The inspiration for the latest issue of Magma comes from Kafka’s comment that ‘Words are ice-axes for the frozen sea within’, putting the focus on poems that find new and powerful ways of engaging with feeling. As well as previously unpublished work by celebrated poets Gillian Clarke and Vicki Feaver, there are also poems by the winners of the 2008 Gregory Awards for best poets under 30. We have Matthew Sweeney responding to the Austrian poet George Trakl and Blake Morrison writing about ‘Poetry of Departures’ by Philip Larkin. In addition to our usual reviews, there’s a discussion of prose poetry, an article on the contemporary poetic imagination and an exploration of developments in poetry in education and what it means to young people.
Poems
| Sarah Jackson | Pig |
|---|---|
| Eliska Pirosmani | Natascha |
| Padraig O’Morain | Me and my shadow |
| Gary Jackson | Listening to Plath in Poetics |
| Nina Bahadur | I tried to give up writing |
| Heather Phillipson | German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London |
Articles
| The New Imagination | Laurie Smith explores how poetry may help us to survive. I want to suggest that the poetic imagination is currently undergoing… |
|---|---|
| Poetry in Practice - Contained Waywardness | Jane Monson reviews Inventory by Linda Black (Shearsman). For readers who consider the prose poem to be poetic prose, a genre… |
| Poetry in Practice - Are prose poems poems? | Hannah Salt asks some basic questions. Prose poems appear more and more frequently in magazines, anthologies and collections, and it is… |
| Editorial | For this edition of Magma we requested poems that seek new ways of engaging with feeling, that respond to Kafka’s… |
Buy this issue
Subscribe to Magma
You can subcribe to Magma Poetry on an annual basis - from as little as £15.95
Receive the Magma Blog for FREE
E-mail updates
RSS updates
