The most important journal concerned with poetry, [it] is gaining its proper recognition, surrounding its admirably intellectual criticism with an even richer spread of actual poems.
Marilyn Butler, Times Literary Supplement
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 approaching 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. You can sign up to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox every week. Subscribe to the magazine to receive six issues per year and full access to the archive.Buy the current issue without a subscription here.Please can subscribers fill out our anonymised questionnaire so we can develop a clearer sense of our readership.
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Featured Interview
In Conversation with Alice Entwistle
Gwyneth Lewis
In some ways Nightshade Mother , your new prose book, is heartbreaking. Somewhere you say that writing it is killing you, and the reader knows exactly what you mean. But elsewhere you explain how language gives you the resources to do the job. How did the whole thing come about? I’ve been planning this book since I was in my early twenties but, despite having written about a tough subject, depression, before, nothing could have prepared me for the difficulties of this task. Part of the emotional abuse I suffered at my mother’s hands involved her hijacking my writing at an early age, so the subject was like turning the knife I’d been wounded with back on myself again. I’ve always trusted form to shield me from explosive subjects, so I was surprised to find that, in writing the first draft of this book, I’d retraumatized myself and felt suicidal. I hadn’t allowed myself to look at the full extent of the abuse before and it was worse than I’d realised.
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Poems
Jenny Bornholdt
Luck
Luckily
the wolf is inside
when the bird
comes to splash about
in what has become
a birdbath.
‘Peter and the Wolf’
was childhood.
A bird, a boy,
a wolf. Somewhere
from deep in the forest
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Fires Were Started Tallinn, March 1944
Ian Thomson
‘Moscow announced this morning that Soviet planes had made a heavy raid on German military trains in the railway centre and port of Tallinn.’ Manchester Guardian, 14 March 1944. Early in the evening of 9 March 1944, the Soviets began to bomb Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. The skyline turned dark; clouds of cinders, lit red by the blaze, floated down over churches, medieval towers, stone-flagged streets. The mile-high roar of magnesium incendiary flames created a firestorm in which 600–700 civilians died (the final count is uncertain), some 20,000 were made homeless and over 600 left wounded. Tallinn had been bombed a total of sixteen times by the Soviets between 1942 and 1943, and more attacks were expected – but not one of this magnitude. Life as Tallinners had known it came to an end that March night. In a matter of hours, residential
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Selected from the Archive...
Diary of a Satyr
Stanley Moss
When I was a child, I moved my pillow to a different part of the bed each night because I liked the feeling of not knowing where I was when I woke up. From the beginning I yearned for the nomadic life. I wandered, grazed like a goat on a hill - the move from grazing to exploring was just a leap over a fence. In my seventh year, I had a revelation. A teacher asked me a question. I knew the answer. Miss Green, a horse-faced redhead, asked the 3A class of P.S. 99, Kew Gardens, Queens, a long way from Byzantium: ‘What are you going to do in life?’ Most of the answers remain a blur, but someone said she was going to be a novelist and someone said he’d write a play, or for the movies.
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