Current Issue: March - April 2026
PN Review 288

In this issue:

Sasha Dugdale - Two Poems
Shengchi Hsu - In conversation with Chen Yuhong
Michael Caines - Reviving Henri Coulette
David Nowell Smith - W.S. Graham’s Dedications
Stav Poleg - Strane Città Sognante
Andrew Hadfield - Thoughts of Time and Grief
Laura Scott - Poems

Current Issue: March - April 2026
PN Review 288

Two Poems Sasha Dugdale Sunt aliquid manes*

(from Propertius IV, 7 and after a translation into Russian by Grigory Dashevsky)

Those manes are not nothing, death does spare something:
the wan ghost-runner
outpaces the crematorium fire

I’ll tell you what I saw:
how Cynthia came and lay on my bunk
......
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Current Issue: March - April 2026
PN Review 288

In conversation with Chen Yuhong Shengchi Hsu SH: Readers in Taiwan know you as a poet-translator of the works of contemporary Anglophone poets into Chinese, Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, and, most recently, Alice Oswald, to name a few. How did you choose the poets you want to translate? I was first introduced to English poetry at university, but as you know, the curriculum at Taiwan’s foreign language departments doesn’t really cover modern poetry. But I was trained quite well in classical Chinese poetry. After moving to Vancouver in the eighties, I came across Margaret Atwood’s poems by accident. I’d only known her as a novelist! As I read her work, I kept thinking how I could recreate her poetry in Chinese. But it wasn’t until I read Carol Ann Duffy’s work that I began to think seriously about translating English poetry into Chinese. That’s interesting. Why is that?......
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Current Issue: March - April 2026
PN Review 288

Reviving Henri Coulette Michael Caines It is a great irony that Henri Coulette, a poet of remarkable refinement and exquisite formal control – the son, no less, of a gifted musician – suffered from such terrible timing. Part of a cohort at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1950s that included Philip Levine, W.D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice and Robert Mezey, Coulette seemed destined to share the success of his peers in the decade ahead. Yet by the time his first collection, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and appeared in 1966, the impeccably polished, wittily elegiac, ironically self-effacing poems it contained were distinctly out of fashion. In instead were the ‘confessional’ mode pioneered by Snodgrass and adopted by their teachers at Iowa, Robert Lowell and John Berryman;......
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Cover of Issue 288 of PNR
A book can absorb a reader into a world of its own as if it were the one and only. A magazine like PN Review, on the other hand, refracts many aspects of our manifold being in a shared world. I love seeing difference, even creative disagreement, between one set of covers.
Anthony Vahni Capildeo
 
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)

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