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Acumen 111 – January 2025

Coming soon. Order now for dispatch by mid January 2025.

Acumen 111 highlights powerful new writing by well-known and emerging poets from across the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the USA, and beyond. Contributors include David Ball, Sarah Feldman, Gareth Culshaw, Julia Deakin, Wendy French, Steve Denehan, Myra Schneider, Colin Pink, Rosie Jackson, Martyn Crucefix, Patrick Osada, Isabel Miles, Jodi Cadenhead, Dinah Livingstone, Liam Aungier, Paul Surman, Caroline Price, David Sergeant, Jan FitzGerald, Chris Rice, Judith Skillman, Mike Everley, Tytti Heikkinen, Michael W. Thomas, Maggie Brookes-Butt, Toby Buckley, Linda Stern Zisquit, and many others.

This issue features an interview with Fred Beake, who examines the influences shaping poetry, including Greek literature, The Gawain Poet, myths such as The Cyclops, many British, French and American poets, historical events, and landscapes, including North Yorkshire on his writing.

Essays include Paul Gittins’s incisive study of working horses in poetry and Robert Griffiths’s exploration of the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence. Poetry in Translation features works by Ishihara Yoshiro, Anna Akhmatova, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Rudolf Leonhard and others. The Reviews section presents critical insights from Kathleen McPhilemy, Colin Pink, Susan Mackervoy, and Andrew Geary.

An annual subscription to the Acumen Journal covers 3 issues packed with great poetry, plus stimulating reviews and essays. It represents great value for money for either yourself or as a thoughtful gift for a poetry-lover.

I was very struck by how generously Acumen supports new poets, and by the quality and variety of the translations. Well done!

Alison Brackenbury

The latest issue of Acumen made great reading by a wintry fire here in NZ. Proof that intelligent and thoughtful writing is still alive and well in this changing world.

Jan FitzGerald

Acumen deserves to be read for its first-hand experience of poetry. The work it does is the opposite of academic and therefore valuable.

Hugo Williams

Good poetry and thoughtful articles and reviews

Sophie Hannah

Acumen is invaluable for the range of original poems it publishes, for its support of translations and for the seriousness of its reviewing.

Alan Brownjohn

Long may Acumen continue to publish good poems and interesting articles.

Wendy Cope

A beacon in the west, Acumen’s guiding light is valued throughout the world of letters. Printing the best, and not necessarily the most celebrated, is its policy.

Peter Porter

…the magazine’s flag: sharpness of wit; penetration of perception; keenness of discrimination.

TLS

Acumen…is well produced and impressively wide-ranging.

The Poetry Review

Over the years Acumen has just got better and better.

Dannie Abse

Danielle Hope

Editor, on behalf of all the team

Editorial

Welcome to Acumen. Do check out our pages and great poems.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT OF ACUMEN. And a special thank you to those of you who have renewed your subscriptions and have added a donation, so that we can keep the price lower. If you haven’t renewed your subscription for Acumen, please do so here.

Thank you to everyone submitting poems and prose. Acumen has been experiencing a wonderful increase in submissions lately, and we’re grateful for the interest in our magazine. Thanks for your patience while everything is carefully reviewed. Please remember we do not accept simultaneous submissions, but we consider postal and electronic submissions. We do, however, encourage contributors to carefully review our submission guidelines to ensure their work aligns with what we publish – poetry and prose on poetry-related topics, and not short stories. To prepare your submission and for more information please see here.

We’re excited to share the latest Acumen with you, though we must apologise for recent postage issues. Unfortunately, some issues of Acumen have disappeared in Royal Mail. If you’ve experienced any delays or problems, please do let us know. Despite this, we’re committed to ensuring that everyone can enjoy the exceptional work featured in the latest edition. PDF copies are available, plus a very small number of printed copies which we are sending to those whose copies have gone astray. Please contact the Acumen editor for more information.

Thank you for your continued interest in Acumen and the world of poetry. As Emily Dickinson said, ‘I dwell in possibility’ – and it is through your support that we continue to explore the endless possibilities of poetry.

I end with lines that have been attributed to Yeats, but more likely originated from English author and playwright, Eden Phillpotts: ‘The universe is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.’ I hope that the coming months give you magical things that your senses can sharpen to find, especially through the troubled world that often surrounds us.

Guest Poems and Young Poets

Acumen’s aim is to be wide-ranging, publishing contemporary poets both known and unknown, relying on the strength of the poetry rather than the name behind it.

Selected poems from each issue are posted on the website as guest poems for the week. We add photographs and very short biographies – a thing we don’t do in the magazine, preferring at that stage to let the poems speak for themselves.

Ralph Mold

Ralph Mold lives in Farncombe, Surrey, works in London and writes poems on trains. His work has appeared in The North, Orbis, South and as part of the Poem of the North. He is particularly pleased to have had a poem published in Acumen, because not only is it a journal he has admired for some time, but it has also allowed him to branch out from only appearing in publications with geographical titles. This poem is from Acumen 110.

Sue Spiers

Sue Spiers works with Winchester Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, The North, South, The High Window and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She won the Shepton Mallet poetry prize in 2024 and was longlisted in the 2023/4 National Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet: A Wallet of Creature Poems was published by Hedgehog Press in June 2024. Sue Tweets @spiropoetry. This poem is from Acumen 110.

Heather Chapman

Heather Chapman is a Durham University student. She was a 2023 Foyles Young Poet, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Tower Poetry competition and the 2023 Wells Festival Young Poets prize.

Millie Woodrow

Millie Woodrow is a writer of poetry and fiction from Salisbury, Wiltshire. She is presently studying Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. Her poetry has been published in Motherlore.

We love to publish new and established writers, in our journal and/or on our website and we are proud to have discovered many new voices.
We welcome unpublished poems, translations of poems, articles and debate on poetry covering a wide variety of topics and with different writing styles.
Find out how to submit your poems.

Poetry and Prose

Books and publications

We have a range of quality poetry publications for sale which we hope you will enjoy reading including hardbacks, paperbacks, pamphlets and single issues of the journal.

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Electrifying Announcement!

Acumen is among the longest-running literary magazines today.

Patricia Oxley started Acumen in 1985 armed with only an electric typewriter, and without subscribers or contributions. Since then it has grown to one of the country’s leading literary journals.

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