The best recent poetry – review roundup

Small Birds Singing by Matthew Welton; The Channel by Jana Prikryl; Stepmother by Helen Mort; Drunken Driving by Martina Evans

The Guardian view on sporting fair play: it was never quite cricket

Editorial: Saltburn’s alleged trickery caused outrage, but cricket’s moral code conceals a rich history of cheating and convenient national myth

Ian McDonald obituary

Trinidad-born author and poet whose novel The Humming-Bird Tree is a classic of Caribbean literature

Lesvia review – the rise and fall of an amazing lesbian community on Sappho’s actual island home

Director Tzeli Hadjidimitriou grew up on Lesbos, and her elegant debut feature explores how the Greek poet’s birthplace became a hub for lesbians

The Guardian view on Chinese workers picking up the pen: poetry in motion

Editorial: A food delivery rider has won the country’s highest literary award. It is part of a growing trend for writing by labourers

Andrew Motion: ‘Wilfred Owen became a kind of sacred text for me’

The former poet laureate on growing up with Lawrence Durrell, rereading Henry James and getting to grips with the genius of Alexander Pope

‘More postmodern than ancient’: why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to Westeros

Christopher Nolan’s take on the Odyssey is set to break box-office records. What made the director so determined to adapt the ancient Greek epic? And why does a poem from 600BC hold a vice-like grip on pop culture?

Beat legend, ‘boy lover’: how should we reckon with Allen Ginsberg’s complex legacy?

As a series of star-studded events celebrates Ginsberg’s centennial, the keeper of his estate weighs the genius poetry – and provocative views – of the iconic writer

The best recent poetry – review roundup

Cafés by Holly Pester; The Acrobat by Wisława Szymborska; Volvelle by Rachael Boast; Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang; Talk a Blue Streak by Lila Matsumoto

At a poet’s memorial, I saw how Andy Burnham could be a different kind of prime minister

The putative PM-to-be explained how one of Tony Harrison’s poems gave him a new outlook, says poet and author Blake Morrison

Night Swimming by Sharon Kernot review – a sharp, sexy and tremendously satisfying thriller in verse

As in Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, the form is perfectly suited to the story: of a sleep-deprived woman unravelling as she’s haunted by her past

‘Beautiful and terrifying’: the best American LGBTQ+ books, chosen by Samuel R Delany, Kaveh Akbar, Eileen Myles and more

From 20th-century classics to little-known treasures, queer authors share their favorite books about LGBTQ+ life

The Guardian view on literature in wartime: words do not stop when the bombing begins

Editorial: Writers do not only document the horror of conflict; they speak to a future that must exist beyond it

Here in Georgia our festivals are full, but our poets are in prison – and now we feel abandoned by Europe

Anti-government protests continue, but our young people are leaving. Increasingly destitute cultural gatherings have become my places of solace, says Georgian writer Archil Kikodze

‘Pleasure and invigoration’: Diana Evans wins UK’s Jhalak prose prize

Awards for prose, children’s writing and poetry, for writers of colour in UK and Ireland, come with £1,000