Most Read... John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Kirsty Gunn re-arranges the world John McAuliffe reads Seamus Heaney's letters and translations Chris Price's 'Songs of Allegiance' David Herman on Aharon Appelfeld Victoria Moul on Christopher Childers compendious Greek and Latin Lyric Book Philip Terry again answers the question, 'What is Poetry'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack
PN Review will be a monument to the moment when [...] England sought a redefinition of itself through the recovery of its autonomous cultural history, and sought to re-make the nation according to the programmes of its unacknowledged legislators.
Cairns Craig Times Literary Supplement

Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. In 2023 PN Review celebrated its jubilee.

Our vast archive now includes approaching 280 issues, with contributions from some of the most exciting and radical writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, Christopher Middleton, John Ashbery, Les Murray, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others.

You can sign up to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox every week.

Subscribe to the magazine to receive six issues per year and full access to the archive.

Buy the current issue without a subscription here.

Please can subscribers fill out our anonymised questionnaire so we can develop a clearer sense of our readership.

PN Review 279
Featured Poem
The Banquet Stav Poleg … per lo naturale amore de la propria loquela

— Dante, Convivio

It was a difficult autumn, I reached for Dante
because I needed to walk out, needed to be taken

by the dark, unreliable highway
that links ethics to knowledge. All winter

I found myself running in the spiralling evenings
and streets of Florence – a city haunted

by longing – a road leading inwards
and outwards – shaken
... read more
In conversation with Neilson MacKay
Stanley Moss You told me a few minutes ago that you experience life in paragraphs. When I asked you what you meant by that, you said you would have to write a poem to find out. What gives?

I often say something without knowing why I said it. For example, I woke up from a dream saying, ‘Abandon ship!’ When I was in the Navy we were taught if necessary to abandon ship, but of course I never did and I never would. It bothers me to think that I would have somewhere to go, wishes that I would abandon, because I was afraid of some fucking torpedo. There are many poets who think – not only do they think but their readers think – they have something to say. I don’t write poems because I think I have something to say; I write poems to understand why I said something, try to find the way I said things.
... read more
Elegies
Lorna Goodison You’re enough to sift into an oblong alabaster box.
Flesh and bone charred and ground into griege
gravel fallout from torched cobalt blue winding
sheet; sheer dust of light blue shirt; the fabric grit
of serge trousers and wool socks; blue and white
smoke ropes of striped school tie; big voicebox –
site of forensic eloquence – burned down to silence.
Your long limbs set straight by undertaker’s hands.
St George’s boy, you forward and face flame dragon.



For an Athlete
... read more
Also in the magazine... Ophira GottliebFour Poems Horatio MorpurgoDiscovered during Repair Work Gabriel JosipoviciLoyalty and Death by the Blackwater River Gwyneth Lewisfrom Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling Meredi OrtegaThree Poems Anthony Vahni CapildeoLetter from Lima: The Company of Heaven
Selected from the Archive...
Three Poems Fleur Adcock Three Poems


RICHEY

My great-grandfather Richey Brooks
began in mud, at Moneymore:
'A place of mud and nothing else'
he called it (not the way it looks,
but what lies under those green hills?)
Emigrated in '74;
ended in Drury; mud again -
slipped in the duckrun at ninety-three
... read more
Searching, please wait... animated waiting image