This evocation of springtime quickly takes on a darker tone and stands among the author’s unforgettable works

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise (No 1789)

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
The maddest noise that grows, —
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night’s delicious close,

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Poet laureate produces 10 poems, haiku and a musical EP, working with National Trust as it renews its blossom campaign

He imagines blossom as fancy dress, as an artist or a magician lighting up countryside, town and city. Yes, it is a thing of beauty and joy but also, sometimes, a pertinent reminder of changing climate patterns.

On World Poetry Day and to celebrate spring, the poet laureate, Simon Armitage , has launched a collection celebrating the bright blossom that sweeps through the UK at this time of year.

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The six-strong list of titles include novels, short stories and poetry, with the winning writer to receive £20,000 when revealed in May

Mary Jean Chan, Caleb Azumah Nelson and AK Blakemore are among the shortlistees for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize .

The award, worth £20,000, celebrates poetry, novels, short stories and drama by writers aged 39 and under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

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Anne Enright triumphs in fiction category for The Wren, The Wren and Observer art critic Laura Cumming wins non-fiction with Thunderclap: A Memoir of Life and Art and Sudden Death

Three women have triumphed in this year’s Writers’ prize, formerly known as the Rathbones Folio prize, with poet Liz Berry winning the overall book of the year award, worth £30,000.

Berry won the £2,000 poetry prize as well as the overall award for her collection The Home Child , a novel-in-verse inspired by the poet’s great-aunt, who at 12 years old was forced to move from the Black Country to Canada as part of the British child migrant schemes.

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An unpublished book has emerged by the woman best known for her liaisons with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Isadora Duncan

She was the “furious lesbian” who had affairs with some of the most famous women of the jazz age, prompting the writer and wit Alice B Toklas to remark of Mercedes de Acosta: “Say what you will about Mercedes, she’s had the most important women of the 20th century.”

Among the playwright and poet’s conquests and flirtations were Hollywood royalty Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, dancers Isadora Duncan and Tamara Karsavina, actresses Ona Munson and Pola Negri, and reportedly Toklas herself.

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The poet on discovering Seamus Heaney, revisiting Alice Walker and the joy of Allan Ahlberg

My earliest reading memory
Being taken to the local library to choose, being able to browse through so many books, and the rush of excitement as the ones you’ve chosen are stamped and taken home.

My favourite book growing up
The one I still remember off by heart is the poem Please Mrs Butler , in the poetry collection of the same name by Allan Ahlberg. I still have it. I read this poem constantly, and loved that it allowed me into a world of adults, to see what a classroom might feel like from the teacher’s perspective. Most of all, it made me laugh, and I loved that.

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Prolific poet, novelist and critic who was an astute and sometimes satirical observer of life in modern Britain

Alan Brownjohn, who has died aged 92, was a prolific and seemingly indefatigable poet and novelist. Although best known as a poet, a recipient of the Cholmondeley award in 1979, Brownjohn also wrote well-received novels – winning the Author’s Club prize for his first, The Way You Tell Them (1990), a satire set in the world of standup comedy – and two children’s books, collaborated on plays, and worked as a freelance writer and critic.

He was poetry editor for the New Statesman from 1968 until 1974, and later poetry critic of the Sunday Times for more than 20 years. He was also a diligent campaigner on behalf of poetry.

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A tender hymn to rural Wales in the wake of the Covid pandemic from the Cardiff-born poet’s new collection, The Silence

Spring Equinox, 2021

First summer night
in a world remade,
streets are carless,
silence walks the roads.

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The poet’s new collection of mainly prose pieces on subjects as diverse as Flaubert, snow and Roget’s Thesaurus is a nonstop triumph

What sort of a mind produces a whole book as though it might be an error, each sentence a fault line? The Canadian poet Anne Carson – here chiefly writing prose – explains Wrong Norma is thus named because she knows the pieces within the book do not add up. We are not to expect them to be on speaking terms with one another. I have interviewed Anne Carson , a classicist frequently tipped as a contender for the Nobel prize, for this newspaper – but interview is not the word for what took place between us by email. I sent her questions, she swatted the majority of them away like troublesome flies. Sphinx would be an understatement. Formidable, ditto. I was relieved to learn, later, that she is well known for resistance to talking about her work.

But reading her new book, I see something more revealing going on: the sense of how difficult it is for anyone to say precisely what they mean. Words, here, are not trusted collaborators. In Snow, she writes: “words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.” Questions, in her essays, prove as volatile as answers. Some barely deserve to be questions: “Some questions don’t warrant a question mark,” she writes in an opening essay. But language has a recklessness that is an oppositional force causing constant friction against Carson’s default cautiousness.

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