I apologize, as always, for omissions – it was painful to have to whittle down a many-splendoured longlist to something that wouldn’t fill a whole shelf – but I wish you as much pleasure reading these poems as I had foraging for them. One of the greatest beauties of poetry is that it reminds us that we are not, and never have been, alone. These women walked this way before us, and they have left us these bright threads to follow through the dark. For the days when the world weighs heavy on us, for the days when the struggle seems fiercest, I hope you will find a parachute in these pages.

Ana Sampson, 2020

‘I smelt the smell of distance and longed for another existence’ – Wanderlust and Dreams of Freedom

Here are poems that give us permission to dream, whether we are indulging in fantasies of a new life during a golden café afternoon, or whiling away a long lesson on a summer’s day. These poets beautifully express the desire to break free – to be, as Safia Elhillo writes, ‘ungovernable’.

Elinor Wylie imagines herself a tiny, twinkling thing, fleeing the world through an escape hatch so tiny and enchanted that she cannot be pursued. We hear from one of the world’s most celebrated recluses, Emily Dickinson, who locked herself down in the family home for two decades. She spoke to visitors through a door and treated the local children by lowering baskets of sweets from her window, but in her poetry she yearned for flight and freedom. Kate Wakeling, Carol Ann Duffy and civil rights activist Georgia Douglas Johnson urge us to throw open the door. The world is wide and waiting.

The Distance

Over the sounding sea,

Off the wandering sea

I smelt the smell of distance

And longed for another existence.

Smell of pineapple, maize, and myrrh,

Parrot-feather and monkey-fur,

Brown spice,

Blue ice,

Fields of tobacco and tea and rice,

And soundless snows,

And snowy cotton,

Otto of rose

Incense in an ivory palace,

Jungle rivers rich and rotten,

Slumbering valleys,

Smouldering mountains,

Rank morasses

And frozen fountains,

Black molasses and purple wine,

Coral and pearl and tar and brine,

The smell of panther and polar-bear

And leopard-lair

And mermaid-hair

Came from the four-cornered distance,

And I longed for another existence.

Eleanor Farjeon

Maybe I’ll Be The First

In the car, shreds of 8am light pool in,

the half-moons under her eyes.

She told me she’s been searching all her life –

her spine now a heavy root from years of reaching

and stretching and slipping between rock and struggle.

She is a small tree, in a big storm

refusing to be displaced.

Yet every so often

anger strips her tongue

into a lashing whip,

burns hot coals in the pit

of her stomach, blows back smoke

through her heart.

In her village, she watched many close to her fall. She told me

there were murmurs of dreamers hearing an oasis calling,

whispering honey as they slept and schemed,