The Poetry Review Sampler 2025 by The Poetry Society

Welcome to this sampler of recent poems from The Poetry Review. Since it was founded in 1912, the magazine has been home to the world’s best writing – by both internationally renowned and emerging poets, newcomers and Nobel Prize winners alike. The Review, in line with The Poetry Society’s overall aims, recognises that the poetic community is a broad one, and encompasses a variety of aesthetics, preoccupations and concerns. As such, the magazine intends to celebrate the very best of this ever-growing landscape. In this sampler you’ll find poems by the Forward Prize winner Victoria Chang; Eric Yip, youngest ever winner of The National Poetry Competition; multi-award winning Carl Phillips; T.S. Eliot Prize winner Alice Oswald; Crispin Best, who counts Bjork among his many fans; and one of the last poems ever published by the late Charles Simic, former United States Poet Laureate. These works are just a taste of the diverse and brilliant living art form represented in our pages.

Beyond this brief introduction, you can find further highlights from the current edition and back issues at bit.ly/ThePoetryReview. Readers can also listen to our podcast series, look ‘Behind the Poem’ to learn more about selected works, and see what our contributors are reading and thinking about in the ‘Poetry Mixtape’ series. You are also welcome to join us at free launch events for each issue – live at The Poetry Café and online – and hear a selection of contributors reading new work.

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Wayne Holloway-Smith, Editor

ERIC YIP Broadway Cinematheque

In Yi Yi a boy’s camera shows people the back of their heads. In Happy Together two men tango on the other side of the world. After the movie my mother tells me she is divorcing my father. We are sitting in a seventy-year-old cafe near closing time one floor above Temple Street. The tiling is composed of repeated octagons and squares. Accordion blinds filter streetlight onto turquoise tables. If I were a cinematographer I would want the shot to be from outside looking in so my face would be half-hidden. In All About Lily Chou-Chou a boy listens to his Discman in a waist-high paddy field. This is after the trip to Okinawa with his friends where malevolence first enters his life. What life one has yet to live is a question one should always pose themselves. The milk tea is cold and she cannot finish the luncheon meat and egg sandwich. In Farewell My Concubine a mother chops a finger off her son and sells him to an opera troupe. Posters cling to the cinema’s white facade above the ebb of moviegoers. Someday you might walk in and find a story already holding your sorrow in its hands.

CARL PHILLIPS

There’s a Lullaby

We lay down fully clothed; next to, but not touching, like two heroes, each known to the other only by hearsay, each refusing to show, too soon, his respective powers –

I liked that. I liked thinking, in a world where almost nothing anymore stays hidden, that secrets still had their place, to be defended, should it come to that –

Did you know, he said, That the first fireworks were likely the small fires people lit not for warmth for once, but for distraction, to catch – then sustain – the gods’ attention while wishing Let this befall or, by some miracle, become un-befallen?

(There’s this lullaby I was taught to sing, long ago, when frightened. Like waves, the context keeps changing; the suffering’s the same, like the ocean, is how it goes. I still sing it sometimes, in my head.)

No, I said, turning to him, not touching him, not needing to. No, I’ve never known that, till now.

CRISPIN BEST

Woodpeckers arrive

Woodpeckers arrive every April to be misidentified. Or the mouse who died in the bucket of nuts, turning the top layer blue. The girl who covered her mouth and said he took heaven with him. Or the swivel chair beside the bus stop. Who let this happen? All that headroom.

Or how the duvet’s soul has spilled out again. Or how the dropped banana peel has somehow crossed its fingers. Or none of these things, none of this, and instead at last here comes this beautiful stranger crossing the crowded room to say: ‘Your poetry changed my life. It made it worse.’

VICTORIA CHANG

Tree [Studies], 1944

Once they picked a date, I knew something the eucalyptus tree did not. Someone knows when the earth will end. I think that person is a lumberjack. To be alive is to accept perception but to use the perceived. To know a tree has no bones but to paint in bones. To know that we aren’t actually writing poems but our own autopsies. That the earth is a collage of the sky, the leaves, and its own grave.

Things stay alive by eluding our perception. The same gaze that believes a tree is there for us to draw. That its branches have tiny offices. That it can fly away or be poured. The miracle is that the earth holds the weight of the living, the dead, and our imaginations, but it doesn’t sink. Picasso drew in a branch collar, where a tree branch had been cut. As if he knew that the whole drawing depended on it.

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All images © the artists, cover details (left to right): Aboudia, Smoke Weed at School, Jack Bell Gallery; Alvaro Barrington, When I was just trying to feed my daughter, Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery; Peter Liversidge, as a thought, Kate MacGarry, London; Sarah Sze, Metronome, photograph Thierry Bal; Khalil Rabah, Villa Nova Palestina, Sfeir-Semler Gallery; Kyungah Ham, Greedy is Good, Kukje Gallery, photograph Kwon Oyeol; Shilpa Gupta, For, in your tongue, I cannot fit, photograph SV Photographic (Vicky Luthra); Dom Sylvester Houédard, Untitled, Lisson Gallery.

The Poetry Review is the world’s finest poetry quarterly. Within its pages readers will find in-depth peer reviews of the latest poetry releases, provocative and inspiring conversations and thoughtful and influential prose, alongside the very best in contemporary poetry by established and emerging writers. 24/25 contributors include: Amy Acre, Kim Addonizio, Iyanuoluwa Adenle, Rachael Allen, Moniza Alvi, Holly Amos, Anthony Anaxagorou, Rashed Aqrabawi, Rae Armantrout, Tiffany Atkinson, Isabelle Baafi, Rowland Bagnall, Urvashi Bahuguna, Michael Bazzett, Dzifa Benson, Fiona Benson, Tara Bergin, Claire Berlyn, Jay Bernard, Crispin Best, Hera Lindsay Bird, Rachael Boast, Sean Borodale, Helen Bowell, Alison Brackenbury, Tom Branfoot, Rachel Bruce, Madailín Burnhope, Courtney Bush, Maura Dooley, Matthew Caley, Zakia Carpenter-Hall, Joe Carrick-Varty, Nejra Cehić, Jess Chandler, Chen Chen, Maria-Sophia Christodoulou, Jenna Clake, Joey Connolly, Simon Costello, Fred D’Aguiar, Hazel Davis, Meg Day, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Susannah Dickey, Duy Đoàn, Maura Dooley, Joe Dunthorne, Phoebe Eccles, Inua Ellams, Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Kit Fan, Logan February, Matthew Francis, Ella Frears, Jackqueline Frost, Forrest Gander, William Gee, Harry Josephine Giles, Vona Groarke, Philip Gross, Livvy Hanks, Caroline Harris, Will Harris, Hasti, Marwa Helal, WN Herbert, Erica Hesketh, Alice Hiller, Matthew Holman, Dane Holt, Saleem Hue Penny, Ian Humphreys, Nasser Hussain, Ian Irwin, Leo Kang, Luke Kennard, Aaron Kent, Caleb Klaces, Daisy Lafarge, Khando Langri, Clara-Læïla Laudette, Ali Lewis, Tim Liardet, Mukahang Limbu, Christopher Lloyd, Rachel Long, Maitreyabandhu, Nick Makoha, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, DS Marriott, Chris McCabe, Joyelle McSweeney, Alex Mepham, Lucy Mercer, Laurel Moore, David Morley, Helen Mort, Theresa Muñoz, Daljit Nagra, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Eliza O’ Toole, Katie O’Pray, Chisom Okafor, Alice Oswald, Sandeep Parmar, Don Paterson, Pascale Petit, Carl Phillips, Bohdan Piasecki, Stav Poleg, Clare Pollard, Kate Potts, Jasmine Reid, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, Maurice Riordan, Kaisa Saarinen, Tom Sastry, Denise Saul, Richard Scott, Kerri Shying, Emily Skaja, Caroline Smith, Shannon Smith-Meekings, Brian Sneeden, Andrew Spragg, John Stammers, Greta Stoddart, Chloe Stopa-Hunt, Romany Stott, Marek Sullivan, Ellora Sutton, George Szirtes, Yuki Tanaka, Shuji Terayama, Jack Underwood, Kirmen Uribe, Sean Wai Keung, Chrissy Williams, Alison Winch, Anna Woodford, Lynn Xu and Eric Yip.

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