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New issue of OP out now. Mick Imlah published only two collections, but when he died last January he was mourned as one of the outstanding poets of his generation. Oxford Poetry XIII.2 celebrates the boy, the man and the poet. There are insights into his life at Dulwich College, Magdalen and the TLS. Essays explore his published work, and poems celebrate his life. We also print seven previously unpublished Imlah poems that will be included in a forthcoming Selected from Faber.
There are contributions from James Campbell, James Fenton, Mark Ford, John Fuller, Alan Hollinghurst, Alan Jenkins, Glyn Maxwell, Andrew McNeillie, Andrew Motion, David Norbrook, Bernard O’Donoghue, Jan Piggott, Peter Porter, Carol Rumens, and Tracey Warr.
- The TLS mention Oxford Poetry's latest issue in their 8th January edition.
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What is Oxford Poetry ?
Oxford Poetry is 100 years old this year. It is the oldest dedicated poetry magazine in the world today.
The magazine was started in 1910 by Oxford undergraduates and published by Basil Blackwell. Previous editors have included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Kingsley Amis, Geoffrey Hill, John Fuller, John Lanchester and Robert Macfarlane. In the 1980s, Mick Imlah, Nicholas Jenkins and Bernard O'Donoghue revived it as a more outward-looking journal - no longer restricted to publishing student poetry but maintaining a connection with the university.
The list of contributors throughout its history is as impressive as it is diverse. In recent years readers would have come across poems by Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Mario Petrucci, Wendy Cope, George Szirtes, Carol Ann Duffy, David Constantine and Glyn Maxwell.
Find out more about the magazine’s history or browse through the selection of online texts.
Read about how to submit work or subscribe.
Poetry Press
"I like the danger; the short line has so much edge. I can’t bury a weak word." Kay Ryan • Drunken Boat
"On a superficial level Mr. Hoagland’s poems — he writes in an alert, caffeinated, lightly accented free verse — resemble those of many writers in what one is tempted to call the Amiable School of American Poets, a group for which Billy Collins serves as both prom king and starting point guard." Dwight Garner on Tony Hoagland • New York Times
"Humility, absent from The Divine Image, is clearly not the usual Christian virtue for Blake. It appears as a diseased growth which, in modern psychoanalytical terms, might equal 'repression' or 'denial'." Carol Rumens on William Blake • The Guardian
"A real poem, that is, lives with the possibility that it might not be any good, and no amount of training, or canny targeting, can ever lessen that." Peter McDonald • Verse Palace
"One idea of poetic ambition sees not the poem, but the book of poems, as a single extended imaginative act, demanding of the reader the same sustained attention that, say, a novel requires, and providing commensurate rewards. It is precisely this sustained attention that the new technologies—those by which we are encouraged to learn and feel and communicate—so routinely defeat." Karl Kirchwey on Louise Glück • Philadelphia Inquirer
"Too few poets write criticism. Too few venture beyond their tribal affiliations." Carol Rumens and James Sutherland-Smith discuss the state of British poetry • The Bow Wow Shop
from ThePage
"One of the best small magazines in the country" Tom Paulin "Glad to be in such good company" Seamus Heaney