We are delighted to offer tube travellers a new autumn set of Poems on the Underground with poems by Seamus Heaney, Garous Abdolmalekian tr. Idra Novey & Ahmad Nadalizadeh, Anthony Joseph, Helen Ivory, Charles Simic and Karl Shapiro.
Look out for the new set of Poems on the Underground on London Underground and Overground trains from 26th October
Axe by Anthony Joseph Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury from Sonnets for Albert (2022)
Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. His Sonnets for Albert is the winner of the 2023 T S Eliot Prize.
In a Loaning by Seamus Heaney Reprinted by permission of Faber from District and Circle (2006)
‘It delights me that ‘The Loaning’ might work for you. It’s a strange wee thing, which is why I trust it, but it might be, for the travellers, ‘a puzzle-the-world.’ (Seamus Heaney writing about ‘In a Loaning’, which he wrote when recovering from a stroke).
from Elegy for a Dead Soldier by Karl Shapiro
Reprinted by permission of University of Illinois Press from The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late (1998)
Karl Shapiro was an American Poet laureate and won a number of major poetry awards in the 1940s, including the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Academy of Arts and Letters Grant, and the Contemporary Poetry Prize
Long Exposure by Garous Abdolmalekian Translated from Persian by Idra Novey & Ahmad Nadalizadeh Reprinted by permission of Penguin from Lean Against This Late Hour (2020).
Garous Abdolmalekian is an Iranian poet living in Tehran. He is the author of five poetry books and the recipient of the Karnameh Poetry Book of the Year Award and the Iranian Youth Poetry Book Prize
The Square of the Clockmaker by Helen Ivory Reprinted by permission of SurVision from Maps of the Abandoned City, SurVision Books (2019)
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist, the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Anatomical Venus.
Empires by Charles Simic Reprinted by permission of Faber from Selected Poems 1963-2003 (2004)
Charles Simic (1938-2023) was a distinguished Serbian-American poet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN International prize for translation. Seamus Heaney said of his writing that it “comes dancing out on the balls of its feet, colloquially fit as a fiddle, a sparring partner for the world” – a poem in itself.
You can find the rest of our poems for this month here