Foreword by Cecilia Rossi Displacements What is the relationship between translation and place? Perhaps the most widely quoted definition of translation, especially when considering its etymology, is the one that implies a change of place, a movement across from one place to another, a carrying across of something from one point to another. But we […]
feature
With a rootless lily held in front of him
The winner of the 2019 Plough Prize, ‘With a rootless lily held in front of him’ is taken from Heidi Williamson’s 2020 Bloodaxe collection Return by Minor Road. Like someone stepping slowly ahead of an old-fashioned car, or the person tasked with carrying the country’s Olympic flame, he must hold the lily as he walks, […]
Three poems from Mock Orange
Three poems from Anne Osbourn’s first book of poetry, Mock Orange, published by SPM Publications in September 2020 My Mother, Age Thirteen Suffocating The cheap stench of privet and Mrs Baldwin’s perfume, as she pulls the lanky girl bosomwards and cuddles her tight. The girl knows she’s welcome round there in the […]
Spring Journal: Canto IX
A canto taken from Jonathan Gibbs’s book-length poem Spring Journal, a response to the coronavirus pandemic originally written on Twitter, and modelled on Louis MacNeice’s 1939 poem Autumn Journal. “Now we are back to normal, now the mind is ….Back to the even tenor of the usual day Skidding no longer across the uneasy […]
Corona Diaries: In Came the Rona
It starts out as a distant fear in December 2019, a virus, COVID19 or something like that, is ravaging Asian countries, millions of people contacting the flu, thousands dying… then it spread to Italy… locked down Italians are playing beautiful music, you shrug and enjoy the entertainment, with tears in your eyes. Then the United […]
Winter Snow and Pink Champagne: a translator’s letter home from the Nuremberg War Trials
‘This is an extraordinary place,’ 21-year-old Patricia Crampton, then Patricia Wood, writes of Nuremberg, Southern Germany to her parents in England, in a letter postmarked 5 December 1947. She describes leaving work at 5.30pm in the last stages of a bright and sunny November day, yet by 6pm it is completely dark and snowing. Back […]
Dasein
This poem is part of the SPOONFEED takeover of New Writing, curated by Kat Payne Ware and Sean Wai Keung. You can read the issue in full at spoonfeedmag.com/spoonfeed-x-new-writing Yes, I’m aware of the ketchup stain on my jumper It’s there so that I don’t have to tell you I’m struggling The whole point […]
An Ode to Uncle Roger
This poem is part of the SPOONFEED takeover of New Writing, curated by Kat Payne Ware and Sean Wai Keung. You can read the issue in full at spoonfeedmag.com/spoonfeed-x-new-writing There are two types of people: those who can cook egg fried rice and those who can only try. Here is the cultural barrier: […]
BBQ
This poem is part of the SPOONFEED takeover of New Writing, curated by Kat Payne Ware and Sean Wai Keung. You can read the issue in full at spoonfeedmag.com/spoonfeed-x-new-writing Two men are having a barbecue and it is so boring I can hear a potato salad being explained from two garden- widths away and […]
30/4/20
This poem is part of the SPOONFEED takeover of New Writing, curated by Kat Payne Ware and Sean Wai Keung. You can read the issue in full at spoonfeedmag.com/spoonfeed-x-new-writing I made a chestnut man: A round belly, inedible pulp To pat. Skinny legs made of matches. They rot on frosty nights before 1st November. […]
