Marian Janssen on Elizabeth Bishop

Instead of approaching the material with the detached view of a historian or anthropologist, Yoon’s A Cruelty uses empathy and poetry to dramatize the traumas the comfort women have suffered.

A couple of years ago I was living in Knebel, down by Mols. My window had a view of trees, a field, and sky. I carried on long conversations with that view

In the beginning, there is polyphony, false starts, botched experiments, and mixed motives. Usually.

The canonization of the Moscow poet Kirill Medvedev (born 1975) seems to be taking place in real time: in the past several years, international and critical audiences began catching on to a distinctive voice familiar to Moscow literary circles since the early 2000s.

Hunt started his working life as a surgeon’s apprentice before making a living, at different times, as a chemist and druggist, a statistician with the geological survey, and a professor at the School of Mines in London.

If you open Lindsay Turner’s new book of poems, Songs and Ballads, at random, you’re going to be looking at a poem that’s meant to be sung, and it’s more than likely on a topic you would never think to sing about...

Sun of India, Barrenechea’s book of poems, was published in New Delhi while he was living there. At first read, it may seem a simple take on the traditions of the country as filtered through the sensibility of the poet...

Even after escaping school, Moran’s late teens were miserable. “I was trying to figure out what the hell to do. I didn’t have any qualifications and I was pretty desperate.

When my first book of poems came out in 1992, I learned what it could mean to be seen as a political poet for no other reason than because of who or what one is...

A Russian poet died in North Carolina, on Friday. His name was Naum Korzhavin.

It’s early on a Sunday morning in January of 2010. I sit on the edge of the bed, already dressed, with my hand on my partner’s foot as he sleeps. The night before, I couldn’t catch my breath, and I told myself that if I felt the same in...

Michael Hofmann is one of the great poets of squalid student digs, and ‘Between Bed and Wastepaper Basket’ is one of his great poems.

My mother almost certainly misdelivered Rosemary Tonks’ newspaper when she was eight...

Lots of poets drank at the Fitzroy. It was a haunt of Dylan Thomas and William Empson and Nina Hammett and Malcolm Lowry; it gets a mention in Briggflatts...

This building in Warwick, now a venue for wedding ceremonies, has the distinction of being the only place where Larkin had to drudge. In 1942, his second year at Oxford, the ground floor was the Fuel Office, and he took a summer job there which he hated.

When it comes to interior shots of Edith Sitwell houses, this blog certainly spoils its readers. This is the room in which she was born in 1887, currently the offices of the lively Scarborough-based Valley Press.