Poetry by individual poets

Zaffar Kunial is a proven master of taking things apart, polishing up the fugitive parts of single words, of a sound, a colour, the name of a flower, and putting them back together so that we see them in an entirely different light. In the poems of ‘England’s Green’ we are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know and made to think again. With everything so newly set, we are alert, as the poet is, to the ‘dark missing/step in a stair’, entering this new world with bated breath. By such close attention to the parts, the poems have a genius for invoking absence, whether that be a missing father, the death of a mother or a path not taken.

‘When My Brother Was An Aztec’ is a work of courage and invention – one that foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of western mythologies and a deeply rooted cultural history. Natalie Diaz’s arresting debut explores a brother’s addiction and its devastating effects on a household, while offering a political critique of our nations and their pasts. It acknowledges absences and uncomfortable silences, as well as conjuring vivid voices and presences, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus.

In June 2022, Her Majesty the Queen will become the first British monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee after seventy years of service. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage honours the occasion with a specially written poem, ‘Queenhood’. It is published here as a signed limited edition pamphlet, to be kept and cherished as a souvenir of this majestic moment in history.