Current Issue: November - December 2025
PN Review 286

In this issue:

David Herman - Gabriel Josipovici at Eighty-Five
Rowan Williams - Heledd 2025
Rory Waterman - Remarkable Coincidences
Tony Roberts - Mary McCarthy: Self-Portrait with Sunglasses
Nyla Matuk - Poems
Philip Terry - Poetry and Pandemic
Jane Duran - Seven Enclosures
Ricardo Nirenberg - Orpheus Still Sings I
Rachel Hadas - Poems

Current Issue: November - December 2025
PN Review 286

Gabriel Josipovici at Eighty-Five David Herman Gabriel Josipovici is one of the leading writers and critics of his generation. He has been astonishingly prolific. Over more than fifty years he has written two dozen novels and books of short stories, as well as written and edited almost twenty books of criticism, from The World and the Book (1971) to A Winter in Zürau (2024). Perhaps most striking of all has been his range of interests. In an interview he gave in 2015 he said,

I love the narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the narratives of the Border Ballads and of the Grimm tales, but most so-called classical novels turn me off – I don’t want to be filled with Stendahl’s or George Eliot’s inventions, or even Tolstoy’s, all those descriptions of clothes and rooms and the rest – I want books that leave......
READ MORE

Current Issue: November - December 2025
PN Review 286

Heledd 2025 Rowan Williams The Canu Heledd, ‘Songs of Helled’, are a sequence of over a hundred short verses – epigrammatic three-line poems of the kind called englynion in Welsh, one of the oldest forms of Welsh poetic composition. They date from (probably) the tenth century, but they imagine events from some three centuries earlier, in an age of border warfare: the main speaker, Heledd, laments the death of her brother Cynddylan, ruler of a small border territory somewhere near Shrewsbury, at the hands of marauding warbands. Repetitive, compressed, unrelieved, they are among the unchallenged masterpieces of medieval Welsh verse. Their evocation of the human cost of violence is intensely contemporary. In these versions of the opening sections, I have removed the local names and relaxed the historical specifics a little. The ‘grey-headed eagles’ of the original lose their precise outline to......
READ MORE

Current Issue: November - December 2025
PN Review 286

Remarkable Coincidences Rory Waterman Len Pennie became famous during the Covid pandemic, posting on social media about Scots words and reading her own ‘poyums’. She now has more than 700,000 followers on TikTok and in excess of 500,000 on Instagram. You might have seen those words before. They’re not mine: they are the opening sentences to Graeme Richardson’s recent Sunday Times review of Pennie’s second collection (in two years), Poyums Annaw, published by Canongate in September. I probably could have passed them off as my own, though: they’re not remarkable, but constitute a simple establishing shot. What is remarkable, however – or, rather, the first and yet least remarkable thing about this story – is the extent to which Richardson buries the hatchet into the work. Hardly any reviewers seem to do that anymore, under any circumstances. Pennie’s poetry is,......
READ MORE