Explore poetry
17 Melbourne Road
Oliver Reynolds
‘A room at the top of the street / preserving his life in sunlight’
6 March 1989
Salman Rushdie
‘Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face? / Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place’.
A Cloudless Sky
Michael Dickman
‘A cloudless sky and I’m back / an ice-cold sky-blue rag / for my eyes’
A Meeting of Minds with Henry David Thoreau
Andrew Motion
‘What am I doing here more than looking – / which I would stop / only to help things through their vanishing’
A Numbered Graph That Shows How Each Part of the Body Would Fit Into A Chair
Mary Jo Bang
‘It’s a simple truth that one can occupy two / places at one time while sitting in a chair—the same way a / poseable doll can be divided from her dress.’
A Spell For Going Safely Forth By Day
Jynne Martin
‘The hunter pushes a bullet beneath his tongue to fix his aim, / or is it to stave off his thirst?
Abingdon Square Park
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
‘I once had had a thought / About a thought I once had had’
Accidental
Sadaf Halai
‘Of the 36 views of Fuji, this one is the strangest: / the great wave off Kanagawa, frozen and tempestuous, / both sound and silence.’
All the Good Help
Togara Muzanenhamo
‘He will not understand her fascination / for rain, these summer months of water / that somehow keep the money coming in’
Apparition
Mark Doty
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
Beyond Sunset
Mary Ruefle
‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’
Bianca Burning
C.K. Williams
‘The sexual terror lions are roaring into my ears as I make my way between their cages’
Bicske
Joanna Walsh
‘For us, discomfort is a hard feeling. / Almost as hard as hate. / Almost as hard as fear.’
Biographical Detail
Ángel González Muñiz
‘The cockroaches in my house complain because I read at night’.
Bird of Fire
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
‘No more, no longer the sweet difference / Between real and dream I knew.’
Black Against the Sky, the Giant Mothers
Selima Hill
‘Black against the sky the giant mothers / are whispering together in the moonlight’
Black Rot and Mildew
Leontia Flynn
‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’
Blue Sky Thinking
Gillian Clarke
‘Let’s do this again, ground the planes for a while and leave the runways to the racing hare.’
Blueberries
James Lasdun
‘I’m talking to you old man. / Listen to me as you step inside this garden’
Civilization Spurns the Leopard
Solmaz Sharif
‘To step out of my door and hope to see something like a life, something passably me.’
