Most Read...
The Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239) Bill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259) Val Warner: A Reminiscence
(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 239) Bill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259) Val Warner: A Reminiscence
(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
Stav Poleg's Banquet
Stanley Moss In a concluding conversation, with Neilson MacKay
John Koethe Poems
Gwyneth Lewis shares excerpts from 'Nightshade Mother: a disentangling'
John Redmond revisits 'Henneker's Ditch'
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'PN Review is the most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines. A shelf of its back issues now extends to over a metre - I hope it continues to increase.'
Simon Armitage
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. |
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Featured Interview
In Conversation with Alice Entwistle
In some ways Nightshade Mother, your new prose book, is heartbreaking. Somewhere you say that writing it is killing you, and the reader knows exactly what you mean. But elsewhere you explain how language gives you the resources to do the job. How did the whole thing come about?
I’ve been planning this book since I was in my early twenties but, despite having written about a tough subject, depression, before, nothing could have prepared me for the difficulties of this task. Part of the emotional abuse I suffered at my mother’s hands involved her hijacking my writing at an early age, so the subject was like turning the knife I’d been wounded with back on myself again. I’ve always trusted form to shield me from explosive subjects, so I was surprised to find that, in writing the first draft of this book, I’d retraumatized myself and felt suicidal. I hadn’t allowed myself to look at the full extent of the abuse before and it was worse than I’d realised. ... read more |
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Poems
Luck
Luckily the wolf is inside when the bird comes to splash about in what has become a birdbath. ‘Peter and the Wolf’ was childhood. A bird, a boy, a wolf. Somewhere from deep in the forest ... read more |
Fires Were Started Tallinn, March 1944
Manchester Guardian, 14 March 1944. Early in the evening of 9 March 1944, the Soviets began to bomb Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. The skyline turned dark; clouds of cinders, lit red by the blaze, floated down over churches, medieval towers, stone-flagged streets. The mile-high roar of magnesium incendiary flames created a firestorm in which 600–700 civilians died (the final count is uncertain), some 20,000 were made homeless and over 600 left wounded. Tallinn had been bombed a total of sixteen times by the Soviets between 1942 and 1943, and more attacks were expected – but not one of this magnitude. Life as Tallinners had known it came to an end that March night. In a matter of hours, residential ... read more |
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Selected from the Archive...
Diary of a Satyr
When I was a child, I moved my pillow to a different part of the bed each night because I liked the feeling of not knowing where I was when I woke up. From the beginning I yearned for the nomadic life. I wandered, grazed like a goat on a hill - the move from grazing to exploring was just a leap over a fence. In my seventh year, I had a revelation. A teacher asked me a question. I knew the answer. Miss Green, a horse-faced redhead, asked the 3A class of P.S. 99, Kew Gardens, Queens, a long way from Byzantium: ‘What are you going to do in life?’ Most of the answers remain a blur, but someone said she was going to be a novelist and someone said he’d write a play, or for the movies. ... read more |
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