I hope you have been keeping well and finding time for poetry in the midst of the upheavals of the past year. I’ve had a few poems published in magazines recently. You can read one of them online in (or should it be ‘at’?) Anthropocene. It’s called ‘Thirteen Birds’ and features different types of bird […]
Poems
Poem: Lockdown
Mark McGuinness · Lockdown You should be able to play the recording in the SoundCloud player above, but if not you can find it on SoundCloud here. Lockdown We’re cooped up with ourselves. Alone together for weeks or months until it’s safe to breathe. The virus crosses continents like weather. For now we’re stuck here, […]
(Audio) A Poem of Hope in Dark Times: The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
As the UK went into Coronavirus lockdown over the past few days this poem by Thomas Hardy kept coming into my mind. So I thought I’d read it for you and talk about how I think it speaks to us at a time like this. You should be able to play the recording in the […]
Poem: ‘Hiroshima’, in Oxford Poetry
Even though I was expecting it, as the bullet train pulled into the platform it was still a shock to see the word ‘Hiroshima’ on the sign, in the same everyday font used for station names all over Japan. I will never forget the things I saw in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, or the […]
My Chaucer Translation – Third Place in the Stephen Spender Prize
I’m delighted to report that a passage from my translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has been awarded third prize in this year’s Stephen Spender Prize, as announced in the Guardian. I’ve been working on the translation for over two years – the poem is over 8,000 lines long – and it’s great to receive […]