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Poem of the Week: ‘The Iliad in a Scottish Cemetery’ by Ange Mlinko

20 January 2025

Our Poem of the Week is ‘The Iliad in a Scottish Cemetery’ by Ange Mlinko, from Foxglovewise, the UK debut of a celebrated American poet whose work is as lyrical as it is radical.

The Iliad in a Scottish Cemetery

The culinary garden on the burial grounds
raises a few eyebrows, but not the dead.
There’s lovage, chamomile, pineapple sage.
The graven names are old Scottish names.
On my headphones, though, is The Iliad,
so my eyes take in Prestons, Grays and Grahams
as my ears do Agamemnon, Calchas, Diomedes.
On a plinth a bas-relief of storm-tossed seas
commemorates a mariner. The catalog of ships
survives in unfamilial polysyllables.
Names don’t translate; a mouth of pebbles,
they slow the language roaring down the page.
I’m in two foreign countries at once, by turn
testing on my tongue the umami of these sounds,
iron-laced water like blood-anointed spear tips
and the tangy granite in the skirling burn.

Copyright © Ange Mlinko, 2025. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Foxglovewise by Ange Mlinko is out on 30 January 2025.

 

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The UK debut of a celebrated American poet whose work is as lyrical as it is radical.

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