This issue, based loosely on the theme of formal verse, begins a two-part feature on the American new formalists, with poems by Rachel Hadas, David Mason, Wyatt Prunty, Mary Jo Salter and Dana Gioia:

Unsaid
So much of what we live goes on inside -
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.
-- Dana Gioia

And there are also poems for a formal occasion: John Kinsella on the paintings of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, marking its 150th anniversary.

Jo Shapcott talks about geography, rootedness and the fear of falling, and:

...if I'd been good enough then I'd have wanted to be an opera singer. I do think it's related to poetry - the line and the voice...

Translation: Michael Hoffman leads a seminar on translating Rilke, with notes, transliterations and then parallel versions by Alistair Elliot, Elaine Feinstein, John Kinsella and Jo Shapcott.

Making hay in the suburbs: Joyelle McSweeney reviews the new Paul Muldoon...

Muldoon dispenses with the sense requirement, changing, for example, a Ford Sierra to a Ford Zephyr when the rhyme demands it...

Jeremy Noel-Tod reviews Jon Stallworthy's Rounding the Horn, and there are capsule reviews of Adam Zagajewski, Michael Longley and poems from Middle Kingdom Egypt, circa 2100-1600 BC.