A chilling double sonnet finds the echo of ancient ritual sacrifice in modern ‘collateral damage’

Haunted by a softly luminous mistiness, the moor combines, as if by double exposure, the passing of time and the full-lit present moment

A Scottish Jamaican takes defiant ownership of her homeland and ‘th braken brainches wi’in you’

The biblical story of two animals granted the power of speech for their reverence to the holy child becomes an angry reflection on those denied that power

A spider’s hard web-building work is destroyed by the poet’s scythe

Social rules and self-consciousness intrude on a couple’s romantic privacy

Inspired by de Chirico’s painting, this errant child is more thoughtful and recognisably contemporary than the figure in the biblical parable

What if God were these days a down-at-heel wanderer whose eternal presence flickered through city streets?

This austere reflection on lost friendships was written in the poet’s later years as he fought opium addiction

A 21st-century reader might find a parable in this disturbing Kipling poem, in which a drowned man is dehumanised and has become a displaced ‘thing’

A formal tribute to the death of a fellow poet cannot, in the end, restrain its passion

A child’s eye attempts to make sense of a military attack on a school – but fails to find any

Alert to the energies of small words and large dogs, this bounding tale by the republican revolutionary is free from ‘Irish shams’

A weary supermarket queue at the height of the pandemic is wryly observed by a speaker who is just as driven by scrappy appetites

A fresh spin on the sonnet, this subtle contemplation of art, love and language makes the poem into a home

An austere song of praise to a flower that withstands the battering of nature is also an intense response to classical Greek literature

A Hungarian schoolboy recently arrived in 1950s England has to switch his allegiances in a hurry

A horrifying story of racial violence told from the point of view of an oak tree bough is all the more disturbing for its imitation of the ballad form

This evocation of springtime quickly takes on a darker tone and stands among the author’s unforgettable works

A warm and generous-minded tribute from an older poet to the ‘brighter plumage, stronger wing’ of his younger colleague