Highlights from the latest issue

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  EDITORIAL

  Clare Pollard

  Welcome to our Spring issue. The front section includes a new translation of Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński’s major poem ‘A Trip to Świder’ by Renata Senktas and Christopher Reid, supported by the Polish Cultural Institute. There are Indonesian poetry highlights from this year’s London Book Fair, and Zeina Hashem Beck shares the bilingual form she has invented called the Duet. We are also glad to provide a platform for an urgent feature on Rohingya poetry, assembled by James Byrne, that we believe to be the first in a UK magazine.
  
  Then there is our focus on the languages of the United Kingdom. My idea was that, with the magazine published the same month the UK was committed to leave Europe, this could be our ‘Brexit’ issue...

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  FEAR EUN LOTA: BIRD WOUND MAN

  MacGillivray

  Similar in appearance to medieval depictions of ‘Wound Men’, the ‘Fear Eun Lota’ (Scottish Gaelic for ‘Bird Wound Man’) demonstrated poetic damage done to an individual when deliberately conversing with birds – an archaic gift much sought after in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Such wounds afflicted specific parts of human anatomy relevant to the particular type, size, song or mythology of each bird so that the ‘slaughter-hawk’ or raven, can be seen to attack the hands, for example...

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  ‘Dem Shout Batty Bwoy!‘

  Dean Atta

  I’m on my own street
  in North West London.
  I’m afraid but I look
  towards dem for a second.
  
  Four laughing youts.
  Two asian boys, one black
  boy and one white girl
  around my sister’s age.
  
  I don’t recognise dem
  but I recognise dis patois
  so carelessly/violently
  flung in a’ my direction.
  [...]

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  Dis Life is Nivver Enyoch

  Christine De Luca

  Shö lies, foetal, in a shell-saand grave
  apön her richt side, maybe facin da sun;
  twa steyns abön her skull,
  een at her fit.
  
  Her left hench-bane lies across her richt
  da knap-bane below da tidder een
  left airm curled inta her richt airm.
  Shaklebanes, fingers, cöts, taes
  der aa dere: young an unwörn.
  
  Her grave-goods: jöst twa shalls,
  a pebble, whit micht a bön a blade.
  Naethin ta busk her fur her journey
  nedder beads nor redder;
  [...]