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Issue 28 highlights include:
• New poetry by Erica Wagner, Chris Jones, Neil Curry, Helen Kitson, Caroline Price and Gill Gregory
• Patrick McGuinness' piece in the Poet on his Work series is worth the cover price on its own. He writes on the contact in poetry of his father and his son who missed each other in life by the bare span of eight weeks.
• Fiction by David Constantine
• Angela Macmillan writes combatively and carefully on reading groups
• Ian McMillan embarks on a new Reading Lives feature, writing letters to a younger version of himself
• Actor of stage, screen and board, Neil Pearson talks about his other life as an avid book collector
• Plus reviews, recommendations and all our regulars
• In the editorial Philip Davis writes with characteristic verve, calling on Ben Jonson who ‘used to go up to such people and knock on their chests, shouting loudly, "ARE YOU IN THERE?"' It's a challenge folks!
The theme of the issue is of hidden or forgotten realities coming back to light, whether that be in the surfacing of an ancient form (Anglo Saxon poetry), the emergence of myth in modern forms (Alan Davis writing on Demeter's reappearance in the poetry of Ted Hughes), or the stages of recovery in coming back to look at the past in David Constantine's great story, ‘Witness'.
The Reader has been tarted up and redesigned but the commitment to good writing, to earnest readers and to real thinking remains the same.