Angela Leighton
Sewer and salve, dredge and dump, kitten and killer,
sea, our element, lovely other, soul and matter,
intricate jeweller of caves and corals, molluscs and pearls,
salty original, mirror of weather, flood of tears.

Sea, our crossing, launch and offing, lift and tease,
as if a loop of dolphins took us, deeper to breathe,
darker to see, further to hear — from dream to after,
through flesh, fish, shell, krill, to the first life-matter.
from the book ONE, TWO / Carcanet
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Sea, because it’s there at the start, our watery origin; because it answers to faraway weathers and pulls of the moon; because its rhythms are endlessly varied, yet perfectly controlled; because it launches us out, from home, name, identifying place, into nowhere you’d know; because it speaks polyphonically in numerous voices; because it soothes and storms, lifts and kills. Above all, it is song--and song is the undertow of all poetry.
Formal portrait of Heinrich Heine
"The Great Gay-Jewish Poetry Brawl of 1829"

"In the shouty Valhalla of pointlessly destructive literary feuds, a place of honor must go to the verbal duel between the poets Heinrich Heine and August von Platen, which amused and disgusted the German literary world in 1829. Two outsiders—a Jew and a homosexual—resorted to crude stereotypes as they attempted to eject each other from an establishment that might rather have dispensed with both of them."
 
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What Sparks Poetry:
Laura Marris on “The Berlin Wall, or Blackberry Picking in Western Brittany”

"Paol taught me how close writing and translating could be, and how both could pull from the deep well of changing landscapes and languages. Part of what drives this work is the way the original physical and cultural landscapes that inhabit our writing are always betraying their translations into poetry. We write the world down, but it doesn’t stay put"
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