Poem of the week: Toad by Cliff Forshaw
A slangy English take on a work by poète maudit Tristan Corbière has the writer finding a kindred spirit in the croaky ‘junk-dump nightingale’
Poem of the week: The Diomedes by Matthew Hollis
The distance between two remote islands in the Bering Strait is measured by different meanings of neighbourliness
George the Poet: ‘These Tories will get what’s coming to them. They are not the British people’
The podcaster and yes, poet, on fatherhood, writing for the royal wedding and why spoken word has stormed the mainstream
Poet Safiya Sinclair: ‘As a girl I felt small within Rastafari’
The Jamaican poet on her new memoir chronicling life with an authoritarian father, reconfiguring the postcard image of her homeland and her love of Marvel comic books
‘Washy clouds and a weepy sky floating upside down’: Simon Armitage’s Arctic expedition
The poet laureate faces the climate crisis head-on in Svalbard, and presents a new poem, The Summit
‘Libraries are the heart of community’: children’s laureate Joseph Coelho on inspiring the next generation of writers
Since his first anthology in 2014, Coelho has become a prolific author for children and YA readers – and it all started, he says, in a vital community space
Anthology of poems by van drivers celebrates life on the road
Nikki and Russell Eatly’s poem The Work Wife wins competition in Poetry in Motion collection
The best recent poetry – review roundup
Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler; Mothersong by Amy Acre; Infinite in Finite by Andrew Wynn Owen; Enter the Water by Jack Wiltshire; The Coming Thing by Martina Evans
‘They didn’t believe my life’: the poet from the centre of Sweden’s gang wars
Faysa Idle has a book out on the brutal impact of the violence on sisters, partners and mothers
Shortlisted TS Eliot prize poets speak to a disrupted world
The 10 listed collections range from ‘zany intimacy’ by Sharon Olds to explorations of Black identity from Ishion Hutchinson and Jason Allen-Paisant
Poem of the week: Snow-Flakes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
As the elegiac poem develops across its three verses, the powerful imagery becomes a metaphor for the insurmountable grief from the death by fire of the poet’s beloved wife
What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in September
Writers, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson review – a bravura feat
Six years on from her translation of the Odyssey, Wilson revels in the clarity and emotional clout of Homer’s battlefield epic
Enter the Water by Jack Wiltshire review – the company of birds
A homeless man journeys from Cambridge to the coast in the Leicester writer’s fresh, funny and serious verse narrative
Poem of the week: Upon her Play … by Mary Leapor
The metropolitan contempt for a female working-class writer from provincial Northamptonshire gets a zinging satirical response