The Green Issue

Volume 98, No 1, Spring 2008Cover of Poetry Review 98:1 (photograph by John Kinsella)

Editor: Fiona Sampson

In Poetry Review 98:1, The Green Issue, we face the challenge of eco-poetics head on, with an essay by John Kinsella on poetry and protest. John Burnside writes about Apollo, existential dread and “civilisation”. And Sharon Olds talks, in interview, about evolution in both poet and poem. We’ve poems by Olds and Burnside alongside Don Paterson, Jaan Kaplinski, Colette Bryce, Christopher Reid, Robert Crawford, Choman Hardi, translations by Moniza Alvi and Marilyn Hacker… and many more, including a cluster of Review debutants. Plus: the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, the winning poems in the National Poetry Competition, and a Letter from the Loire…
 

Contemporary Lithuanian Poets: a Poetry Review Supplement

With the spring Poetry Review, we have issued a special supplement of contemporary Lithuanian poetry – free with each copy (subject to availability).

Poems

Sharon Olds, Free Shoes, Western Wind, One Secret Thing
Don Paterson, Love Poem For Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze
John Burnside, Cloth Of Gold, Night Shift At The Plug Mill
Robert Saxton, from On First Looking Into A Second-Hand Satchel
Jaan Kaplinski, from Words For The Wordless
Moniza Alvi, To My Posthumous Self, Animal Faces
Christopher Reid, from A Widower’s Dozen: Conundrum, A Reasonable Thing To Ask, Afterlife
Elena Tincu-Straton, The Poppy
Robert Crawford,  A Day’s Work, Yin And Yang, Pretender
The Change Of Life
Polly Clark, Marriage
Tom Gilliver,  from Vita E Bela: xviii
Robert Desnos, The Friday Of The Crime
Robin Ford, Audrey In Whitecroft
Fiona Benson, Frontiers
Kathryn Maris, Angel With Big Book
Michael Murphy, Primrose
Dean Parkin, New Bloke
Kit Fan, Watershed
Marie Etienne,  from The End And The Beginning
David Hart, What Should I Speak Here?
Jane Duran, Cod Liver Oil
Sarah Corbett, Taking The Night Train
Danielle Chapman, Expressway Song
Choman Hardi, His Blue Sky
Michael Symmons Roberts, Horsemen
Neil Ferguson, Your Neighbour
James Byrne, Recovery
Stella Davis, Difficult Days
Colette Bryce, The Poetry Bug

Centrefold

John Burnside, “The Wonder Of Daylight”: In Search Of A Delicate Balance
Sharon Olds: Apparently Personal : interview by Helen Farish
John Kinsella,  Wheatbelt Isohalines And The Making Of Isopleths: The “Annihilation Of Distance” And Other Subtexts In Creating A Sequence
Of Poems

Reviews

Sarah Crown on Anne Stevenson, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill & Naomi Shihab Nye 
John Redmond on the recoil from Modernity 
Michael Murphy on Jamie McKendrick, Dennis O’Driscoll & Paul Durcan 
Zoë Skoulding on the Selected Poems of Elfyn and Kay
Hilary Barker on the art of translation from the French
Alison Brackenbury celebrates the liveliness of women’s writing
Tracy Ryan on new poetries 
Alice Kavounas reads six Welsh poets
Ben Hickman on John Ashbery’s Selected Later Poems

Endpapers

Editorial
Stephen Romer, Letter from the Loire
John Hegley
The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize: Alan Brownjohn on Neetha Kunaratnam
Again, Please!
Letters to the Editor
The National Poetry Competition