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Rebecca McCutcheon Bear Country 69 Blood is Thicker 70 Prerana Kumar Saraswati on Ritual Honeymoon 71 Jack Nicholls For the Cat Found Naturally Mummified Under St. Patrick’s Church, Toxteth 73 Victoria Kennefick Watching Your Egg Crack 74 I Do An Egg Cleanse Because I Must 75 Moniza Alvi The Handwriting of the Very Old 77 Sophie Robinson f rom mother o’ pearl 78 Alissa Valles / On Zuzanna Ginczanka 82 Zuzanna Ginczanka Explanation in the Margin 83 Instead of a Rose Petal 84 Firebird 85 Vocations 87 A Mutual Uncertainty 88 Mimi Khalvati and Eve Esfandiari-Denney Gallery Nina Mingya Powles Slipstitch 101 Essay Jeremy Noel-Tod Magic Papers 112 Reviews Clare Pollard A Sort of Net 118 Vidyan Ravinthiran What Will I Do in the Future? 123 Alycia Pirmohamed Organisational Structures 129 Astra Papachristodoulou Excavating Language 134 SZ Shao Poets with Guts to Spare 139 The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2022 JLM Morton Lifecycle of the Cochineal 145 Beetle, c.1788 143
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EDITORIAL Shortly before the launch of the Spring issue of The Poetry Review, my GP referred me to a specialist for an MRI scan, with the concern that I might be facing a life-altering illness. ‘It might be Multiple Sclerosis,’ the GP told me, ‘or it might not.’ As someone who suffers from acute anxiety, I am prone to the need for certainty – a tendency to want to ‘know’ everything, for sure, all of the time. As such, I began daily to produce narratives around this worst-case diagnosis and how I would deal with it – as a parent, partner and poet – in an attempt to assuage the uncertainty with which I was grappling. ‘Try not to worry,’ my friend who is a practising surgeon told me over the phone, ‘it could just be peripheral neuropathy.’ ‘Try not to worry,’ my girlfriend told me, who has no medical expertise at all. * It may have been because of my present circumstances, but when reading for this issue I seemed to alight frequently upon uncertainty as a particular value or poetic concern. In the second in the series of intergenerational discussions, Mimi Khalvati states that in writing poetry ‘not knowing is what is required of you’, as she and Eve Esfandiari-Denney investigate the properties of not knowing, working towards a new vocabulary of understanding illness, cultural identity, relationship – to the self, the reader; in letting go of fixed and determinate meaning, the latter suggests, ‘we offer the reader a parcel of enigma for them to dive into and find the

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Rebecca McCutcheon Bear Country 69 Blood is Thicker 70 Prerana Kumar Saraswati on Ritual Honeymoon 71 Jack Nicholls For the Cat Found Naturally Mummified

Under St. Patrick’s Church, Toxteth 73

Victoria Kennefick Watching Your Egg Crack 74 I Do An Egg Cleanse Because I Must 75 Moniza Alvi The Handwriting of the Very Old 77 Sophie Robinson f rom mother o’ pearl 78 Alissa Valles / On Zuzanna Ginczanka 82 Zuzanna Ginczanka Explanation in the Margin 83 Instead of a Rose Petal 84 Firebird 85 Vocations 87

A Mutual Uncertainty 88 Mimi Khalvati and Eve Esfandiari-Denney

Gallery Nina Mingya Powles Slipstitch 101

Essay Jeremy Noel-Tod

Magic Papers 112

Reviews Clare Pollard A Sort of Net 118 Vidyan Ravinthiran What Will I Do in the Future? 123 Alycia Pirmohamed Organisational Structures 129 Astra Papachristodoulou Excavating Language 134 SZ Shao Poets with Guts to Spare 139

The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2022

JLM Morton Lifecycle of the Cochineal

145 Beetle, c.1788

143

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