‘How many dead Palestinians are enough?’ The unbearable prescience of the late poet Refaat Alareer

The author and academic was killed in an Israeli airstrike a year ago. A posthumous collection of his work, If I Must Die, tells the stories of Gaza in a plea for change

Nikki Giovanni, acclaimed poet of the Black Arts Movement, dies aged 81

The award-winning US poet and author of works like Black Feeling, Black Talk and Those Who Ride the Night Winds has died after a third cancer diagnosis

Poem of the week: I know that all beneath the moon decays by William Drummond of Hawthornden

A sonnet about disappointed love is enlivened by a large imagination and technical fluency of great vitality

The best books to give as gifts this Christmas

From a radical retelling of Huckleberry Finn to Al Pacino’s autobiography, novelists and nonfiction writers reveal the books they will be giving as gifts – and the volumes they would love to find in their own stocking

‘Scotland has always been multilingual’: new Scottish makar Peter Mackay

As new national poet, the Gaelic speaker is looking at all of the languages spoken in the country, to see ‘what we can learn between them’

The best poetry books of 2024

The joy of house parties, an email to an estate agent, tales from a billionaire’s dolls and more

Poem of the week: In Drear Nighted December by John Keats

A wintry vision of the separation of two lovers gains fresh energy from the verse’s roots in folk song

Cornish tourist spot unveils spider-related haiku spun by Simon Armitage

Work first in a series from poet laureate about wildlife that exists in the Lost Gardens of Heligan

Poem of the week: The Rights of Woman by Anna Laetitia Barbauld

This vision of liberation by a supporter of the French Revolution is rather less straightforwardly feminist than Mary Wollstonecraft’s

Lord Byron museum to open in Italian building where poet had intense affair

Visitors will be able to explore Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna, where Byron romanced its aristocrat owner’s wife

Pretentious, moi?: Josh Brolin’s poetry about Dune has landed, whether we like it or not

Brolin’s verses about Timothée Chalamet and Florence Pugh have now found their way into a London art gallery in the form of Dune: Exposures

Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt review – the great smells of the north and nature

Grief rubs shoulders with greasy chip pans in a humorous and heartfelt celebration of the coastal working class

AI poetry rated better than poems written by humans, study shows

Findings suggest non-expert poetry readers who participated preferred AI works because they find them more straightforward and accessible

Poem of the week: Renacuajos by Michael Schmidt

An oblique elegy for the poet’s brother is addressed to his great-niece with some friendly information about the life of tadpoles

The exile of Mosab Abu Toha: how a Gazan poet was forced to flee his home

His house was bombed and his relatives killed, before he escaped to the US. Now he is on a relentless, restless drive to tell the stories of all those left behind