The latest collection by the poet Hollie McNish is dedicated to anyone who has been “blamed, shamed, pressured, tortured, dehumanised, de-mothered over a man-made concept about your own body”. Virgin is a... Read more »
Early on in her latest collection, the Canadian poet Karen Solie apologises: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.” The line appears in a poem, Red Spring, about agribusiness and its sinister... Read more »
Now, Mother, What’s the Matter? Only the monsters do not have troubled hearts.Life is for troubled hearts. Art is for troubledhearts. For my whole life, Hamlet has beena bridge between. Hamlet’s ‘Now,... Read more »
The Canadian poet Karen Solie has won the 2025 TS Eliot poetry prize for a collection of work, Wellwater, which explores the destruction of the natural world. Solie was announced as the... Read more »
Dream-Pedlary i. If there were dreams to sell.What would you buy?Some cost a passing bell;Some a light sigh,That shakes from Life’s fresh crownOnly a rose-leaf down.If there were dreams to sell,Merry and... Read more »
The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien (Picador, £12.99)This sombre collection showcases O’Brien’s varied use of forms and subject matter, exploring themes of history, remembrance of war and political conflict, death, time, the... Read more »
The Man in the Wind The man in the windwho keeps us awake tonightis not the black monk of the windcowering in corners and crevices,or the white face under the streetlightstricken with... Read more »
Winter Walk She left the hut and bright log fire at noonAnd walked outside on crisp white winter snowTo find the iced slopes shadowed like the moon,The wild wood desolate and bare... Read more »
Many of 2025’s most notable collections have been powered by a spirit of wild experimentation, pushing at the bounds of what “poetry” might be thought to be. Sarah Hesketh’s 2016 (CB Editions)... Read more »