Val Warner: A Reminiscence Patricia Craig What to Do When Someone Dies is the title of a 2008 thriller by Nicci French. It came into my head when I was confronted by the recent death of my friend Val Warner and didn’t know what to do. To start with, I couldn’t quite believe it had happened. The last time we’d spoken on the phone, in early September 2020, Val had announced quite matter-of-factly that she would probably die and be left to moulder at her house in Hackney, without anyone being aware of what had happened. I, of course, told her not to be so morbid, to pull herself together and stop envisaging such a dismal scenario. But it fell out just as she had predicted. I should have paid more attention to her accounts of minor, but accumulating, infirmities. Alarm bells sounded in my head on a couple of occasions, it’s true, but not with sufficient urgency to impel me into action. For example, taking two and a half hours – as she described it – to walk the short distance from a local supermarket to her home, suggested something seriously amiss. I knew, because she’d told me, that something was wrong with her legs, but she refused to be specific about the cause of the problem. She’d said it was easier for her to get upstairs on her hands and knees – which led me to harbour a terrible image of Val crawling from room to room like an oversized bat. But when I tried to insist that the time was long overdue for her to register with a doctor, or at least to ring a medical helpline ... read more

John McAuliffe Bill Manhire is New Zealand’s best-known and most celebrated living poet. Since his Collected Poems (2001), he has published four striking, distinctive collections, Lifted (2005), The Victims of Lightning (2010), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017) and, last year, Wow. The poems are playful, intent, open to the contemporary moment, steeped in the history of poetics, and, lately, very interested in what it is a poem does, an interest that seems in conversation, often, with questions about song and about sequence, and how poems which begin in one place or moment can make occasions of their own.

This interview took place in February 2021. I emailed Bill a question in mid-morning from Manchester and he would respond from the New Zealand evening, the Manchester dawn, timings which set the rhythm of the exchanges, occasionally interrupted as Bill flew south from Wellington ... read more

Joshua Weiner Joshua Weiner: I’m excited to have this opportunity to talk to you, Daniel, because more than any other poet-critic of my generation you’ve pushed at my own thinking about poetry the hardest, mostly by revealing to me the histories of poetry’s materiality. What I think of as a kind of trilogy – Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (2000) and Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (2009), and My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry & Kitsch (2014) – is really a whole new history of modern poetry, moving in the latter volumes towards an exploration and revival of the concept of diction, which you extended in your recent essay on lyric for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia (2020).

That essay was particularly useful this fall for how it foregrounded some of my initial thinking around Louise Glück receiving the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, ... read more