Places of Poetry: Mapping the Nation in Verse

Presenting the best poems from the nationwide Places of Poetry project, selected from over 7,500 entries

Poetry lives in the veins of Britain, its farms and moors, its motorways and waterways, highlands and beaches.

This anthology brings together time-honoured classics with some of the best new writing collected across the nation, from great monuments to forgotten byways.

Featuring new writing from Kayo Chingonyi, Gillian Clarke, Zaffar Kunial, Jo Bell and Jen Hadfield, Places of Poetry is a celebration of the strangeness and variety of our islands, their rich history and momentous present.

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool, England and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. His collections of poetry include The Boy from the Chemist Is Here to See You (1998), which won both a Somerset Maugham Award and a Forward Prize; The Ice Age (2002), winner of a Whitbread Poetry Prize; Tramp in Flames (2006), shortlisted for both an International Griffin Poetry Prize and a TS Eliot Prize; and The Dark Film (2012), which was also shortlisted for a TS Eliot Prize. Farley’s other works include his collected poems for radio, Field Recordings: BBC Poems 1998-2008 (2009). He currently teaches at Lancaster University. In 2012 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Andrew McRae is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the Department of English and Dean of Postgraduate Research and the Exeter Doctoral College. His publications include God Speed the Plough (1996); Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (2004); and Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (2009).