Tim Liardet

Tim Liardet’s New and Selected Poems is due from Carcanet later this year.

Two Poems

Tim Liardet, 10 May 2018

Empath to the Punctured Kevlar Helmet

World is the head inside. The jump of the optic nerve. Its Uzis are genteel. Its arbiters are deaf. Add to it the lips that are less a grin than a grave. Its guns hang like salamis. Though they are bereft of protein they somehow often seem to bleed. They’re tagged with the tenderloins. The new Pietà is now only hands with no body to be...

Two Poems

Tim Liardet, 6 October 2016

Address to the Drowned Seaman, in Answer to His Distress Flare at Rockall, Mid-Atlantic, 1944

after ‘Pincher Martin’

You have already drowned, although you think you made it to the rock. The dwarf you build is the means by which you reconstruct yourself, stone by stone. The rock is a tooth. The gulls that flap around your head are umbrellas shaken out, reptiles that snap, the...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences