential souls that greet you,
Mounted upon the morning or evening air:
Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits
Elizabeth Jennings
You are confronted with yourself. Each year
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond. Your brush's care
Rubaiyat
Mimi Khalvati
Beyond the view of crossroads ringed with breath
her bed appears, the old-rose covers death
has smoothed and stilled; her fingers lie inert,
her nail-file lies beside her in its sheath.
Blues for Titania
RF Langley
The beetle runs into the future. He takes
to his heels in an action so frantic its
flicker seems to possess the slowness of deep
water. He has been green. He will be so yet.
The Polar Explorer's Love Song
Bill Manhire
The goddess Hypothermia
came and held me tight
and as we kissed we drifted
in the pale, pure light.
Elegy of the Flowing Touch
Christopher Middleton
Almost anywhere there's a poem lying around
Waiting for someone to lift it up, dust it off,
For instance, the argument with a neighbour
About a large dog: was it a German Shepherd
What the evangelist should have said
Kei Miller
An American evangelist, preaching salvation,
said it was like being on one side of a river, Jesus
on the other, arms long as forever reaching
to lift you over. But we only knew hope river,
1801
Sinéad Morrissey
A beautiful cloudless morning. My toothache better.
William at work on The Pedlar. Miss Gell
left a basket of excellent lettuces; I shelled
Soldiers Bathing
F T Prince
The sea at evening moves across the sand.
Under a reddening sky I watch the freedom of a band
Of soldiers who belong to me. Stripped bare
For bathing in the sea, they shout and run in the warm air;
You've Ruined My Evening / You've Ruined My Life
Tom Raworth
i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish
only as one i contain the complications
in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant
i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels
Rhapsody on Red Admirals
Edgell Rickword
That March the cottage was alive with wings.
They yearned for the garden, fluttered on the panes.
"Cannot you see there are no leaves yet,
and rime whitens the twigs?
Snakeshead Fritillaries
Anne Ridler
Some seedlings shoulder the earth away
Like Milton's lion plunging to get free,
Demanding notice. Delicate rare fritillary,
You enter creeping, like the snake
The Nondescript
Peter Scupham
I am plural. My intents are manifold:
I see through many eyes. I am fabulous.
I assimilate the suffering of monkeys:
Tiger and musk-ox are at my disposal.
The Usk
C. H. Sisson
Such a fool as I am you had better ignore
Tongue twist, malevolent, fat mouthed
I have no language but that other one
His the Devil’s, no mouse I, creeping out of the cheese
A Rose for Janet
Charles Tomlinson
I know
this rose is only
an ink-and-paper rose
but see how it grows and goes
The only confirmed cast member is Ook the Owl, who has been tapped to play the snowy white owl who delivers mail for Harry
Jane Yeh
Claw up. Claw down. Cut.
My fine eyes. My fine eyes are - Cut.
I was fluffed & plucked, like a beauty-pageant winner,
Between takes. Like a news presenter.