The Caged Skylark

Gerard Manley Hopkins explores what it feels like to be trapped in your skin.

Read

Rising Five

Norman Nicholson warns us not to wish our lives away.

Read

David Constantine wonders if there isn’t something more to life than meets the eye.

Read

Looking at life differently in Carol Rumens’ challenging poem

Read

After many years away from the country of her birth, Sujata Bhatt wonders if it’s finally time to share her memories of India.

Read

Liz Lochhead casts a spell in this magical realist poem.

Read

William Cowper visits a woody riverbank by which he passed many pleasant childhood days… to find it irrevocably changed.

Read

Isobel Dixon shows us that older really does mean wiser as she reminisces ruefully about her childhood.

Read

Allen Curnow suggests that there’s a right time to die in this tough, but rewarding, poem.

Read

Watch as James K. Baxter’s eponymous Farmhand refuses the call to adventure in this poem from New Zealand.

Read