As Gregory Leadbeater observed in the previous issue of the Robert Graves Review, poetry is a more various world than is sometimes alleged. Fashion and careerism tend to narrow the aperture. Over the years, I’ve encountered and enjoyed the work of quite a few poets who might seem to have little in common. If they are ‘grouped’, they’re in different groups. They may not – and I agree with them – care to be grouped at all. They write poems. Let’s read them.

Tamar Yoseloff is an American poet, teacher and publisher, long resident in London, the author of several collections, most recently The Black Place (2019). Her next collection will be Belief Systems (2024). Her long-standing and wide-ranging interest in painting and visual art is reflected in the distinctive design of the chapbooks published by Hercules Editions, which she runs with Andrew Lindesay, as well in her own work. ‘The Painter in His Prime’ wittily evokes the dark-toned and strangely voluptuous seascapes of the Belgian Symbolist Leon Spilliaert, whose work is now deservedly becoming better known here. With ‘Levee’, Yoseloff reads one of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, not, as the work’s imagery might suggest, with reference to the French ancien régime, but to the earthwork raised against floods along the Mississippi, which in turn has taken on an ominous and almost supernatural significance in the Blues. The third poem, ‘Bearskull’, reveals a vein of sardonic humour in its novelistic depiction of a mismarriage.

Peter Armstrong has published several collections, including Risings and The Red-Funnelled Boat. A poet of North-East England, he has a powerful sense of landscape and history, inwoven with an abiding interest in Christianity. The pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela figures prominently in his work, as here in the strange, visionary ‘Edward Thomas on the Camino Frances’. Armstrong’s ear is both just and surprising: listen to the sure-footed central passage of ‘From the Outlying Islands’, and then to the chiselled line of his elegy for William Beveridge, to whom Britain’s Welfare State owes its existence – a future undergoing cancellation day by day, ‘a turning you would miss | if you weren’t looking for it’.