Anne Carson

MEET THE AUTHOR

Interview

Anne Carson: ‘I do not believe in art as therapy’

The poet and classics professor talks about her new collection, Float, her love of volcanoes and the power of brevity

Kate Kellaway
Sunday 30 October 2016

Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, published in 2001, made her name; she became a poetic guru, revered as an original. Her writing is a hybrid – a wayward mix of ancient and modern. She is an essayist, translator and dramatist. Born in Ontario in 1950, she has worked most of her life as a classics professor. She appears in the newly launched Penguin Modern Poets Series and has just published a new collection, Float.

 

Seamos Heaney
Photo by Jane Bown

Seamus Heaney’s poems for a darkening age

Collected in a landmark new edition, the late Irish writer’s work is attuned to wonder, replete with humanity and rooted in the tragedies of history

Fintan O’Toole

Friday 24 October 2025

A place I happen to know very well is the Flaggy Shore, a thin spit of land that sticks out into the south side of Galway Bay. In the autumn of 1992, Seamus Heaney drove up the narrow tarmacked pathway with his wife Marie, the great playwright Brian Friel and his wife Anne. He does not seem to have bothered to get out of the car, or even to stop for a few minutes to take in the scene. Because the path is usually blocked by walkers, it’s a slow drive – but still it couldn’t have taken him much more than 10 minutes. He had, as he later recalled, a “quick sidelong glimpse of something flying past”.

Review

Triage by Claudia Rankine review – how should we respond to the world’s atrocities?

The American poet and essayist weaves memoir, fiction, criticism and lyrical lament into a tale of friendship in an age of existential crisis

Sarah Crown

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental,” writes the multi-award winning Jamaican-American poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine in the disclaimer to her latest work. “Unless it isn’t.” The pretzel-logic of this statement, its assertive ambiguity, sets the tone for a book that digs directly into the question of what we are to do with the idea of truth, when the world we live in is asking us “to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language for”. In Triage, Rankine borrows from her personal history and from a world whose landscape now encompasses “the rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change”, and uses the material she gathers to pose a simple question. When faced with realities such as these, what do you do? Do you stand, or do you fall?

Claudia Rankine / ‘The invisibility of black women is astounding’

 

Poet Claudia Rankine: ‘The invisibility of black women is astounding’

This article is more than 11 years old

The writer asked friends for their experiences of everyday racism and turned them into the award-winning Citizen. Here she talks about the power of making private anecdotes public

Paula Cocozza

Monday 21 June 2015

W

hen Serena Williams was contesting the US Open in 2012, the American poet Claudia Rankine watched from the stands, engaged in a parallel skirmish of her own. She had taken her nine-year-old daughter to the final. They were sitting next to a white American. “And the guy,” Rankine says in surprise, “is cheering for the other player, not for Serena. So I say to him: ‘Are you American?’ And he says: ‘Yes.’ And I say: ‘So why are you cheering for the player from Belarus and not Serena Williams?’”

Rebecca Perry / Interview

Rebecca Perry

INTERVIEW

Ahead of our Poetry Prize, which closes 30th June, we spoke to judge Rebecca Perry about prizes, publication and what she’ll be looking for from this year’s entries.

Rebecca, It’s lovely to have you as a judge, particularly as your 2012 pamphlet little armoured was published by Seren after winning the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Poetry Prize. What was your reaction to winning the Prize and how did it help you in your development as a poet?

Rebecca Perry

Two Poems by Rebecca Perry

This week's dose of new writing medicine comes to us from London-based Rebecca Perry by way of two poems

Rebecca is a graduate of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and currently lives in London. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Poetry London and The Rialto, and she has work forthcoming in The Salt Anthology of New Writing and Best British Poetry 2013. 

Her pamphlet, little armoured (Seren), won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice

Stone Fruit by Rebecca Perry

Stone Fruit
by Rebecca Perry

A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise.

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938), the great modern Russian poet, essayist, and translator was born in Warsaw in 1891. In 1897, the family moved to Saint Petersburg. He received his formal education in the Tenishev School, in part at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, but never took an academic degree. He knew English, French, and German perfectly. 

The Kiss by Stephen Dunn

THE KISS
By Stephen Dunn

She pressed her lips to mind.
—a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.