Acumen 112 – May 2025

Order now for dispatch early May. Acumen 112 presents a rich and varied selection of poetry, interviews, translation, and reviews, featuring both familiar and fresh voices across generations and geographies. Poets in this issue include: Seán Street, Gill Learner, Fred Beake, Caroline Maldonado, Chris Hardy, Diana Pinto, Mantz Yorke, Daljit Nagra, Michael Jennings, Denise Bennett, Simon Richey, Kathleen McPhilemy, Christopher Levenson, Rachel Mann, Jeremy Young, Wendy Klein, Jim C. Wilson, Jeremy Page, Peter Sutton, Wendy Webb, Sue Hubbard, Annemarie Austin, John Daniel and Philip Gross.

Interviews include an insightful conversation between David Perman and Daljit Nagra, who discusses his poetic approach, recent collaboration with Koleka Putuma on a war memorial project in Cape Town, and his work on BBC’s Poetry Extra. Perman also interviews Rachel Mann, exploring her creative influences and recent success with Eleanor Among the Saints, a collection shortlisted for the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize. Duncan Forbes revisits the life and work of U.A. Fanthorpe, whose poems graced early issues of Acumen. Thoughtful reader responses to Acumen 111 appear, while Poetry in Translation includes works by Paul Verlaine, Miguel Otero Silva, Anna Akhmatova, Chen Que and more.

Themes of history, mythology, and legacy thread through much work, alongside reflections on memory, ancestry, family, and identity. There are natural, coastal and city landscapes, with poems featuring herons, egrets, swans, swifts, wetlands, coral, horses, rain, snowdrops, canals, and Japanese ghosts. Reviews from Belinda Cooke, Parvin Loloi, Fred Beake, Rosie Jackson, Nigel Jarrett, Glyn Pursglove and Andrew Geary offer insight into recent collections.