Arts
Almost a year and a half into the Covid-19 era, the publisher Shearsman Books has published Poetry and Covid 19 – An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry. It’s edited by Anthony Caleshu and Rory Waterman, the idea being to pair 19 UK-based poets with poets from around the world to work on poems together. As the blurb puts it: ‘The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in all of the world’s permanently populated continents, recognising that the pandemic has truly hit us everywhere.’ Anthony Caleshu chairs a lively chat about pandemic poetry with two poets who collaborated for the anthology: from India, Sharmistha Mohanty, and from England, David Herd.