For this edition of Magma we requested poems that seek new ways of engaging with feeling, that respond to Kafka’s comment that “Words are ice-axes for the frozen sea within”. The response has been enormous with more poems being submitted than ever before. Many poets clearly hunger to express feeling more directly, to break through the numbness which often seems a condition of modern life.

We can print only a tiny proportion of the many fine poems received. They have been arranged in groups and we have tried to show how feeling builds and ebbs within and between groups of poems as it does within poems themselves: how, for example, the opening poems on inspiration relate, among other things, to love and are followed by poems of love, both passionate and cynical; and how the two poems about Keats end the sections on love and open the section on how-we-live-now, beginning with buildings. But there are also discontinuities and, we hope, surprises.

We hope you will have time to read the sections in different orders, to read them backwards, to pursue the work of poets whose poems appear in different places. We have tried to produce an issue which enacts some of the unexpected ways in which the imagination can show itself in poetry and we hope you find it as exciting to read as we have found editing it.