Poem of the week: Renegade by Lionel Johnson
A faultless lyric from 1887 mourns what seems to be repressed gay love
The best recent poetry – review roundup
The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien; Plastic by Matthew Rice; Retablo for a Door by Michelle Penn; Jonah and Me by John F Deane; Intimate Architecture by Tess Jolly
Poem of the week: The Man in the Wind by Anne Stevenson
This haunting poem depicts an elusive, dangerous figure of overwhelming destructive power
Poem of the week: Down on the canal on Christmas Day by Chris McCabe
A melancholy December vision in Liverpool invokes a Dickensian ghost with more worldly but still warm realism
The 25 best Australian books of 2025
Just in time for last-minute gifts: Guardian Australia critics and staff pick out the best books of the year, featuring Helen Garner, Dominic Amerena, Evelyn Araluen and more
Patricia Robson obituary
Other lives: Teacher who used her skill in storytelling to engage primary school children in drama productions
Poem of the week: Winter Walk by Lynette Roberts
A journey through a visionary landscape, exceptionally bright in icy weather, conjures a surreal semi-mythical world
What rhymes with la la la, la la la la la? Kevin Killian, the poet obsessed with Kylie Minogue
He wrote poems named after Kylie songs and named his collection of erotic fiction after her indie album. He even loved the B-sides. So what did the avant garde writer find so inspiring about the mini Melbourne marvel?
‘This extraordinary story never goes out of fashion’: 30 authors on the books they give to everyone
Colm Tóibín, Robert Macfarlane, Elif Shafak, Michael Rosen and more share the novels, poetry and memoirs that make the perfect gift
John Lucas obituary
Other lives: Writer and publisher whose Shoestring Press published more than 400 titles
Poem of the week: The Apology by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
Finch defends her daring to practise the male profession of poetry using heroic couplets and subversive jokes
The best poetry books of 2025
From Seamus Heaney’s collected poems and Simon Armitage’s animal spirits, to prizewinners Karen Solie and Vidyan Ravinthiran
Poem of the week: Rich and Poor, or Saint and Sinner by Thomas Love Peacock
A sharply satirical attack on unevenly applied 19th-century laws to enforce religious observance still bites today
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen review – headlong language and bitter truths imbued with tenderness
Award-winning poet offers seductive beauty, deadly analyses, desolations and joys in the follow-up to her acclaimed debut Dropbear
Poem of the week: Missing You by Miles Burrows
The moon becomes the witty image of an isolated and contemptuously neglected elderly relation