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Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
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Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
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Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
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PN Review 275
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'probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world' - John Ashbery

During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Find all our anniversary plans here. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe.

Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others.

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PN Review 276
Featured Article
Repair Work translated by Sasha Dugdale Maria Stepanova In October 2023 Maria Stepanova won the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo Editions). This is her acceptance speech, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale.

Dear Friends,

The book we are speaking of today was written only recently, and yet it was written in a different historical era – before the pandemic, when for a few years the whole world lived in a constant present tense: without the future, which had been put off indefinitely, and without the past, which seemed beyond reach. It was published before the beginning of a full-scale war of aggression in Europe, a war that was started and is still being waged by the country I was born in, and where I had spent my whole life. It is a war which has forever changed my sense of self and of my occupation. And that is why it is so hard for me to speak now. In Memory of Memory appeared in a different world and in some ways was written by a different person. ... read more
Some Uncollected Poems Selected by Roger Hickin
James K. Baxter James K. Baxter wrote in the introduction to his selected poems, The Rock Woman (1969), of ‘an obsessive industry that led [him] as often as not into the cactus’. The poems that follow are from A Branch Torn Down, a forthcoming selection – the fourth such – of work unpublished and uncollected in Baxter’s lifetime, work that doesn’t always avoid the cactus, but does attest to the deep involvement in the human condition of New Zealand’s most talented, prolific and controversial poet, ‘a passionate, complex and haunted man’ who was also, in John Weir’s view, ‘one of the great English-language poets of the twentieth century’.


A Portrait of a Fellow-Alcoholic

My cobber has the shakes. The whitish-red
Eyes glitter in the punchbag of his head –
‘That bugger Reilly never had the right
To bash me when I bent under the bed

To get my fiddle...’ The ice-black urinal
In which he lay till dawn, more dead than tight,
Has fouled his jersey. In the trim lounge bar
I shout him three good whiskies for the trip
... read more
The Citadel of the Mind
Stav Poleg First you were an idea, a blue satellite
orbiting a distant, dark

moon. Then you were a feather, the light
distance it takes for beauty

to form into something like finding
the ground. It didn’t happen

without warning, the morning
glowed like a feverish neon sign – an indication

of clemency – I thought, the sky
turned sapphire and dark like new foreign
... read more
Selected from the Archive...
Notes on a Viking Prow Christopher Middleton
TO RECAPTURE poetic reality in a tottering world, we may have to revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of the "contents" of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of poetic language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where "self-expression" has undergone a profound change of function. We experience these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as apertures upon being. We experience them as we experience nothing else.

Yet we say that a poetic text is not this or that thing out there. We say that such a virtual thing as a text is not an actual thing, that it is not even thing-like at all. Or we say that this or that text occupies an interface between things and persons, but has its ontological status only ... read more
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