|
Agenda is one of the best known and most highly respected poetry journals in the world, having been founded in 1959 by Ezra Pound and William Cookson.
It is now edited by Patricia McCarthy, who co-edited the magazine with William Cookson for four years until his death in January 2003. She is continuing, as Seamus Heaney says, ‘to uphold the lofty standards of Agenda’.
"Agenda is one of the two literary periodicals in Britain. I admire it for its attentiveness to all kinds of contemporary poetry… and its consistent stress on the importance of poetry in translation from other languages." Thom Gunn
"Agenda, as the title insists, does several things that need to be done if literary culture is to stay in good shape. First of all, it stimulates and sponsors new poetry by poets whose writings and espousals have given the magazine its personality from the beginning. Agenda has a second important function which it discharges by doing work of critical advocacy for poets of marked or under-rated achievement, living and dead." Seamus Heaney
Timeless Quotes by William Cookson >
Agenda News
Full, newly updated Welsh supplement now online
Welsh Fun poems now online
Broadsheet 12 (Welsh) now online
A new poem by Anna Lewis, one of the two chosen young Broadsheet poets in the Welsh issue, in which she has a sequence of poems.
Angel Meadow
'There is nothing here for you,' the midwives say,
to each new scrabble of arms and legs delivered
in the lodging rooms and tenements of Angel
Meadow. Church bells shake across the burial pit,
where parents and children soften side by side;
shake round the terraces, through the windows
of the rooms where women operate, and nine months
later, offer up - 'yourselves, to be Christened,
wed and buried in between these shacks and alleys,
underneath the bells which, God knows why, will not
relinquish Angel Meadow.'
To see another new poem by Anna Lewis and one by Meirion Jordan, the other chosen Broadsheet poet in the Welsh issue, go to Broadsheet 12.
Latest issue of Agenda Vol 44 Nos 2-3 published 14th May 2009
|
