Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
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'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This poem is taken from PN Review 222, Volume 41 Number 4, March - April 2015.

Adventures of the Noir Américain: An Audience with the Prince Tony Roberts

He likes to huff and puff and blow the house down
but half the porkers in the audience
are from the Fleet and they’re all busy
with not listening. Instead their vocal cords
are happily vibrating in the spirit  
of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
He side-mouths Red that what they’ve got is Circe’s
crew out there tonight (drawing another
Homeric blank). So he has the quintet play
a vamp-till-ready, while he’s waiting on
a kind of hush that doesn’t come, and then
he leans into the mike to try a pitch
he’s told that Mingus made (All right, he’s heard
it didn’t work, but it will surely
mollify, and the Prince is right now
in the kind of mood his drummer, Red, would call
...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image