New and Recent Poetry from the North: Summer 2025
Get ready to indulge in some poetry on a long summer evening. It’s time again for NWN poetry expert Will Mackie to recommend some of the best new work out this season by poets in the north.
Lode (Bloodaxe) is the new collection by Gillian Allnutt, a poet whose extraordinary and elegant work is deeply placed within the North. Lode is a personal journey, much of it taking place in County Durham, where Gillian Allnutt has lived for decades. Her latest collection is a landmark work full of insight, observation and learning, taking us deep into her unique poetic world.
Sarah Corbett’s sixth collection The Ishtar Gate (Pavillion) moves through personal territories and explores historical events in ambitious and finely woven poems that are always absorbing and compelling. She’s an excellent and highly skilled poet whose work is driven by deep intelligence.
When It Rained for a Million Years (Picador) is the new collection by Paul Farley. His poems are often surprising and can be brilliantly visual, with striking and memorable images. There’s such resonance in his poems.
William Martin (1925-2010) was born in County Durham and lived in Sunderland for more than 50 years. He began writing poetry in the 1960s and Bloodaxe published several of his collections. Marratide, also published by Bloodaxe, is an expansive Selected that has been edited by Peter Armstrong and Jake Morris Campbell. It includes a fascinating introduction by the editors that brings us close to this remarkable and singular poet.
If you’re a poet based in the north or a publisher with a new collection or pamphlet by a northern poet and would like to be considered for future versions of this round-up, please get in touch with [email protected].
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