Philip Larkin didn’t much like John Donne. He found him far-fetched and bombastic, or as he put it in a letter to Monica Jones once, ‘silly’, perhaps the word that best captures Larkin’s own latent anxiety and reverse snobberies. He longed for a poetry that could reject adolescent silliness and walk...

Gwyneth Lewis is a meticulous poet but a visionary one. Should there be a ‘but’ in that sentence? You’d hope not, though unfortunately the two qualities seem to have become divorced in my mind. With her fondness for sequences and rhyme, an omnivorous researcher’s eye, and source material ranging fro...

In our quick-fire, clickbait age, Timothy Donnelly’s poems are arrestingly maximal. Big and sinuous, often stretching far beyond the single page, they stage dramatic philosophical arguments about selfhood, perception, moral values, and the economic metaphors that have come to dominate human life. If...

The osteria’s blasting jazz, the slick and fruity / after-hours sort, and down the street a Fiat stereo / fronts up with a folksy Anglophonic strum. / I’m down with it all; I’m a honey trap for wasps / snuffling the grains in my espresso cup, / but those bastards don’t bug me anymore. No, / th...

Just as two dandelions choke in the web / a spider laid to trick his evening kill, / so do I flail in the net of being born / too near technology’s final coup. / / At the windiest end of August, / in a cardigan upon the well-heeled hill, / I drink with my neighbours – the girl in boots, / t...