The longest section in the magazine, ‘Back to Babel’ is primarily dedicated to mixed poems and reviews, mainly focused on poetry. Highlights include Tiffany Atkinson’s sympathetic piece on Australian Martin Harrison’s Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems, Helen Dennis’s survey of seven volumes of New Zealand poetry and a number of reviews about various volumes in translation.

Chris Miller reads translations from the Spanish-language poetry of Basque writer Eli Tolaretxipi and Cuban Víctor Rodríguez Núñez without finding a great deal to like; Lucy M. Alford investigates the political and existential issues informing Mourid Barghouti’s bilingual Midnight and Other Poems, which are consistently informed by the Israel–Palestine conflict and are translated from the Arabic; and John Muckle enjoys the Arc anthology, Six Polish Poets, edited by Jacek Dehnel. William Bedford’s review of George Szirtes’s New and Collected Poems (and of John Sears’s Reading George Szirtes) mentions Szirtes’s debt to expatriate Australian poet Peter Porter.

This is a nice touch in a magazine that uses its second section to mark Peter Porter’s eightieth birthday and which features a photograph of Porter on its cover. Five characteristically probing and inventive poems by Porter open the section, followed by contributions from ‘a few friends [gathered] to sing outside his window’.

In an open letter to Porter, Chris Wallace-Crabbe affectionately remembers him among his poetic contemporaries in England in the 1950s, and briefly ruminates on his distinguished career. John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology 893: Things You Can Do with a Line from Peter Porter’ connects tangentially with Porter’s more discursive modes. George Szirtes makes a poem out of Porter quotations. Peter Rose, following Porter’s example, offers a series of ‘mutant proverbs’ (‘Ask not what your company can do for you but what you can do for your company’), and contributes a tribute, ‘Green Park’, which plays nicely with ideas of reputation, place and how the past may (or may not) be understood. Peter Goldsworthy takes Keats’s famous sonnet as his model for ‘On First Looking into Penguin’s Porter’, and there are also interesting poems by Tim Liardet, Ian Duhig, Anthony Thwaite and Martin Harrison. Overall, this is an enjoyable and stimulating issue of a magazine that is making a significant contribution to international literature.