This issue sees Prac Crit moving to a three-feature format, with a Deep Note provided by the poet-critic Peter Robinson. Following on from his most recent collection, The Draft Will – which features autobiographical prose, and in which he, without arrogance, turns a clear critical eye on his own writing – Robinson writes about verse composition, war, and what the ‘lyrical subject’ (the ‘I’) owes, in its writing about others, to others. Our three feature poets, Karen Solie, Stephen Burt and Luke Kennard, are also concerned with ethics and identity. Solie acknowledges the humane and informed anger, the impatience with political wrongs, which haunts the fine movements of her verse; Cal Revely-Calder’s essay on ‘Via’ reveals the forms of social critique available to her sophisticated and unreductive style. Sarah Howe’s interview with Burt, and Alison Winch’s reading of ‘Fairy Story’, traverse the poetics of a person of two genders; I find myself wondering if Burt – one of the world’s leading poetry critics, as well as a gifted poet – is able to appreciate, and help us to appreciate, verse written by so many different kinds of people, to step outside the usual tribal givens, precisely because he conceives of the self as a shifting and fluid space where alternative desires untyrannically collide. And Luke Kennard’s conversation with Richard O’Brien is remarkable, among other things, for its candidness concerning his conversion to the Greek Orthodox faith. He is known as an ironic, playful poet – a massively influential, and innovatory one – but we see here, as my co-editor Dai George put it to me, the interface in his work (and discussion of it) between that irony, and an abiding sincerity; the care, the precision, which Charlotte Geater’s essay identifies alongside his perennial inventiveness.

Vidyan Ravinthiran