Coming soon!

Acumen 116 – November 2026

Acumen 116 explores the relationships between poetry, history, music, storytelling and much more. In an interview with David Perman, Patience Agbabi discusses her work from Chaucer and grime to her verse novel Wonderland. Helen Ashley examines John Burnside’s poetry through Black Cat Bone, while Elizabeth Barton considers how poets draw on and transform fairy tales. Duncan Forbes reflects on poetry competitions in ‘Forty Lines Max’.

The issue includes poems by Gillian Allnutt, Tony Curtis, Jackie Wills, Myra Schneider, Elizabeth Cook, Seán Street, Catriona Clutterbuck, Bino A. Realuyo, Wendy French, Pam Zinnemann-Hope, Marjory Woodfield, Mark Lewis, Isabel Miles, Anita Ngai, Jasmine Jade Plumpton, Robert Leach, Fred Beake and Heather Hughes, and many more from across the globe.

Poetry in translation includes Ewa Lipska, César Vallejo and Giovanni Pascoli. Reviews consider collections by Ruth Padel, Kim Moore, Tishani Doshi, Jake Skeets and Annemarie Ní Churreáin, among others, exploring subjects from girlhood and the body to war and loss. The issue also includes readers’ responses and Poetry Comment.

Order Acumen 116 now for dispatch from mid-November 2026.

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.

Please see our latest news item (here) for information about disruption experienced at Acumen due to flooding caused by a burst Thames Water main. Thank you for your support and understanding while we get back on track. Thank you also 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 highlights from our current and recent issues of Acumen with you, along with young poets featured on our website. 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. And Plato remarked, ‘Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history’.

I’ll 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 times give you magical things that your senses can sharpen to find, especially through the troubled world that often surrounds us. Thank you for supporting Acumen.

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.

David Ball

David Ball is a poet and translator living in France. He has translated in particular two
contemporary French poets, François Migeot and Jacques Moulin, publishing a bilingual pamphlet of poems by Jacques Moulin with Broken Sleep Books in 2025, ‘Crow and Heron’. He has also published in France a book of bilingual haiku, The ‘Seasons in the Park’. His poems have been published in a number of magazines, including Acumen.

Claire Booker

Claire Booker worked as a journalist and medical herbalist before moving to Rottingdean where she lives between the South Downs and the sea. She’s been long-listed in The National Poetry Competition, a winner of five Poetry Society Members’ Competitions and was awarded a Kathak Award when guest poet at Dhaka’s International Writers’ Festival in 2019. Her latest pamphlet is ‘Twenty Tides’ (V. Press 2026).

Anna King

Anna King is a legal writer and poet currently based in London. Her work has been featured in the Box Zine, the Oxford Cherwell and the Isis Magazine.

Harry Ledgerwood

Harry Ledgerwood is from Ayr, Scotland. His work has been published in the Irish Pages, Anthropocene, and Poetry Scotland. His poem ‘Glasgow Christmas’ won the Winter 2025 Poetry Society Members’ Competition.

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.

Shop now!

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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Our journals carry display advertising reaching key customers at attractive rates. Leading institutions and libraries throughout the world subscribe to our journals and each one of these copies is referred to again and again, ensuring your message is constantly reinforced. Your advertisement has greater prominence and visibility through the high editorial to advertisement ratio, increasing the impact of your brand.

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