On the Israel domain are two poets, along with several illuminating articles.

The poetry of Esther Raab (1894-1981) is impassioned, heady stuff, drawing in part on the Romanticism of the century she was (just) born in. It is also highly erotic – an aspect of her work explored in two of the critical responses here.

In an interview for PIW, Moroccan-born Israeli poet Mois Benarroch talks about the shock of arriving in Israel (an entirely “different” culture) at the age of 13, the outbreak of war a year later (1973), and the death of his younger brother. “These traumas are the source of my writing”, he says. Themes of displacement, loss, mixed identity, difference, run through several poems here – sometimes stated in a completely direct, straightforward way (as in the early poem, ‘On my going up to the Land of Israel’), sometimes distilled through metaphor. ‘The Bread and the Dream’ begins with the striking image of longing as “forgotten sourdough” that keeps on rising; and in the poem’s final lines, memory is likened to an elephant visiting his ancestor’s grave and which

. . . cries out a little near them
and follows his own road,
falling not falling,
still, a different elephant.

UK editor Naomi Wood presents three poets who have not always “made their bed on the page” but have also worked within other artistic media, including radio, film and opera.

Among these is Paul Farley, who champions radio as an “intrinsically collaborative” medium. His 2009 collection, Field Recordings, consists of poems originally commissioned for BBC radio – from which the epic poem, ‘Ports’, documenting the lives of port cities Carthage, Liverpool and Rotterdam – is included in the selection.

Mario Petrucci’s book-length narrative poem, Heavy Water, drawing on the testimony of Chernobyl survivors and those who dealt with the disaster at ground level, inspired a highly praised documentary film of the same name. Two of Petrucci’s featured poems (‘Ukritye’ and ‘The Room’) are taken from this work.

In his libretto for the opera The Lion’s Face, Glyn Maxwell seeks to convey the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease, using such devices as fractured syntax and repetition:

people never come here
people come here
two ladies held the picture
of the boy beside the seaside
to be beside
to be beside I
buy him the ice-cream!

All three poets on the UK domain are very versatile, as other poems on the poet pages show.

Up next: the 1 August issue brings poems from India and Ireland.