“You give me a soft brown / stare. How I wobble now before you, cow / of love…” Geraldine Clarkson’s ‘Love Cow’, just published in The Poetry Review, 105:2, is a poem that can’t help but have an interesting background story. And this is what Clarkson delivers in her contribution to our online feature, Behind the poem, with her imagination dwelling on night cheese and the abattoir, leading to the wild west of Ireland and a faraway sea. Look out for Clarkson reading this poem and more, alongside Zaffar Kunial and Daljit Nagra, at The Poetry Review launch, at the London Review bookshop on Thursday 2 July, 7-9pm (free event).

Fellow contributor Laura Scott explores how her reading of War and Peace produced “a dead man come back to life” and the moon turning some of the trees silver in her poem, ‘If I could write like Tolstoy’.

As ever, Behind the poem offers fascinating insights into poems published in The Poetry Review and the variety of ways in they develop, allowing readers a glimpse of the writer’s working practice and wider imagination.

Published 1st July 2015