Most Read...
Bill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259) Val Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259) An Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259) A Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121) On Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237) Notes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
(PN Review 259) Val Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259) An Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259) A Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121) On Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237) Notes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue
Sinead Morrissey 'The Lightbox'
Philip Terry 'What is Poetry'
Ned Denny 'Nine Poems after Verlaine'
Sasha Dugdale 'On learning that Russian mothers buy their soldier sons lucky belts inscribed with Psalm 90 to wear into battle'
Rod Mengham 'Cold War Hot Air'
|
...PN Review is the best poetry magazine that I know: it is interested in poetry in no glib way, it publishes good poems, and it keeps up to date in reviewing new books.
Thom Gunn
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. |
|
|
Featured Article
from Appa Stories
Mosquitoes
Appa has warned the children about mosquitoes, but they are not impressed. They’re afraid of bats and snakes, not mosquitoes. After Appa has finished speaking, the children ask him to say ‘mosquito’ again. The children enjoy asking Appa to say ‘mosquito’; he pronounces it ‘moss-quito’, which makes them laugh. Already the children have a different accent when they speak English. But no matter how much English they learn, they will always call their father ‘Appa’. Bats and Snakes Now, Appa stands in the veranda, the indigo sky behind him, he is about to enter the house. The children are restless beside him; he urges them to go indoors, away from the mosquitoes. Appa doesn’t know that the children have just escaped from the bats, or so they feel. The children have a special zigzag way of running, which, they believe, not only protects them from bats, but also from snakes. Once again, this evening, the children feel that the bats would ... read more |
|
Borges, Recursion and the Multiverse Some Reflections
In his essay ‘When Fiction Lives in Fiction’ (1939), Borges states that he can trace his first notion of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that lent ‘mystery and vertigo’ to his childhood. ‘On the side of this unusual object,’ he writes, ‘there was a Japanese scene; I cannot remember the children or warriors depicted there, but I do remember that in a corner of that image the same biscuit tin reappeared with the same picture, and within it the same picture again, and so on (at least, potentially) into infinity...’1
This childhood experience of Borges’s, in turn, evokes the vertigo the reader might feel before the various mysteries and labyrinths, the doublings and redoublings, and the recursive modes of narration that populate so many of the author’s stories. And it is this notion of recursion (or recurrent self-referentiality) that I wish to address ... read more |
Three Poems
The Process
Everything starts in the field – some thistles, say, or a bunch of moss. These get reformed into bandages. Then spitting cloths. Then the ragman turns the spitting cloths into paper. Enter me, the ‘maker’. I purchase paper from the ragman by the hundred sheet pack. I fill every sheet front and back, then I place the sheets in stacks for the Nightmen. When the Nightmen come they buy my jottings for a decent sum. They don’t read them. No need. They twist the paper into wrappings for tobacco, weed – ... read more |
|
Selected from the Archive...
Three Poems
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 |
|
