Current Issue: January - February 2026
PN Review 287

In this issue:

Alberto Manguel - With the Lobsters into Sea
Abū Nuwās - When ‘The Wine of Life is Drawn’
Kirsty Gunn - To travel both and be one traveller…
Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield Give Life Lessons on Poetry in Prose
Chen Yuhong - Poems
Translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi
Richard Price - from The Accidental Curator
Raymond Queneau - Memento Mori
Tony Roberts - The Magnetic Field of William F. Buckley Jr.
Mike Freeman - Re-Visiting the Arcade
Nóra Blascsók - Unscrupulous Mirror

Current Issue: January - February 2026
PN Review 287

With the Lobsters into Sea Alberto Manguel Professor Christopher Pressler, Manchester University Librarian, and colleagues invited Alberto Manguel to deliver the inaugural John Rylands University of Manchester Lecture, to mark the Library’s 125th anniversary. Introducing the event, Professor Pressler celebrated Manguel’s unique place as a modern man of books, who had inspired his own decision to become a librarian. Born in Argentina in 1948, Manguel is known for many things: as one of Jorge Luis Borges’s readers from 1964 to 1968, as his eventual successor as director of the National Library of Argentina; as a novelist, essayist, translator, anthologist, editor. Since 2021 his home has been in Lisbon where he directs the international centre for reading studies, named the Espaço Atlântida in 2023. Among his wonderful books – apart from fiction and essays – are his Dictionary of Imaginary Places (a collaboration......
READ MORE

Current Issue: January - February 2026
PN Review 287

When ‘The Wine of Life is Drawn’ Abū Nuwās Translated by James E. Montgomery


Sin

1
Dappled with Moonbeams

It’s March, winter has gone, the trees
   are in bud and Time’s scent is sweet.
   Spring has dressed the earth in a patterned
......
READ MORE

Current Issue: January - February 2026
PN Review 287

To travel both and be one traveller…
Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield Give Life Lessons on Poetry in Prose Kirsty Gunn In Munich recently, en route to Bayreuth for Wagner and performances of that particular iteration of Wissenschaft, I was startled to see, passing before me on the other side of the street, a line of three barefoot boys in wetsuits all carrying surfboards. Their hair was damp and their boards clearly just out of the water. But how? Where was the beach? The sea? We were in the middle of a landlocked city in Bavaria, an urban criss-cross of grand squares and two-lane expressways… Where was the wave? The boys’ profiles as they passed before me – elbows at an angle and their boards pointing forward, bare feet flat on the ground, heel to toe – were elongated and purposeful as the drawings of pharaohs on the walls of Egyptian tombs. Who were they?......
READ MORE
Cover of Issue 287 of PNR
I have a job in Lewis's and my co-workers and I all read your new magazine PN Review. We all think it is ever such good fun and we are so tired of all the usual sorts of magazines like Jackie and Darling. We all read it during the lunch breaks as I have said, and I have written some poems myself.
Geraldine Moped (Edwin Morgan)
 
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. In 2023 PN Review celebrated its jubilee.

Our vast archive now includes over 280 issues, with contributions from some of the most exciting and radical writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, Christopher Middleton, John Ashbery, Les Murray, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others.
Cover of PNR 10 1979
Cover of PNR 36 1984
Cover of PNR 57 1987
Cover of PNR 100 1994
Cover of PNR 134 2000
Cover of PNR 226 2015
Cover of PNR 243 2018
Cover of PNR 264 2022

From the Archive

in Conversation with Robert Minhinnick Sam Adams
Robert Minhinnick was born, in 1952, and brought up in the village of Pen-y-fai, near Bridgend, south Wales. He was first published in the 'New Poets' special number of Poetry Wales in 1972 and has since established himself at the forefront of the younger generation of Anglo-Welsh writers. The most recent of his six books of poetry, Hey Fatman, was published by Seren in 1994. He has also produced two volumes of essays, Watching the Fire Eater, Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 1993, and Badlands (1996):

SAM ADAMS: Although you are clearly Welsh by birth, upbringing and allegiance, in a country where the list of writers is packed with Davieses, Joneses and Thomases, your name is unusual. Is Minhinnick Cornish? More importantly, are you interested in origins?

ROBERT MINHINNICK: ... READ MORE

Readers' Choices

Rebecca Watts

The Cult of the Noble Amateur

(PN Review 239)

Stav Poleg

The Banquet

(PN Review 279)

Rory Waterman

Remarkable Coincidences

(PN Review 286)

Stav Poleg

The Citadel of the Mind

(PN Review 276)

Eavan Boland

A Lyric Voice at Bay

(PN Review 121)

Searching, please wait...