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PN Review 274

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) Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237) Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49) M. Wynn ThomasThe Other Side of the Hedge
(PN Review 239)

Next Issue Miles Champion on Steve Malmude, and a selection of his poems Isabel Galleymore 'Baby Earth Environmentalism' James Womack 'The City, an Argument' Marilyn Hacker 'A New Sequence' Ian Thomson 'Before Darkness Fell' Horatio Morpurgo on Semyon Lipkin

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PN Review 274

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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. We'll be celebrating throughout the year, with events and workshops planned for this autumn, find the details here. You can also sign up to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox. Subscribe to the magazine to receive six issues per year and full access to the archive. Buy the current issue without a subscription here.
	Featured Article Unfinished/Ungoverned: An Introduction to V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang Rosa Campbell This is Miss Lang, Miss V.R. Lang. The Poet, or The Poetess. Bynum, would you introduce Someone else as, This is J.P. Hatchet Who is a Roman Catholic? No. Then don’t do That to me again. It’s not an employment, It’s a private religion. Who’s that over there? You probably haven’t heard of Bunny Lang. Or, if you have, it’s because you’re a Frank O’Hara fan, and can recall poems dedicated to her: ‘V.R. Lang’, ‘An 18th Century Letter’, ‘A Letter to Bunny’. Or perhaps the sudden shift in ‘A Step Away from Them’, when he pivots from the joys of cheeseburgers, Coca-Cola and hot shirtless labourers on the streets of Manhattan to the lines: ‘First / Bunny died, then John Latouche / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?’ To learn that someone has died before you’ve even been introduced properly seems unfair – to you, to them. Yet this is perhaps how most people first meet V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang, ... read more
The Drunken Boat (after Rimbaud) Ned Denny Descending the swift, imperturbable flood, I could no longer feel the pilot’s reins; Exultant redskins had shed his blood, Nailed his naked limbs to a brilliant stake. I cared nothing for the fate of my crew, Minds filled with English lace and Flemish wheat. When all that din had been tomahawked too The rivers let me travel as I pleased. Into the frenzy of the tides, last winter, As gravely intent as a playing boy, ... read more	An Asterisk on the Map Sinéad Morrissey This is the text of a keynote lecture that Sinéad Morrissey delivered at the Ciaran Carson Conference, held at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast on 14 September 2023 Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory, first published in 1997, a year before The Good Friday Agreement, offers, in his own phrase, an ‘alternative hologram’ of Belfast, pieced together by memory. All memoir is pieced together by memory. The term memoir describes its provenance as a genre. The Star Factory is striking, however, in drawing our attention to the maverick ways in which memory actually works, to Ciaran’s laterally associative leaps and flights of cognitive fancy (I will return to flying soon), and to his submission to serendipity as the book’s organising principle. ‘Everything you open seethes with memory’, he writes, describing, with his hallmark lavish attention, the contents of his writing desk drawer, ... read more
Editorial News & Notes Letters
Also in the magazine... Miles BurrowsPostcard from Taiwan James CampbellFor Love by Robert Creeley Jane YehThree Poems Laura SolórzanoFour Poems Translated by Adriana Díaz Enciso Jeremy HookerThe poetry of Philip Pacey A view of England
Selected from the Archive... A Conversation with Louise Glück Yvonne Green I interviewed Louise on Tuesday 24 November 2009 and we began by chatting about Hakan Nesser’s latest detective story. I knew he was a writer she enjoys. ‘Reading Woman with Birthmark¹ will be two days of escape from life,’ she said. YVONNE GREEN: The boundary you create between your poems and your reader seems to me to have the draw of the magnetic field suggested in the final stanza from ‘Lost Love’,² in Ararat: …when my sister died, my mother’s heart became very cold, very rigid, like a tiny pendant of iron. Then it seemed to me my sister’s body was a magnet. I could feel it draw my mother’s heart into the earth, so it would grow. LOUISE GLÜCK: I haven’t ... read more

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