CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
‘The sniff of the real’
Thom Gunn:
Autobiography
Hugo Williams:
Tides
Susannah Amoore:
An Upstairs Kitchen
Ann Sansom:
Instructor
Hilary Menos:
Slaughterhouse
Mandy Sutter:
Caring for the Environment
Mark Robinson:
Domestic Bliss
Galway Kinnell:
Saint Francis and the Sow
Kate Bingham:
Things I Learned at University
Kate Clanchy:
Timetable
‘Ordinariness renewed’
Seamus Heaney:
Night Drive
Jaan Kaplinski:
‘This morning was cold’
Robert Rehder:
Corminboeuf 157
Michael Laskey:
Bike
Maura Dooley:
Mansize
Sylvia Plath:
Mushrooms
Charles Simic:
My Shoes
W.N. Herbert:
The Black Wet
Gwen Harwood:
Cups
Esther Morgan:
Avocados
James Schuyler:
June 30, 1974
Andy Brown:
Prayer/Why I am Happy to be in the City this Spring
‘Talk in another way’
John Logan:
Picnic
Peter Sansom:
K563
Carol Ann Duffy:
Words, Wide Night
U.A. Fanthorpe:
Atlas
Lawrence Sail:
The Lack of You
Jean Sprackland:
The Birkdale Nightingale
Jackie Kay:
Dusting the Phone
Dorothy Nimmo:
Rondeau Redouble
C.K. Williams:
Kin
Brendan Kennelly:
May the Silence Break
Laura Apol:
The Switch
‘What it’s like to be alive’
Deryn Rees-Jones:
What It’s Like to Be Alive
Emily Riall:
Duty Psychiatrist
Margaret Avison:
Twilight
Mark Halliday:
The Missing Poem
Sharon Olds:
Looking at Them Asleep
Elizabeth Jennings:
A Letter to Peter Levi
Evangeline Paterson:
Literary Portrait
Ferenc Juhász:
The Birth of the Foal
Siân Hughes:
Results
Naomi Jaffa:
Some of the Usual
Caroline Yasunaga:
Morning
Moniza Alvi:
I Would Like to be a Dot in a Painting by Miró
Janet Fisher:
Women Who Dye Their Hair
‘I came near to dying’
Tomas Tranströmer:
Alone
Marin Sorescu:
With Only One Life
Hubert Moore:
Deep Third Man
George Messo:
The Beautiful Apartments
Julia Darling:
Chemotherapy
Psalm 102
Patrick Kavanagh:
Wet Evening in April
Mandy Coe:
Let’s Celebrate
Jo Shapcott:
Era
Ian McMillan:
On the Impossibility of Staying Alive
‘Questions unanswered’
Norman MacCaig:
Aunt Julia
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin:
Swineherd
Anonymous:
Underneath the mathematics of time
Helen Dunmore:
In the Desert Knowing Nothing
Martin Stannard:
The Ingredient
Geoff Hattersley:
The Only Son at the Fish ’n’ Chip Shop
Christopher North:
The Dog
Alasdair Paterson:
Fishermen
Wisława Szymborska:
Psalm
John Ashbery:
Down by the Station Early in the Morning
Christopher Southgate:
High Fidelity
Peter Carpenter:
Nightwatchman
‘Heavens, I recognise the place, I know it!’
Elizabeth Bishop:
Poem
Kathleen Jamie:
The Way We Live
Marie Howe:
Prayer
Connie Bensley:
Sunday Lunchtime
Stephen Berg:
Eating Outside
Catherine Smith:
How It All Started
Carol Rumens:
Coming Home
Rose Cook:
A Poem for Someone Who Is Juggling Her Life
Robert Pinsky:
Song of Reasons
Cliff Yates:
Boggle Hole
Raymond Carver:
Prosser
Ted Hughes:
Wind
‘We’re still here’
Philip Levine:
Magpiety
Alison Mosquera:
Tamoxifen
Clare Best:
The bookbinder
Adrienne Rich:
FROM
In the Wake of Home
Kenneth Koch:
To My Heart at the Close of Day
Don Coles:
Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13, 1910
Jane Kenyon:
Let Evening Come
John Ash:
The Middle Kingdom
Mary Oliver:
The Journey
Ann Gray:
mercifully ordain that we may become aged together
Iain Crichton Smith:
Poetry
Derek Mahon:
Everything Is Going To Be All Right
INDEX OF POETS
INDEX OF TITLES
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Copyright