Magazine Supplements
All of the Agenda issues below after the death of William Cookson in January 2003, starting with Volume 39 No.4 up to and including Volume 55 Nos.3-4 were edited and published by Patricia McCarthy since she took on the sole editorship of Agenda (excepting the C.H.Sisson issue which was guest edited by Charlie Louth).
Patricia McCarthy has also compiled and edited all of the following Broadsheets, Poems & Painting supplements and the ongoing series, Notes for Broadsheet Poets (in the journal and online).
Vol 50 Nos. 1-2
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Vol 55 Nos. 3-4
Vol 39 No. 4
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44 No. 4 / Vol 45 No. 1
New Generation Poets Vol 49 Nos. 3-4 Published March 2016
Accompanying the New Generation Poets issue are the following:
Essays & reviews in supplement to the ‘New Generation Poets‘ issue of Agenda
The following reviews are included here:
Richie McCaffery on Will Stone’s The Sleepwalkers
Omar Sabbagh on The Ways of Empathy: Fiona Sampson’s The Catch
Peter Carpenter: Tributary Senses: Kieron Winn: The Mortal Man and Andrew Wynn Owen: Raspberries for the Ferry
Natalie Burdett: Nothing hides in abandoned places: Karen Solie and Thomas A. Clarke as visual artists in love with landscape
Two fun pieces on Poetry Workshops, followed by a serious inquiry into why do them
(linking to the debate on ‘Can you teach Creative Writing, especially Poetry?’ in the double New Generation Poets issue of Agenda, Vol 49 Mos 3-4)
Peter Carpenter and Sarah James on Poetry Workshops
Agenda has, for thirteen years now, been especially encouraging the work of young poets, many of whom had their very first published poems highlighted in Agenda’s pages, and in Agenda‘s online Broadsheets for young poets and young artists. It is most encouraging to see, therefore, that a considerable number of these poets have, since then, gone on to have their work published in pamphlets and collections, and even to become quite established.
This New Generation Poets‘ double issue is a testament to the energy and fresh talent in these Broadsheet poets and other poets today.
Family Histories Vol 49 No. 2 Published September 2015
Essays in supplement to the Family Histories issue of Agenda
David Cooke on Louis de Paor
Arthur Broomfield on Samuel Beckett’s Letters
Shanta Acharya on Lance Lee
Patricia McCarthy on Peripatetic Poets (coming soon)
Hossein Moradi on John Donne
Accompanying the Family Histories issue are the following:
In David Constantine’s immensely readable handbook, Poetry (OUP,2013), peppered with intriguing examples from poets through the centuries,he analyses the writing and reading of poetry, examining what constitutes poetry and how vital it is for us in every age. He intimates that a lot of poets start with the personal, yet ‘the poet must convert the personal, anecdotal and accidental into the figurative’. In other words, the personal or particular needs to transcend itself and become universal – by, for example being deeply lived and becoming anyone’s experience, particularly the experience of some reader who, unlike the poet, lacks the articulacy to put such experience into the charged speech of a poem. As Constantine asserts: ‘Formal shaping helps you into the figurative. You begin to see that the poem, however personal the stuff of it may be, is not itself a personal thing’, while it is the ‘minute particulars’ of a poem that earth it to whatever form it takes and make it achieved.
Here in this ‘Family Histories’ issue of Agenda, then, many of the poems link to family, but take experiences at a special slant, with exact choice of language, so that they leave the territory of the merely personal and flourish by, in Constantine’s words, ‘abundantly saying the human’.
Callings Vol 49 No.1 Published May 2015
Accompanying the Callings issue are the following:
How to improve reading your poetry – Marek Urbanowicz
This Callings issue of Agenda includes a special feature, Feast of Fools: a collaboration inspired by medieval Misericords, Stuart Henson, poet and Bill Sanderson, artist.
Requiem: The Great War Vol 48 Nos. 3-4 Published November 2014
Two essays to accompany the Requiem: The Great War issue of Agenda
W S Milne: Arms and the Man – Geoffrey Hill: Broken Hierarchies
Omar Sabbagh: Avant La Lettre: On Browning’s ‘Sludge’, Ford, And The Mess Of A Great War
Accompanying the Requiem issue are the following:
Web supplement I: two poetry sequences
D.V Cooke and Martin Caseley
Web supplement II: poems and art work by Brian Whelan
‘Have you forgotten yet?’…
Siegfried Sassoon: ‘Aftermath’
Let Siegfried Sassoon’s haunting question introduce this commemorative special issue of Agenda in which honouring must, above all, be given to the War poets such as Sassoon, Owen, whose extraordinarily powerful poems, written while on the Front, serve not only as important historical documents, but as outstanding examples of poetry written in extremity, at the edge of experience: where poetry braves and dares.
Here, we not only mark the centenary of that war, without glorifying it, but testify to the fact that all of us alive now, in the relatively early twenty first century, are the last generation to have actually known, or heard first hand about, those who fought in the war, often giving up their lives. The very fine poet, Michael Longley, is an example of someone whose father fought in World War 1 and, as evident in these pages, he writes powerfully on this theme, explaining how his poems glance off World War 1 with different angles and perspectives.
With essays on French, German, Italian and Russian poetry of the Great War, it is hoped that a universal overview is given of poetic output, and indeed of soldierly experience, and that a balanced outlook is achieved.
The poets in these pages have been chosen for responding in their own unique way to the Great War, each of them perhaps being, as Virginia Woolf suggested, ‘a poet in whom live all the poets of the past, from whom all poets in time to come will spring’, linking them to the great Chain of Being. Indeed, as James Aitchison suggests, in his useful and inspiring book, New Guide to Poetry and Poetics (Rodopi, Amsterdan, New York 2013), ‘all poems are part of a great universal poem, a living force that is continually revitalized and extended by new poems’. He quotes Auden also as defining ‘a vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead,, the living and the unborn writers of every age and in every tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilising task’. With this idea in mind, then, of poets being bound together, let all voices chime in urgently with Siegfried Sassoon’s beginning and end refrains in ‘Aftermath’:
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll
never forget…
Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you’ll
never forget.
Scentings Vol 48 Nos.1-2 Published August 2014
Accompanying the Scentings issue are the following:
This issue of Agenda, which happens to be a lot about rememberings, is also full of rememberings and honourings of special people in the poetry world who have passed on: Sebastian Barker, Dennis O’Driscoll, and Felix Dennis. We wish them all a creative peace to rest in and for their words, wisdoms and spirit to sing on forever.
Poetry & Opera Vol 47 Nos. 3-4 Published December 2013
The following essays and Libretti accompany the Poetry & Opera issue of Agenda:
James Aitchison: Poetry and Music
Kim Moore: My Collaboration with Steven Jackson
Libretti
John Greening: HOME: a libretto in search of a composer
Nigel Thompson: CEYX AND ALCYONE: Libretto for an opera in two acts
Accompanying the Poetry & Opera issue are the following:
It was with great sadness and shock that we heard of the sudden death of Seamus Heaney, a great friend, and wonderful supporter of Agenda. We pay tribute to him in the first section of this issue, including a very special essay on Heaney and Ireland by his fellow Nobel Laureate poet and friend, Derek Walcott. It must be quite unique to have one Nobel Laureate poet writing on another.
This issue also celebrates the centenary of Benjamin Britten, born November 22, 1913, on, by a happy coincidence, St. Cecilia’s Day, the latter being the patroness of music.
Exiles Vol 47 Nos.1-2 Published May 2013
Accompanying the Exiles issue are the following:
The following reviews accompany the Exiles issue of Agenda:
Omar Sabbagh on Sudeep Sen’s The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians
Tim Liardet on Fiona Sampson’s A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (Chatto & Windus)
Welcome to this ‘Exiles’ issue of Agenda which is dedicated to Dennis O’Driscoll who served as an advisor to Agenda for many years.
We hope you will agree that these pages demonstrate the multiple ways a person can be an exile: not just by being ostracised or separated from your own country, but also by illness, death, by the feeling of being a loner, an outsider, even by being an ‘exile’ from the deepest or truest self in a person’s psyche.
The translations/versions come from far and wide and are testimony to the power of poetry as a universally expressive and liberating force, cutting through boundaries, sects, creeds.
Celtic Mists Vol 46 No.4 Published Sept 2012
The following essays accompany the Celtic Mists issue of Agenda:
Derek Mahon: Wind and Limb: Patrick MacDonogh
Gabriel Rosenstock: The Irish Language and its Literature:
a Brief Overview
Anne Marie Connolly: The Poetry Pamphlet in Scotland
Wendy Holborow: Tegwen Lewis: Neglected Celtic Poet (1915-1988)
Omar Sabbagh: The Headiness, The Heaviness of Womanhood
Zoe Brigley: Conquest (Bloodaxe Books)
Accompanying the Celtic Mists issue are the following:
Notes for Broadsheet Poets 19 Part 1
Welcome to this ‘Celtic Mists’ issue of Agenda. It was originally conceived as an extension to the last ‘Retrospectives’ issue of Agenda. However, it has taken on a character of its own, with makars and bards that speak for themselves.
Retrospectives Vol 46 No.3 Published April 2012
Accompanying the Retrospectives issue are the following:
The following essays accompany the Retrospectives issue of Agenda:
Francis O’Gorman: Remembering Edward Thomas
John Greening: Braided Syntax: Amy Clampitt (1920-1994)
Tony Roberts: Maxine Kumin at Fifty
Shanta Acharya: To Taste That Various, Universal Bliss:
The Poetry of Rabindranath Tagore
The following reviews accompany the Retrospectives issue of Agenda:
Shanta Acharya: Indian Poetry in Translation
Rabindranath Tagore and Kunwar Narain
Will Stone: The Black Herald: a new literary magazine in Europe
Paul Stubbs: Ex Nihilo
Blandine Longre: Clarities
Belinda Cooke: Turning and Returning
Peter Robinson: The Returning Sky
Martyn Crucefix: A Way of Seeing
Shanta Acharya: Dreams that Spell the Light
Will Stone: A Tribute to W.G. Sebald
Welcome to this ‘Retrospectives’ issue of Agenda.
Neglect has always been the bane of poets, novelists and artists. Who knows how many poets, particularly women poets who were condemned to silence, to no education, or to hiding behind their men, have been buried in an undeserved oblivion, never even reaching the printed page?
Gerard Manley Hopkins defines the torturous state of neglect in one of his dark sonnets:
…This to hoard unheard,
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.
In this issue Agenda takes a good look at undeservedly neglected poets in the not too distant past and also in the present.
Keenings Vol 46 No.2 Published Autumn 2011
Woven around elegies.
Contents include: a revealing interview by Patricia McCarthy with
Peter Dale; poems by known and new voices, essays and up-to-date reviews.
Accompanying the Keenings issue are the following:
Welcome to this ‘Keenings’ issue of Agenda through which runs an echo from a refrain of an old Irish keening or caoineadh:
Ochón agus ochón ó
The assonance of the ‘o’ gives meaning to the sound of the lament which does not even need to be understood.
Poetry has always managed to deal with the difficult, and it is this issue of Agenda, woven around the theme of elegies, that words do come into their own and prove that this is so. The poems here surely comply with what Elizabeth Jennings, in Every Changing Shape, wrote about Rilke’s elegies: ‘the tension in these great elegies lies in the implicit yet unacknowledged belief that reality exists autonomously in an area of experience that only poetry can penetrate’.
To get into the mood for this ‘Keenings’ issue, then, let us listen to Galway Kinnell:
…poetry sings past even the sadness
that begins it
and
When the song goes, silence replaces it
inside the bones.
Dwelling Places Vol 45 No.4 – 46 No.1 Published May 2011
Accompanying the Dwelling Places issue are the following:
The following essays accompany the Dwelling Places issue:
Jaime Robles: In the Shadow of the Ineffable: Imagery in
John Burnside’s ‘Annunciations’
Maitreyabandhu: Near-Belonging
Alan Stubbs: Reading Burnside
This special double issue of Agenda, ‘Dwelling Places’, is focused on an important poet of our time, or indeed of any time, John Burnside. Burnside’s impressive body of poetry, as commented by Patricia McCarthy, at the start of her interview with him, seems to breathe out and in, with a natural flow all of its own.
The essays, by both well-known academics and poets, and also by young poets and critics all illuminate Burnside’s poetry, showing it in variegated lights and perspectives, highlighting its lyrical and narrative power, its technical virtuosity and thematic progression.
Hoofmarks Issue Vol 45 No.3 Published Autumn/Winter 2011
Accompanying the Hoofmarks issue are the following:
‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’
Shakespeare: Richard III
Welcome to this ‘Hoofmarks’ issue which contains, among other treasures, poems on horses, from many angles, by established and young poets, that have been saved, waiting for the chance to include them in Agenda.
C. H. Sisson Issue Vol 45 No.2 Published Spring 2010
Accompanying the C.H.Sisson issue are the following:
C.H. Sisson Special Issue, guest edited by Charlie Louth
Supplementary poems and paintings; also new translations (by W.D.Jackson, Will Stone, Omar Sabbagh and Simon Thomas)
also essays/reviews (by Belinda Cooke, Harry Guest & Samuel John Perry)
Thanks are due to Charlie Louth who guest edited the C. H. Sisson issue of Agenda, and is quoted from his introduction below.
C. H. Sisson‘s association with Agenda goes back nearly to its beginnings, to 1961, when the poem ‘Easter‘ was printed in the magazine. From Sisson‘s second full collection, Numbers (1965), onwards, every book of his poems includes acknowledgement for work that originally appeared in Agenda.
Looking back over his oeuvre, it is hard to think of another contemporary writer whose range is so wide. Many twentieth-century poets have produced important critical writing, and some have translated extensively. But not many at all have written political and ecclesiastical essays, polemical studies, novels, autobiography, and none it is safe to say, a study of government as well. What characterizes Sisson‘s work is that, though the poetry is central to it and provides the strongest continuous thread, he is always striking out in different directions, and poetry is just one mode of inquiry, always an elusive and unreckonable one (for ‘poems just happen’, as it seemed to him).
Vol 50 Nos. 1-2
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Vol 55 Nos. 3-4
Vol 44 No. 4 / Vol 45 No. 1
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Vol 39 No. 4
