We chose ‘Lost at the Western General’ by Kate Hendry to be our Friday Poem on 25/03/2022 partly because its subject matter resonates so powerfully with many women, and partly because the form and language of the poem reflects and carries the content so well. It’s written in tight couplets, appropriate for a couple under stress. The language is precise, the line endings – slightly abrupt – create a sense of disconnect. The overwhelming impression is one of control, of just being able to hold down rising panic, of just managing to deal with unpleasant memories. We think it’s a very accomplished, astute, and profoundly compassionate poem, and we’re very happy to have it.

Lost at the Western General

by Kate Hendry

It only happened once, at night —
the ward we needed wasn’t listed

on any signs and there was no one
in the Covid-empty corridors to ask.

Finally, I recognised the stairs
I’d descended after surgery

and so we found ourselves
by mistake, in ward six,

where I’d had my mastectomy
and I showed you the dayroom where

I’d waited, all morning, with ringing
phones and abandoned bags

of women taken before me,
and the toilet where I took

a pregnancy test — me, at 50?! —
and held my sweating breast

for the last time, and the quiet room
where I rang you afterwards.

No one saw us or stopped us.
I couldn’t remember

which of the green double doors
led to the theatre where the surgeon

removed my breast but by then
we were out the other side

and you delivered me to the night nurse
in the cancer assessment unit

and she led me to a bed
with my name already written

above it and said she’d look after me
and that you must go home.

Kate Hendry is a poet and teacher. Her work has been widely published in magazines such as PN Review, The North, The Rialto, and Mslexia. Her first collection, The Lost Original, was published by HappenStance Press, and her latest collection, MX SIMP (Mariscat, 2023) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards Poetry Pamphlets – read Clare Best’s review of MX SIMP here. Her website is here.

What’s Natalie Shaw’s poem ‘Not my children, not my rats’ about? It has an Orwellian feel. We know that the thought police are never the nice guys, so the narrator’s revision doesn’t convince, despite – or more probably because of – the repeat of “perfectly lovable”. Shaw often plays with the surreal and the surprising, and her work is often funny (see that “cataloguing abilities”!) but this is much more than a quirky, amusing poem. It’s dark. It’s a warning. It’s doing exactly what poetry is supposed to do. That’s why we chose it to be our Friday Poem on 18/10/2024.

Not my children, not my rats

by Natalie Shaw

I have revised my views on the thought police:
actually, they are perfectly lovable guys,

perfectly lovable guys just trying
to do their best; not everyone

has the patience or cataloguing abilities
for this challenging work, particularly

during dark times when it is a difficult job
to see even vaguely what is going on. I have always been quick

to judge; now I realise it is a real luxury
that qualified people are here to do the heavy lifting.

Natalie Shaw has been described as “a fake, a fraud and a phoney”. She has two pamphlets, oh be quiet (Against the Grain Press, 2020) and Dirty Martini ( Broken Sleep Books, 2023). Her poem ‘I know you only invited me in for a coffee, but‘ was commended in the 2018 National Poetry Competition. Read her Friday Poem piece on ‘Maybe; maybe not’ by Denise Riley, our review of oh be quiet by Hilary Menos or our review of Dirty Martini by Isabelle Thompson.

You can almost touch the stiff permanent waves of the ladies in their silk and taffeta gowns and the Brylcreemed hair of the men in dinner suits as they lounge and smoke. Matthew Paul’s poem ‘Pathé News Visits the Ace of Spades’ beautifully evokes the atmosphere of the roadhouse, a country club style establishment built along arterial roads in and out of London in the inter-war years, where people liberated by motorcar ownership could meet for entertainment and dancing. In the black and white newsreels of the time these clubs were portrayed as sophisticated and glamorous but Matthew Paul’s poem focuses on the seedier side, offering us a peek at the louche lowlifes, glitzy girls and slick entertainers of the 1920s and 30s. His poem is lavish, detailed and lots of fun, and we revel in it – it was our Friday Poem on 15/12/2021.

Pathé News Visits the Ace of Spades

by Matthew Paul

Hook, Surrey, 1933

The crew don’t capture Noël and Ivor snorting cocaine
off the black-marble bar; the gargoyles they actually film
are me and my pals: Marcel waves and louche rum coves
high-balled to the eyeballs, soft-shoe-shuffling to the silver
syncopation of Percy Chandler and his rinky-dink band,
trowelling a long, smooth intro to Al Bowlly, who croons
like a trout. The camera pans across the diners and lingers
on that cad Mosley’s double, hiding his face with a plate,

a trice too late. Clad in top-hat and tails, and spying
for Japan, the Colonel Master of Sempill swallow-dives
from the highest board, to frolic among ‘Spadettes’
in the ace-shaped outdoor pool. Norman Long, a comic
off the wireless, corpses at his own punchlines, before

he delivers them. The Southern Sisters — Vera, Sybille
and Betty — harmonise ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t
Got That Swing’. All of us blootered punters, grinning
like ventriloquist dummies, cheer as if Larwood’s snared
Bradman for a golden duck. Bill-toppers Gerlys and Lysia,
‘Continental artistic dancers’, provide a sensational
climax to proceedings: Lysia raised aloft, like an angel,
fully fanning-out her knife-pleated, black-leather skirt.

Still swooning afterwards, we whip my new Alvis Firefly
up the by-pass to party till noon in Lancaster Mansions,
at Putney Bridge; more champers and — oh, hot digetty! —
more Duke Ellington stompers: ‘East St Louis Toodle-Oo’,
‘Doin’ the New Lowdown’, ‘Jig Walk’, ‘Diga Diga Doo’ …

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Matthew also writes and reviews for The Friday Poem – read his long-form pieces on Ted Walker, Patricia Beer, poems featuring bowls, and the English haiku, or his reviews of Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter by Sarah Mnatzaganian (Against the Grain, 2022), Lanyard by Peter Sansom (Carcanet, 2022), Fool by Greta Stoddart (Bloodaxe, 2022), Selected Poems 1983–2023 by Ian Parks (Calder Valley Poetry, 2023), New and Selected Poems by Cliff Yates (Smith|Doorstop, 2023), Instead of an Alibi by Geoff Hattersley (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), A Land Between Borders by Mike Barlow (Templar Poetry, 2023), STRIKE by Sarah Wimbush (Stairwell Books, 2024), The Hawthorn Bride by Victoria Gatehouse (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2024), and The Ayrshire Nestling by Gerry Cambridge (Tringa Press, 2024), ‘Lapwing’ by Hannah Copley (Liverpool University Press, 2024), ‘Summers Are Other’ by Andrew Neilson (Rack Press, 2025), and ‘Everything is Present’ by Anna Woodford (Salt, 2025).

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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Once upon a time there lived
a small joke
in the middle of nowhere.

This small joke
was dying to share
itself with someone

but nobody came to hear
this small joke.

So this small joke
told itself to the birds

and the birds told this small joke to the trees
and the trees told this small joke to the rivers
and the rivers told this small joke to the mountains
and the mountains told this small joke to the stars

till the whole world
started to swell with laughter

and nobody believed
it all began
with a small joke

that lived in the middle of nowhere.

Everybody kept saying

it was me
it was me.

’Once Upon a Time‘ is from The Poetry World of John Agard, illustrated by Shirley Hottier and introduced by Darren Chetty (Otter-Barry Books, 2025) — thanks to Otter-Barry Books for letting us reproduce it here.

Hilary: John Agard has been around for as long as I can remember; I used to read his poem ‘Half-Caste’ to all four of my kids (you can watch Agard performing it on YouTube here) along with ‘Palm Tree King’ and ‘Listen Mr Oxford Don’. I found these not in children’s poetry books but from the Other poetry anthology (British and Irish Poetry since 1970). In Other, editors Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain were consciously offering up an antidote to mainstream British poetry, and Agard’s poems rubbed shoulders with work from a diverse bunch of writers including Bob Cobbing, Geraldine Monk and Denise Riley. So at the time I didn’t think of him as a writer of children’s poetry so much as an exciting avant-garde or alternative poet.

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But of course he has also built a reputation and a following as a poet for children, and now he’s gone and won the CLiPPA children’s poetry award for the third time, with The Poetry World of John Agard, a collection of poems drawn from some of Agard’s previous books – I Din Do Nuttin (1983), Say it Again, Granny (1986), No Hickory No Dickory No Dock (1990), Laughter is an Egg (1990), Grandfather’s Old Bruk-a-Down Car (1994), We Animals Would Like a Word With You (1996), Come Back to me my Boomerang (2001), and Points of View of Professor Peekaboo (2000). Past winners of the CLiPPA include Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and Michael Rosen and, like them, Agard writes successfully for both children and adults.

Annie: Interesting that you say he has been around for as long as you remember – the back cover of The Poetry World of John Agard describes him as “one of the most beloved and influential poets of all time”. That might be overstating it a bit but we’re in the world of poetry here, so we’re allowed to exaggerate! Having said that, there is something timeless and ageless about Agard, who’s been a legend in classrooms for years. A Caribbean Dozen, which he edited with his wife Grace Nichols, was a staple in every primary school I’ve ever worked in, and he’s been widely anthologised. One of my favourite poems to teach round Eastertime was always ‘A Date with Spring’, which the children loved to act out as a performance piece.

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Hilary: Agard’s poems cover a wide range of subjects. As might be expected from his ethnic and cultural roots, race, ethnicity and culture are very important, but Agard’s work also draws on such diverse subjects as ancient mythology, academia, Caribbean folk tales, environmental issues, politics and patriotism. I like how he is gently political, in a way that children understand. For instance, in ‘Happy Birthday Dilroy’, Dilroy gets a pair of skates he wanted for a long, long time for his eighth birthday. But he still has a question:

But, Mummy, tell me why
They don’t put a little boy
That looks a bit like me.
Why the boy on the card so white?

Annie: John is also a superb performer, as your YouTube link illustrates. It’s worth checking out some of the many on-line clips of John Agard before settling down to the book. You can hear him reading ‘A Date with Spring’ (along with five other gems) on the BBC website.

He embodies his words in a way which captivates adults just as much as children and I always hear his mesmerising voice in my head when I read his poetry. It’s like dancing with him inside a carnival of language.

It’s great news for John and for Otter-Barry Books to have won the CLiPPA again, but it must be especially exciting for Shirley Hottier, whose name is not yet so well-known, but whose vibrant art works brilliantly with the poetry. Congratulations all!

John Agard was born in Georgetown, Guyana. He taught French and Latin at O-level after he completed his education, before working as a librarian. He moved to England in 1977, where he became a touring lecturer for the Commonwealth Institute to promote a better understanding of Caribbean culture. He visited 2,500 schools over the next eight years, and began to write poetry for children. He was given the Queen’s award for poetry in 2012, and in 2021 the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the author of more than 50 books for children and adults and has been cited as a major influence by Raymond Antrobus and Dean Atta. Chair of judges and Children’s Laureate for Wales Nicola Davies describes John as “extraordinary”. She said “You can carry John’s words in your head and your heart and warm your soul on them forever.”

The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education is a a small independent UK based children’s literacy charity working with primary schools to improve the life chances of children by making sure that every child has access to quality experiences of literacy. They have compiled a great list of award-winning children’s poetry which includes work by Philip Gross, Jackie Kay and George Szirtes. For those newer to poetry, there’s a really cool bit on its website where you can search for information about different poetic forms and devices – forms such as the ballad, the renga, or the triolet, and devices such as assonance, metaphor, or onomatopoeia.

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal(2020), and one recently from Mariscat Press: Missing the Man Next Door(2024). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.

Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3700-plus subscribers. It’s run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of the poems, features and reviews on Substack in the future.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

Annie: Tactile quality is important – a teacher-friend of mine assesses the ‘strokability’ of any new book she buys to read to her class. The five shortlisted books vary. PRESS START TO PLAY is a slim, budget-priced paperback which I can imagine an eleven- or twelve-year-old reading by torchlight under the duvet once / if they’ve been forced to log off or hand over their devices for the night – it will get bent and thumbed and can’t afford to be especially beautiful.

In contrast, The Poetry World of John Agard is an attractive, chunky hardback with good quality, thick, glossy pages – it’s robust enough to survive much handling in a school library which is where I envisage it doing well. A First Book of Bugs and Five Little Friends are large, attractive hardbacks which would suit an adult reading to a child, or a teacher reading to a whole class. But the one that comes out tops for strokability is This is not a Small Voice – it has a sleek, strong, hardback cover, partly covered in grainy black fabric you can’t help stroking, and the pages are sumptuous, bright and glossy. It’s published by Nosy Crow, who take pride in their production values. I imagine a child or a pair of children poring over it with delight. It feels special, but at £20, it’s easily the most expensive.

Hilary: The First Book of Bugs looks on the face of it to be the most eye-catching – the pictures are fun and brightly coloured, rather like the illustrations in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but even more vibrant and grabby. On the other hand, The Poetry World of John Agard and PRESS START TO PLAY are mostly black and white. How important is the look of the book – glossy covers, pictures, colour – do you think?

Annie: Important I think, but it’s not everything, and cost is a consideration of course. Shirley Hottier’s colourful cover for The Poetry World of John Agard is delightful and the book might have looked very impressive if all illustrations could have been in colour, but I think the black and white ones work fine. They have a clarity, impact and sense of fun that’s just right for Agard’s poetry and suits the 7-11 age group. I’m assuming that the publishers, Otter-Barry Books, selected the illustrator, in which case they did a good job.

With books for the very young the pictures are much more important – they are what the child ‘reads’, with the adult’s voice as accompaniment. In The First Book of Bugs and Five Little Friends the artwork is very much centre stage – it is as you say, what grabs the attention. When it comes to illustration, there’s always the danger that the art can totally outperform or even overwhelm the words. I wondered if The First Book of Bugs might be heading that way …

Hilary: I like the way The First Book of Bugs advocates for insects. In the ‘About this book’ section, Simon Mole says, “Bugs are the invisible power that keep the world working. They help plants to grow, act as a natural pest control and play a vital role in the food web.” Of course the references to environmental issues may go over a child’s head, but as an adult you get a real sense of understanding and care for maintaining wildlife habitats.

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I agree with you though, where there are such vibrant and funky graphics the text has to work hard to compete. And while it’s certainly informative and fun, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of attention paid here to rhyme and rhythm. As a child, I remember reading Walter de la Mare, Charles Causley, Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc, and I especially loved Old Possum’s book of Practical Cats by T S Eliot. The poetry in these CLiPPA books seems quite different. I used to love poetry with a strong emphasis on end rhyme and regular metrical patterns, but many of these books seem to be in what I would call free verse, or even prose. Don’t children need some kind of formal structure – the rhyme and rhythm that makes a poem easy to remember – or am I old-fashioned?

Annie: If you replaced ‘children’ with ‘we’ in your last sentence, that question might be echoed by many adults who, if not bemused by most contemporary poetry, can’t help mourning the marginalisation of rhyme and formal structure. Out of interest, I googled ‘When was the last time a rhyming poem won the National Poetry Competition?’ and was told that ‘Absence has a grammar’ by Fiona Larkin was a rhyming poem that won in 2024. If this is a rhyming poem, it certainly doesn’t rhyme in a way that I or the old chap on the Clapham omnibus might understand. But then who remembers the chap on the Clapham omnibus …? And who knows what an omnibus is …? I’m teasing of course, but I think you and I might both be old-fashioned regarding rhyme and rhythm – along with a lot of other people.

But I do think (and I suspect you’d agree) that it’s possible to enjoy rhyme and rhythm as well as free verse or even more experimental forms. In fact, early readers have often not read enough poetry to have developed expectations, and so children’s poetry books often mix the old and the new marvellously well, with an openness and generosity that I think the adult poetry readership could learn from. In The Poetry World of John Agard some poems are in free verse, others have a clear, regular rhyming pattern, but many move in and out of rhyme with subtle elasticity. that I think works well. This is ‘Mummy’s Bump’, for example:

Under her heart’s thump-thump
sits Mummy’s bump

and curled all cosy inside
could be my baby sister
could be my baby brother

having a water-ride
in the water-world
of mummy’s bump

having a turn to swing
from a wrinkly trapeze
of a navel string

and when I put my ears
to Mummy’s bump
I hear the song of all the seas

and I hear myself begin.

If children are encouraged to write their own poems, they often love rhyme but it isn’t easy to do well and some kids can come unstuck if they force a rhyme. From around the 70’s onwards it has become more common in schools to steer children away from rhyme in their own writing. One popular teacher guidance book is ‘Does it have to Rhyme?’ by Sandy Brownjohn. This did a lot to free up children’s poetry by including conversational-style poems like ‘Chocolate Cake’ by Michael Rosen. I was never over-keen on the poem, to be honest, but it’s become a classic – children adored it when it was first published, and still do.

Hilary: Of course Michael Rosen won the CLiPPA award in 2021 for On the Move, a collection of poems about migration in which he reflects on his own past as part of a Polish-Jewish family growing up in London.

Annie: Yes, On the Move was a significant winner – a masterclass in how to write engagingly for children on a difficult subject. Quentin Blake’s illustrations worked perfectly with Rosen’s poems. CLiPPA has done a great job over the years of bringing quality children’s poetry to schools’ and public attention and also introducing new talent like Kate Wakeling, Joseph Coelho and Karl Nova.

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Hilary: It’s a difficult task for the judges, isn’t it, to judge between five books which are so very different? Even the age ranges are different – PRESS START TO PLAY is for nine to fifteen-year-olds, there’s lots of text, and not much in the way of pictures. Here’s a typical page:

Five Little Friends, on the other hand, is for children up to seven. This one does rhyme rather beautifully, and the illustrations, by Fiona Woodcock, are charming. Each poem is rhythmic, short, and fun to say, and there are poems about all sorts of things, from brushing your teeth to spending too much time on a phone (presumably something for mummy to think about).

Annie: I love this book’s energy and the potential for interactivity. A great one for teachers in Early Years settings. Fiona Woodcock’s illustrations are a joy and, as you say, Sean Taylor’s rhyme and rhythm is spot-on.

Hilary: Are you prepared to come out and tip the winner?

Annie: I thought you might ask! Well, what have we got … Five Little Friends shouldn’t be overlooked despite its simplicity. PRESS START TO PLAY is different and pleasingly subversive. A First Book of Bugs is visually stunning. All the same, I have a particular soft spot for The Poetry World of John Agard (a collection drawn from eight of Agard's previous books). Agard’s blend of playfulness, wisdom and musicality makes him a perfect children’s poet and I like how each section of the book includes a chatty introduction so the reader feels they’re part of a conversation. It would be great for any teacher doing an ‘author focus.’

However, my vote would go to the sumptuous anthology This is Not a Small Voice: poems by Black Poets (It actually includes some lovely John Agard poems!). In the introduction, Traci N. Todd, who selected the poems, says she wanted the book to be “a celebration of Blackness.” It is exactly that – it doesn’t ignore the sickening racism that persists among us, to all our shame, but it’s essentially an uplifting, hopeful book. It includes black voices from different countries, cultures and times, from Maya Angelou to Amanda Gorman; from Langston Hughes to Benjamin Zephaniah. The poems are skilfully ordered so that they talk to each other, and Jade Orlando’s illustrations are gorgeous. I’d definitely give this one my vote, and I’d like to finish with a link to the poem that opens the anthology, ‘The Dream Keeper’.

Many will hear Martin Luther King’s voice echoing here, because he drew on Langston Hughes’s poetry in his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. Hughes wrote ‘The Dream Keeper’ exactly a century ago and it’s fully sixty years since King’s speech, but look at the world right now, in 2026 … We need this book. There should be copies in every primary school in the country.

Hilary: We’ll all be interested to see what the judges decide when the results are announced on 9^th July – next Thursday.

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal(2020), and one recently from Mariscat Press: Missing the Man Next Door(2024). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.

Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3700-plus subscribers. It’s run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of the poems, features and reviews on Substack in the future.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

The Sparks was Wilkinson’s debut pamphlet. It’s a precocious set of poems, bursting with a young man’s vigour, portraying contemporary urban youth with a smattering of hints at wide reading and multiple influences. These poems are packed with josh and juggle, riff and baseline, revelling in new-found games of language and life, as evidenced by an evident knack for startling images like “the sudden void of shadows” or “the prayer-still street”. One of the main strengths of The Sparksis its evocation of the tension between young individuals and the social and physical hubris that surrounds them, as in this example from ‘The Quiet’:

I was drinking my way through a fifth pint of lager
and sparked up a fag as the tidemarks grew larger,
walked to the bar as the music grew louder

and noticed in minutes I’d clocked up two hours
when stumbling away from the urinal’s cowl
I turned to the exit to make for your house …

These lines provide an array of artificial, multi-clausal sentences that dazzle us with their linguistic gymnastics, forcing us to pause while we unpick their beautifully tied knots.

The Sparks saw Ben Wilkinson beginning to stake out a poetic territory, both in stylistic and thematic terms. Conor O’Callaghan, a fine poet himself, offers a key insight on the back cover, stating that Wilkinson was beginning “the difficult task of unlearning”. Wilkinson’s next pamphlet, For Real, found him making huge progress down that route.

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There’s an argument that while the poems in The Sparks are dashing and clever, playing a role, they are also slightly guarded, dancing round an inner core that never quite dares to open up. However, For Real marked a significant progression, containing several pieces that are remarkably brave and revealing. One such example is ‘Hound’, which later made it into Wilkinson’s first full collection. It surges with the passion that’s required to fight cyclical depression:

[…] its come-and-go presence,
air of self-satisfied deception,
just as the future bursts in on
the present, its big I am, and that
sulking hound goes to ground again.

This is poetry that bares its heart, not for the sake of confession or self-gratification, but for transforming qualities that are capable of moving its reader. As such, it demonstrates Wilkinson’s gradual eschewing of artifice and fireworks, alongside a growing confidence in his skill that enables him to look his readers in the eye. Moreover, in hindsight, it’s possible to venture that For Real foretells the explicit social and political concerns of Way More Than Luck. For Real makes a first, aslant approach to these issues, and Way More Than Luck develops a more clearcut connection between the individual and society.

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One such example is how Wilkinson portrays football, mapping wider social history via the histories of countless families and lives, all filtered through a personal perspective. ‘This is Anfield’ invokes and evokes a child’s first visit to Liverpool F.C.:

[…] I still remember it like that: the luminous pitch,
echo of the terraces, players floodlit
beneath an October sky. An ordinary game,
solid win, save for one kid looking on in wonder.

The above stanza, which brings the poem to a close, is an illustration of Wilkinson’s deft use of line endings and sentence structures, first panning out across the stadium before homing in on the eyes of “one kid”. At this point, the reader is reminded that the scene forms part of an individual’s story. The sentence structures are clear, syntax working for the sake of semantics, in contrast to many of the poems that appeared in The Sparks, for instance.

As Way More Than Luck advances, there are more poems with clear political overtones, such as ‘Building a Brighter, More Secure Future’, or pieces that set out to describe a set of physical surroundings with socially-laden connotations, as in ‘Byroads’, which mentions “hanging baskets … the pub’s carpark … the village shop … the borderline / where post boxes change from red to green … hillside housing estates …”.

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However, once again, the most affecting poems, those with most powerful societal ramifications, are personal in their point of departure. ‘The Argument’ provides us with an excellent example. Its final stanza reads:

[…] And it isn’t that they won’t come through this, but what
the house alone, insidious, is able to articulate. Half-empty
cups on a table. A dust-thick windowsill. A washer spinning
through its final cycle, like a HGV thundering downhill.

The poem deals with a couple’s argument. The roles of the man and woman are clearly no longer those that traditional society assigned, while this final stanza also undermines itself on purpose. It starts by stating that only the house itself can find the right words, but ends by reaching out beyond the humdrum washer (who put it on?!) to an external and extremely contemporary element, the HGV. The choice of simile is shocking and mirrors a “thundering” threat. Wilkinson retains his linguistic vim but has learned to use it more sparingly and to maximum effect.

In Same Difference Wilkinson builds on the qualities of his previous books. And the passing of time has had powerful effects on his poetry. There’s a thematic impact as he grows older and focuses more on the nature of memory, worrying away at the tension that exists between the onward flow of time versus the significance of specific moments within that flow. Several poems present narratives (especially of relationships) via a series of snapshots, as in ‘What We Were’:

[…] Here’s us taking a bath together, the lather
in your hair like good ice cream. Here’s the memory
of us seeing curlews over the far fields …

Within the context of these portrayals, the ending of ‘This Year’ takes on additional importance:

[…] a reminder that what’s done is done,
and of dark-bright moments still to come.

These lines display another of Wilkinson’s qualities – his growing feel for the natural cadences of a sentence and his ability to use everyday language combined with striking imagery. And then there are the implicit and explicit allusions invoking influences as disparate as Larkin and Verlaine and on occasion even making clear references to the artifice of creating a poem.

Same Difference sees Wilkinson concluding a process that began with The Sparks, resolving the co-existence of accessibility and erudition in his poetry, and employing a coherent and cogent method that combines allusion and directness of speech. By resolving these potential clashes and making them work in synch he’s already generated an approach that’s highly unusual in the context of contemporary UK poetry. The question now is where his poetry will take him next. Whatever direction Ben Wilkinson chooses, it’ll be well worth accompanying him on his journey.

Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. Following two pamphlets with HappenStancePress, his first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, was published in 2017, and his second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, in 2023. Recent poems have featured in The Spectator, The New European and Wild Court. He blogs at Rogue Strands.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has more than 3700 subscribers. It is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – poems, features and reviews – on Substack in the future. Like this one.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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Helena Nelson, in The Dark Horse, says, “His music is the cadence of speech … The tone is so restrained that the reader is suddenly astonished to find it is anger or despair. In fact, you can miss the abyss altogether if you’re not reading carefully. But it is there, in the beauty of the writing and its understated control. Many contemporary writers try to write like this. Few achieve it.”

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Michael Laskey’s work is deceptive. Its emotional power and depth creep up on us and take us by surprise, un-peeling its layers of subtle control and seemingly innocuous observations to reveal an emotional depth that lies beyond the reach of many flashier poets. In terms of cadence, meanwhile, his matter-of-fact tone is underpinned by a delicate musicality, reflecting the natural rhythms of speech yet simultaneously heightening them just at the pivotal point in a poem. Its accumulative effects are therefore difficult to convey via short quotes, although this, from ‘Patient Record’, shows Laskey’s method, especially in terms of his subtly heightened rhythms.

[…] I’m writing it down so I don’t forget it –
this year you’ve lived through
with what your brusque oncologist called
fortitude, an unusual word.

The line endings here are carefully judged. The key word – fortitude – is held over and dropped into the final line like a laser-guided missile. As for the ending, it’s built on the foundations of restraint via the use of ‘unusual’, which leaves so much unsaid. Laskey’s knack for understatement often means that what he holds back is actually more resonant that what he explicitly articulates, eschewing the so-called lyric voice and its ordered rhythms and replacing it with the ambivalences and ambiguities of everyday speech.

‘Patient Record’ is also characteristic of Laskey’s work in terms of its avoidance of neat endings that bring strands together. His poetry is seldom circular in nature. Instead, he tends to end a poem by opening outwards in both semantic and syntactic terms, encouraging us to use his closing words as a starting point rather than viewing them as a destination.

Laskey’s technique is indicative of a perspective that views poetry as a vehicle for probing and asking questions rather than finding answers. In thematic terms his approach mirrors his technical skills: the big issues of life are seldom explicitly invoked, but they provide the framework for all his work. He tends to hint at their presence rather than meeting them head-on, preferring to find new acute and obtuse angles from which to cast unusual and often challenging perspectives on them.

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One such example is the role of food in Laskey’s poetry. Cooking and eating are portrayed throughout his work, though one poem, ‘On My Own’, stands out for its juxtaposition of the varying purposes of meals. The poem provides two contrasting scenarios.

I don’t waste any time over lunch,
I eat it in the kitchen standing up.
Bread, off the bread board – no plate –

[…]

But with you almost always fresh bread
I’ve fetched first thing – a small
granary, an organic or a cobber –
I ring the changes, surprise you
with rollmops, an avocado, last week
artichoke hearts […]

The opening lines view food and its preparation as a basic necessity before the poem shifts to show them as rite and ritual. The pivotal difference, of course, lies between eating alone or accompanied. As such, the poem can be seen as an implicit, indirect portrayal of the nature of love. And look at the stresses of the above extract. Throughout this poem, Laskey uses the tone of day-to-day language, but he imperceptibly clusters stressed syllables together at important thematic junctures, such as ways/fresh/bread, fetched/first/thing or last/week/art, making the reader pause and absorb the added significance of those specific words.

‘On My Own’ (along with many other culinary poems in his locker) serves to underline Laskey’s treasuring of relationships with loved ones. But it’s also enlightening to consider it alongside other poems that home in on his interpretation of the role of an individual in society. For example in ‘A Change of Clothes’,

[…] one wet afternoon finding the case
carefully packed: a change of clothes
even for me, some papers in English
and some in a language that had to be Polish […]

And in the ending to ‘Together’,

[…] I miss her, I grieve for her, ache
for the small of her back I’m actually
making much of stroking – better
pull yourself together, mgl.

If the first extract is describing an outsider, someone whose home life is far from being typically English, the second poem invokes a quintessentially English (perhaps even public school) stiff upper lip, as epitomised by the speaker’s affectation of addressing himself with his own initials.

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While these two attitudes might seem incongruent on an initial reading, they are actually interlinked and coherent. The first poem is written from the perspective of an outsider who has to assimilate into English culture. The second piece, however, takes that process to an extreme and ends with a self-deprecatory mocking of an extremely English emotional restraint.

Laskey’s seemingly placid, humdrum poems are actually laced with pent-up emotions because he’s inviting us along on his own processing and stripping back of social role-playing. A superficial reading of his work might give the mistaken impression that it couldn’t be more English in tone and content. Nevertheless, a deeper focus shows that it is his perspective as an outsider which enables him to cast new light on the society in question, while also gaining a commensurate understanding of his own inner emotional life. His generosity lies in the sharing of that process via his poetry, inviting his readers to undertake their own parallel journeys.

Michael Laskey is a poet who works in a minor key but with major ambitions and achievements. It’s only too easy to miss the impact of his poetry if we race through in search of the fireworks or the punch line. Instead, his poems reward slow reading, which enables us to engage with his music and connect his life to ours. His New and Selected Poems, The Man Alone (Smith/Doorstep Books, 2007) is an excellent introduction to his work, and his latest collection, Weighing the Present (Smith/Doorstep Books, 2014), is an exceptional book. Its limited critical reception on publication is a travesty but also a reflection of current trends. Michael Laskey’s poetry, however, is built to last, and it will resonate long into the future.

Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. Following two pamphlets with HappenStancePress, his first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, was published in 2017, and his second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, in 2023. Recent poems have featured in The Spectator, The New European and Wild Court. He blogs at Rogue Strands.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has more than 3700 subscribers. It is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – poems, features and reviews – on Substack in the future. Like this one.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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James is a serial prize winner. Not only did he win the National Poetry Competition back in 2008, but this manuscript also includes four first-prize-winning poems and three second place winners. As a consequence, a potential ambivalence kicks in. On the one hand we start our reading in the knowledge that these poems have already received significant recognition and praise. And on the other, we might believe, erroneously, that James is a show pony who has learned how to tick judges’ boxes.

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One of Chris James’ clear strengths, and a key reason why his work is so successful in competitions, is his ability to create gorgeous set-pieces that generate and inhabit their own worlds. However, as this pamphlet demonstrates, they also work in unison when placed alongside each other. In other words, his aesthetic is far more powerful, coherent and moving than a mere technique to be applied to winning awards. Instead, his priority is demonstrably the reader.

The Storm in the Piano features a huge cast in all sorts of settings, often portraying the surreal without artifice in everyday language as if the situation were to be expected. One such example comes in ‘Dorothy Wordsworth is Skydiving’:

She emerges from a cloud,
at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.
In her black bonnet and shawl, she is
a spider dropped from space. As she falls,
she pockets the moon like a lost shilling.
From the air, Grasmere looks like the face
of the husband she’ll never have, but she finds,
there is nothing lonely about the clouds.

In Christopher James’ hands, contexts that might seem impossible or absurd suddenly become relevant and real, as in ‘The Archbishops at the Lido’:

Through the mist, Charles Longley floats
on his back, writing his sermon on a cloud.
George Carey has knotted his cassock
and is slowly inflating it as a life saving device.
He wears a tattoo of the double helix
on one shoulder and an ichthys on the other.
Selling tickets, Thomas Becket sits at the turnstile.

These extracts demonstrate a clear awareness of the importance of otherness in terms of people, places and periods, implicitly reflecting back on our own lives and our own interpretations of our surroundings.

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Moreover, alongside his use of accessible sentence structures, James also possesses an eye for gorgeous images, though never for their own sake, always yoking them to the effect they can generate, as in the following examples from the final stanza of ‘The Dream Coat of Bellaghy’:

Striding in from the gloaming, into
the god-glow of a pub, you loved it best
hung up on a peg to dry, smelling of peat smoke
and rain, turning bronze and then gold
through the prism of a pint. Now, disembodied,
behind glass, it is invested with a power
beyond itself, emptied of its dreamer,
but not yet emptied of its dreams.

The last two lines draw the poem to a satisfying close, while simultaneously reaching out beyond its physical limits, achieving an emotional resonance in its reader, as is typical in the endings of Christopher James’ poems, even when dealing with contexts that might initially appear removed from our sensibilities. One such instance is ‘The Watchmaker of Idlib’, which concludes as follows, drawing us in, moving us intensely:

At dusk, he listens to the crickets in the grass
and follows the slow sweep of the shadows.
He eats his shawarma, then winds his son’s watch,
his time cut short. With a father’s touch, he sets
it ticking like the beat of a sparrow’s heart.

Whether using the first or third person, the poet stands far further behind these poems than is common these days, thus avoiding any temptation to conflate the poet and the narrator. Dramatic set piece after dramatic set piece, Christopher James invites us into his vast array of worlds via an aesthetic approach that feels pretty much unique in the context of contemporary UK poetry.

When considering The Storm in the Piano as a whole it’s useful to invoke a comparison between a poetry collection and a music album. Rather than simply a series of outstanding hits, these poems work together despite their apparently disparate nature, demonstrating a cogent world view. Not only in technical and artistic terms, but also in their capacity to move their reader and launch us on our own journeys, The Storm in the Piano is a pamphlet to savour. Oh, and its cover features two of James’ own terrific paper cut-up artworks that are worth the price on their own, even before considering the poetry inside. Some people are just far too talented!

Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. Following two pamphlets with HappenStancePress, his first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, was published in 2017, and his second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, in 2023. Recent poems have featured in The Spectator, The New European and Wild Court. He blogs at Rogue Strands.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has more than 3700 subscribers. It is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – poems, features and reviews – on Substack in the future. Like this one.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

To start with, the book’s title offers a set of pivotal implicit questions, using the specific to take the reader into the universal. On the one hand, what did the word ‘rebellion’ mean in the past, and what does it mean in 2022; what were its ramifications then, and what are they now? And on the other hand, what did it mean to be Kentish? What separate identity did that term invoke? And what does it entail nowadays?

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Selby sets about addressing the above questions via the use of clever juxtaposition. In linguistic terms, he pits different registers against each other, while the themes are explored through anachronisms so as to invite comparisons and contrasts with the present. One excellent example of this technique can be found in the opening lines to ‘VII’:

Keep going down Week Street, all the way
to KFC, turn left past Poundland

*

into another century. A chapel
gallant on a green, dedicated to a girl
of Aquitaine the Romans barbecued
for her faith, used by the Dutch till Laud,
some of the boards across its vacant windows
knocked off from inside,
and Fairfax stepping
into the gunsights peeping through,
one hand upraised, clutching white truce
soaked in the still-teeming rain that bedims him […]

Beyond the clear shifts in his narrative’s timeline, Selby’s use of language is especially interesting in this extract. He takes the term ‘gallant’, for instance, which was once loaded with societal connotations, follows it up with the jarringly contemporary, slang-infused invocation of a person being ‘barbecued’, and then finishes off with ‘upraised’ and ‘bedims’, two words that feel far more connected with the language of the past than of the present. Via these juxtapositions, he blurs temporal differences, bringing the separate periods together.

Moreover, in the above quote’s allusion to KFC and Poundland, Selby hints at the presence of decline, at the role of that decline in generating rebellion and confrontation, at how leaders attempt to manipulate the masses, and how this issue pervades both the past and the present. In this context, the collection’s closing poem, ‘On the Lord General Fairfax’s Coat at Leeds Castle, Maidstone’, becomes pivotal:

For a few sand grains of your transience,
your infamy in arms through Europe rang.
Now eyes undaunted pass over your swanky doublet
in search of café or shop, maze or grotto.
outlasting you—who are dust, a dummy torso—
is not your name but a sartorial vanity, up-lit,
while Public Fraud, in new clothes that always fit,
stokes hydra heads of rebellions you cannot quell.

The sentence structures here are complex, almost old-fashioned, yet placed alongside terms with contemporary connotations such as ‘swanky’. And then the ‘doublet’, an anachronistic term in itself, is juxtaposed with the present-day shops that visitors browse.

However, the poem’s crux, and that of the collection itself as a whole, lies in the invocation of hydra heads of rebellion. The reader is invited to consider not only the Kentish Rebellion itself, but also more modern social and political unrest. Brexit, for instance, comes to mind through the mention of Europe, all in the implicit awareness that Kent was a key leave-voting county.

In light of the above, it’s worth asking a couple of pretty much rhetorical questions. How many contemporary UK poets actively and regularly engage with history as a subject matter in their poetry? Of course, the answer would be that very few do so, and for that reason alone, Robert Selby’s collection immediately acquires significance.

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Nevertheless, its importance grows further once the reader starts to worry away at their own consequent doubts over the nature of authority and power over society, accompanied by further questions about identity, about what it means to be European, British, English or even Kentish. In other words, while The Kentish Rebellion might seem only to focus on events that took place centuries ago, its ramifications reach into the present and then into the future. We ignore them at our peril.

Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. Following two pamphlets with HappenStancePress, his first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, was published in 2017, and his second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, in 2023. Recent poems have featured in The Spectator, The New European and Wild Court. He blogs at Rogue Strands.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has more than 3700 subscribers. It is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – poems, features and reviews – on Substack in the future. Like this one.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

Round the back of the Dining Hall,
a redbrick block of them, open
to the elements, unchanged
since my father.

A better bet were the parents’.
Absorbent paper, and because you had trekked
to get there, a modicum
of privacy.

Or, much later, the girls’.
No one was allowed near these.
Plus you had to know one.

Nobody escaped from that time.

‘Bogs’ is from Plymbridge by Anthony Wilson (Worple Press, 2026) — big thanks to Worple for letting us reproduce it here.

Is it a pamphlet? Is it a book? And does it matter which Plymbridge is? I’ll work out what I think about that that as I read it, but for starters I check with a pamphlet editor, who insists that her pamphlets have no more than 20 poems. Plymbridge has 24, so that makes it a book. Another pamphlet editor tells me 24 is definitely a pamphlet. But look at the price: does £10 make it a book? (That’s 42p a poem.)

Some years back, it was simpler: you’d could have said books have spines and pamphlets have staples, and staples limit the number of sheets that can be folded together. Contemporary printing has changed that: out with the staples and in with the glue – so now, for example, all of Verve’s pamphlets have spines (and those I have on my shelves range from 12 to 31 poems). Yet still with us seems to be the supposition that pamphlets can offer a good way for younger poets to start publishing, as well as the notion that published poets can use the pamphlet form to explore a specific theme.

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I start by mentioning these thoughts because I find them getting in the way while reading Plymbridge – how to place it? – are my expectations about pamphlets / books interfering with my reading? (Yes they are.)

Plymbridge “is named after the hidden wooded valley on the northern edge of Plymouth close to where Anthony Wilson now lives. Rich with wildlife, it is also marked by its industrial past” is how the cover blurb begins. The book opens with a long two-part poem about the rivers Exe and Plym, both of which have wonderful evocations of water, from some “pea-green lagoon-sludge” in the Exe to the Pym’s

[…] reverse-eddies
crawl up-

stream, what was
mirror

surprised to find itself
rainbow.

(It’s a shame, though, when there is plenty of blank space to play with, that the very first page has been set with a terrible page turnover, cutting off “a beach of brown froth / at rest” from its stanza’s final line, “on a beach of grey shale.”)

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This rivers poem – and, likely, the cover image of an empty nest tangled in bare winter branches – are all that we have of Plymbridge itself: perhaps for Antony Wilson, Plymbridge is the place to look back from, a place where memories resurface for the book. Schooldays certainly do – from ‘Fresh Air’s “drum solo in Los Endos, / so loud we miss the bell / at the start of prep” to the effective compressions of ‘Time in a School House’:

Riotous choirs, punishment dawns.
Eventually, trunks, large cars.
And Squire said have a nice life.

There’s also a poem titled ‘Bogs’ (goodness, I’d forgotten about school bogs) and one about a launderette. I remember reading and re-reading this poem, ‘In the Launderette with Adam Zagajewski’, when I first came across it in a magazine. The narrator takes a book by Polish poet Zagajewski to the launderette and, among chance encounters:

[…] I gave a reading
of your elegies to the empty drums,
your parents clearer than childhood.

The ‘you’ of the poem ‘Class’ is another poet to whom Anthony Wilson gives thanks. After reading Careful What You Wish For, “Cover-to-cover and back-to-back twice, / as I do, once before sleeping / then between zeds”, his thanks are for being made “richer” by it in a wonderfully convoluted train of thought in which he borrows the tumultuously long sentences, which the (un-named) ‘you’ flourishes so casually himself. (Goodness, that type of long sentence structure is obviously infectious.) Anthony Wilson doesn’t name this poet ... but does offer the clue of “Carcanet, 2015” if you don’t recognise the book’s title.

Similarly, the poem ‘The Singer’ leaves you to work out it’s a poem of thanks to Andrew Rumsey (now Bishop of St.Albans).

Between their lines, many poems carry a sense of looking – and of appreciation. That’s probably true of the ‘found’ poems, too. ‘Biographical Details’ is a ‘found’ bio pulled from Faber’s Poetry Introduction 7, which had me wondering for a while which of its poets “Now lives in Southampton”, when I know which one

Has completed research
onto the impact of acid rain

on Cumbrian tarns

and – since that researcher doesn’t live in Southampton – the penny dropped about how the poem was built from its ‘found’ fragments in that book.

Adam Zagajewski appears again (named) in ‘Adam Zagajewski Visits Lvov’, a poem found from Should We Visit Sacred Places? translated by Clare Cavanagh. He opens the hotel curtains to the garden

where one of my nineteenth century cousins,
a lawyer and a poet, caught such a bad cold
that he died soon after of pneumonia and ever since
has been reduced to an elegant shadow
in an oil portrait.

In a lighter vein, even body parts get their appreciation in ‘My Knees at Sixty-Two’:

How present you suddenly are
after years of ignoring you
by doing nothing
more than getting up each day
and going in to work.

This looking-back may well be preferable to looking ahead: “I am frightened of bungalows” is nicely understated. “Please / do not send me there!”

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I find myself referring to Plymbridge as a book, rather than a pamphlet. It has the feel of a book; it has pages I can move between, poems I can re-read – but just when I’m getting into the swing of it, here I am left sitting on the tarmac, finding it’s all over. It’s too short. I don’t recall ever having said that of a book before.

Addendum: In view of recent headlines about accusations of rape on the C4 programme Love at First Sight (where the TV company matches people up and they “marry" at first sight and then see how they get on), I must also mention Anthony Wilson’s short poem ‘At first Sight’ – yes, he anticipated the problems and has already written the poem: “it’s clear she can’t love him, can’t bear / even to look at him.” The second of his two stanzas hastens to explain. He’s “appalled at myself /... a show I found by accident, / after my thriller had come to its grisly, inevitable end”. (Now there’s a line to ponder.)

Jane Routh has published five poetry collections with smith|doorstop. Her first, Circumnavigation, won the Poetry Business Competition and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection; Teach Yourself Mapmaking received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has taken first prize in the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition (with the title poem of The Gift of Boats) and in the Strokestown International Poetry Competition. She contributes reviews and non-fiction to several publications.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3700-plus subscribers. It’s run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

When the after-party has wound up
and Johnny Depp and John Wayne are long gone
to the next hot ticket in the next hot town,

men with trucks come to break down and take apart
the viewing lounge, the steel pole, the 400 kW sound system
in a kind of reverse stop-frame animation

and the grass unflattens itself from the weight of impressions
and the horses approach, alert to the smell of cordite,
the fine print of ash on the mountain,

the echo of star mines in blue and red and gold,
silver salutes hitting the high white notes
and smoke trails like dead men’s fingers.

Here, now, in the valley, feeling the air still
shudder from the impact of the sonic boom,
I wonder what we’ve been sold.

‘Spirit in the Sky’ is from Vox Wah-Wah — watch the ‘Spirit in the Sky’ film-poem embedded further down in the review. Buy Vox Wah-Wah from New Walk or if you are in the EU email Hilary for a copy.

Rock’n’roll takes centre stage in this new pamphlet by Hilary Menos, backed by that evergreen trio, Love, Sex and Death. Here are Hendrix, Chuck Berry and Etta James, Pink Floyd, Sinatra and Elvis. They’re caught out of time, playing their famous solos, dazzling in their sequins and rhinestones, creating the world of sensation and spectacle that for better or worse we still inhabit, back when that world could perhaps be thought innocent. Typically of Menos, just as much attention is paid to what happens behind the scenes, where the limelight doesn’t reach. The first poem of Vox Wah-Wah, called ‘The Queen of Tone’, is a celebration of Hendrix’s performance of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, but also of pick-up winder Abigail Ybarra who

controll[ed] the tension, winding in just enough air,
her hands shaping the resonance of every Fender guitar
with consistent inconsistency
so Hendrix could hold and shape raw sound
and find new tone for the old tune.

Because (as Menos might have added), in rock‘n’roll there’s no such thing as an unstrung hero.

‘The Queen of Tone’ is a good scene-setter for the collection, assuring readers new to Menos that this is a poet whose work can be engaged with deeply. Most of the poems are superficially straightforward, but later readings suggest the depth of Menos’s knowledge and intention. The original ‘Star Spangled Banner’ was a war poem, written as an American patriotic response to the British after the Battle of Baltimore in 1812. In Menos’s version, the way in which Hendrix’s performance is described with reference to the lyrics (“the gunfire, the sirens, the screams and the moans / the mournful bugle forever calling lights out”) reminds us of this fact, but also makes us believe that Hendrix himself knew what was at stake when he began to play it. The 1812 war saw thousands of enslaved Black Americans side with the Brits in the hope of emancipation. Hendrix’s own ancestors had been enslaved and, when this is borne in mind, his famous rendition gains moral force as an inescapably ironic comment, played by an American patriot, of the contortions inherent in African-American identity.

On another level of interpretation, the challenge to “hold and shape raw sound” can be read not only as a description of Jimi’s axe-work but also as the predicament of poets. Menos’s previous pamphlet, Fear of Forks (HappenStance, 2022), mostly comprised still-lives and domestic sketches – albeit with more zombies than that summary would suggest – but Vox Wah-Wah is a return to the dynamic matter of 2013’s Red Devon (Seren, 2013). Menos is drawn to action and display, and to look back across her work is to realise her persistent fascination with themes and imagery of controlled violence, such as the busy slicing and chopping involved in farm machinery and food preparation or, here, the technical skill and histrionics of rock music performance. She evidently enjoys applying formal discipline to all this speed and noise, and much of the pleasure in her poetry is an effect of the dynamic tension between action and restraint. Sometimes, the collision of unruly subject matter and Menos’s own linguistic zest seems almost too much for the poem to contain, and a dramatic peak is reached – like a wild trumpet squeal – before conditional order is restored.

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As in Red Devon, the poems are built out of conversational phrases in a deceptively offhand, even slangy register, with frequent ventriloquism and addresses to an implied reader. This base-level colloquialism is inclusive and disarming, and it increases the range of Menos’s poetic vocabulary, turning the dial away from the highfalutin and towards the earthy. It is also a very effective foil for the unexpected tonal shifts into beauty and sobriety, melancholy and mystery that are a feature of her work. Metrically, too, Menos’s poems are varied and full of interest, or better say wit. They exhibit a gleeful pleasure in sound, being underpatterned with slant rhyme and rhythmic surprises, while potentially complacent lines are enlivened by the insertion of extra syllables. Look at the effect of ‘fabulous’, for example, below:

When you picked me up, I knew you’d take me home
for my feel, my finish, my fit and my fabulous tone

or, in ‘Spirit in the Sky’, the unexpected placing of the word ‘down’:

When the after-party has wound up
and Johnny Depp and John Wayne are long gone
to the next hot ticket in the next hot town,

men with trucks come to break down and tear apart
the viewing lounge, the steel pole, the 400 kW sound system
in a kind of reverse stop-frame animation

These techniques were already at play in Red Devon, but in that collection, excellent as it was, sometimes the verbal effects looked to me like effects, whereas here they give the impression of being fully integrated into the poems.

Much contemporary poetry feels insular and effortful, every drop of personal drama wrung out. But Menos’s gaze is outward-looking and generous. She is interested in other people, their choices, drives and excesses, and she shapes their lives into vignettes that are not only informative but also subtly interrogative. Many of the poems in Vox Wah-Wah offer astute assessments of rock and roll culture, in which enjoyment of the thrill and spectacle is balanced by awareness of what a dark and exploitative business it was, especially for women. It is possible, and rewarding, to read the collection (as the essays of Joan Didion or Camille Paglia are read) as a sympathetic but clear-eyed commentary on American pop culture. Menos knows the dark obverse of the permanently performing American self, and the potholed souls of those who are forever speeding on in pursuit of a gimcrack ideal. This culture is ripe for satire and critique, and sometimes Menos does not hold back; yet she also recognises its pathos and beauty. This can be seen in ‘The King of Porthcawl’ when, for a moment, one among a myriad Elvis impersonators channels our universal homesickness; or in the weird and beautiful ‘Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground’, which imagines Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson travelling through space in one of the 1977 Voyager satellites:

The enamel cup wired to the headstock of Willie’s guitar
clinks against the dash. Chuck fingers the neck of his Gibson
and rehearses the opening riff to ‘Johnny B. Goode’
as the stars bloom and pass by, bloom and pass by.

Putting your fingers to your neck is of course a common index of anxiety, and this detail is all the more moving for being included so gently. Such sympathy isn’t, perhaps, apparent at first reading in Menos’s poems. But return to them, and a consistent ethics shows through the knockabout storytelling. Her love of craft and care, her appreciation of artistry and eccentricity, of uninhibited flair, is confirmed also by her quiet condemnation of egotism, waste, and carelessness of others. Menos loves a party but she never forgets that it will end and that someone will have to clean up afterwards. ‘Spirit in the Sky’ (quoted in full at the top of this review) is scathing about the crassness and vapidity of a certain sort of Hollywood ending. Johnny Depp and John Wayne have visited Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado ranch to witness his ashes being shot out of a cannon. In the aftermath, “the grass unflattens itself from the weight of impressions / and the horses approach, alert to the smell of cordite”. The poem ends:

Here, now, in the valley, feeling the air still
shudder from the impact of the sonic boom,
I wonder what we’ve been sold.

Mostly, though, I think of Vox Wah-Wah as a collection of sounds about sound. It even has an American accent, featuring expressions like “laying down funky grooves”, “hit the sack” and “it ain’t never comin’ back”. This bothered me at first, but now I think it’s a necessary part of the poems easing into character.

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To write well about sound you need to be a good listener, and it seems to me that Menos’s ear is improving with every new book. Vox Wah-Wah describes plenty of bellowing, honking and screaming, yet also “the soft throb of crickets” and “the tiptoe of sticks on rubber pads”. At the same time, as I’ve said, the music of her own lines is increasingly assured. The voice that could be heard emerging from its influences in Menos’s earliest published poems, and which came of age in Red Devon, seems to me now among the most distinctive and enjoyable in contemporary poetry. In ‘Used & Vintage’ Menos writes that “with use and age come depth and resonance”; in context, the appreciation is directed at her partner, the musician Andy Brodie, but it could stand equally as a comment on her own craft.

As the Rolling Stones almost sang, I know it’s only poetry (but I like it).

Steven Lovatt is an editor, teacher and writer, living in Swansea.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3600-plus subscribers. It’s run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of the poems, features and reviews on Substack in the future.

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As a student I joined an on-campus club called the Experimental Media Forum. Each week, one of us would curate an event for the rest of the group. My input, one week, was to bring in the Flaming Lips’ four-CD album Zaireeka. For the intended aural experience you have to play all four CDs at the same time, while sitting on the floor eating pizza (pizza? Really? — Ed). Between us we had a set of desktop speakers (I had already ripped the album to my laptop’s iTunes library), a CD player, a Do The Right Thing-style boombox, and a Minirig connected to an mp3 player. It was awesome. Another week, someone organised an Andy Warhol retrospective. I remember watching the whites of DeVeren Bookwalter’s eyes flicker in 16 frames per second (shot at 24 frames per second) in Warhol’s 1964 short film Blow Job. The Experimental Media Forum did basically what it said on the tin. So did the film Blow Job.

At the end of the year, the Experimental Media Forum exhibited at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, East London. For the exhibition, I asked two computer science students in the club to make a program that could read a poem, take each word and run it through a thesaurus, and rewrite it. Or reiterate it. It made semi-nonsense poems one step removed from my original poems. We projected these new ‘poems’ onto a section of wall alongside the originals. They revealed themselves, word by word. It was called ‘Poet my thesaurus’. Other people made other things. We blew our own trumpets.

I don’t remember much about the two computer science students that helped me, but they were studious, in it for the fun of the challenge, and willing to take my silly project seriously. They liked it (I think), and I liked them. And we wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for this club which connected like-minded people on seemingly opposite ends of the art-science spectrum.

The coding took them a couple of weeks. They got stuck on search limits for free users of online thesauruses. ChatGPT could probably write a watertight program in seconds. But that’s not the point. ChatGPT can do lots of things. It can’t find enjoyment in any of them.

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More human than human

Who should poets write for? For other poets, for competition judges, for social media followers? For new readers, for old readers? Or for themselves?

In the race to produce poetic content, computers are winning. A year or so ago, Nature reported that AI-generated poetry had become indistinguishable from human-authored poetry. We have overstepped the threshold. “We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems,” says the study. This means exactly what you think it means. Researchers Brian Porter and Edouard Machery found participants in their study were “more likely to judge an AI-generated poem to be human-authored than a poem that actually is human-authored”. Others have identified this as the “more human than human” phenomenon. It is now present in the domain of poetry.

AI-generated poems were also rated “more favourably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty”, which led to their mistaken identification as human-written.

Why might readers prefer AI-generated poetry? One reason is that human poetry is complicated. This makes (some) readers misinterpret it as incoherent, like AI slop. Study participants were more likely to use variations of the phrase “doesn’t make sense” to describe human-written poetry than to describe AI-written poetry. This makes AI poetry “more accessible” and … as a result? … preferable, it seems.

There’s a lining, but I’m not sure if it’s silver.

The participants in the study were non-expert readers. They naturally expect to prefer human poetry to AI poetry, but to enjoy a poem, they first need to understand it. They don’t want to pursue a poem; they want the satisfaction of getting it. (Only “expert” poetry readers actively prefer poems they don’t understand, runs the logic. They assume there’s more satisfaction in having to work to understand something original and/or complex than there is in getting something simple immediately. They enjoy the pursuit. Put it another way: they’re bored of clichés.)

Accordingly, the non-expert readers of the study prefer the more accessible AI-generated poetry, which “communicates emotions, ideas, and themes in more direct and easy-to-understand language”. As a result, they “mistakenly interpret their own preference for a poem as evidence that it is human-written”. Happens to the best of us!

These are the poets featured in the study: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T S Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Dorothea Lasky. (There’s a whole other essay to be written on this selection.)

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Revenge of the humanities

What about the recent history of AI? Well, under Steve Jobs, Apple synergised the liberal art and tech disciplines. Engineers made things that worked, art people made them look pretty. The result was the iPhone, a very pretty thing that worked well.

And what’s the most significant technology of our time? Beer. Sliced bread. LLMs, apparently, or Large Language Models, also called AI chatbots. ChatGPT. Grok. Gemini. Claude. They’re infiltrating workflows, workplaces and work-from-homes like nobody’s business. Tech bros are putting lots of money into them. Competition is fierce.

What makes a chatbot a good one? Well, it has to perform any task instantly and brilliantly, whether that involves troubleshooting a section of coding, suggesting dinner recipes based on what’s in the cupboard, or engaging romantically with its user. That’s not all. There are things it must not do. It must not help people code viruses, or cook meth. It must not induce psychosis. (I wrote about this sort of thing here.) In other words, it needs something resembling a moral compass. And, as LLMs are the interface by which most people interact with AI, they also have to be lifelike, likeable – as easy to talk to as possible. That’s what keeps users hooked. (And they do get hooked, see Neuroscience News, here.)

How do you train a machine to be lifelike and likeable, let alone ethical or creative? Or to recognise originality, bias, nuance, quality? Chinese tech companies are hiring people to train AI in literary and artistic expression. But they aren’t hiring engineers. Successful candidates need diplomas in humanities disciplines – literature, history, philosophy, the arts.

Daniela Amodei, who cofounded Anthropic, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, has a degree in English literature and says “studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever”. “The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important,” she told ABC News earlier this year. “And what I mean by that is when we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent [emotional intelligence] and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people.”

So, a poet then?

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Poets smell when a line dies

On Reddit, I found people discussing the idea that poets could be among those training artificial intelligence language models – specifically to write better, and recognise better writing. “Most of what breaks in LLMs”, one user wrote, “is vibes: subtext, tone shifts, metaphor that isn’t just a dead simile, cultural nuance. Engineers optimise loss; poets smell when a line dies.”

“If we’re talking dataset curation,” wrote another, “I’d rather a room full of editors, poets, translators, and comedians picking texts than scraping everything and praying. Pay them. Credit them. And let them define ‘quality’ beyond correctness. LLMs are already decent at facts; the missing layer is taste. Poets are basically taste engineers.”

I have interacted with Grok. I asked about the relative roles of writers, poets and AI poets. It came up with this:

Writer (prose): “Here is what I mean.”

Human poet: “Here is what it feels like to mean it — because I have lived it.”

LLM poet: “Here is a convincing simulation of what it might feel like to mean it, drawn from everything humanity has ever written about feeling.”

I thought this was quite good. Limited, but succinct. AI can never experience anything; it can only aggregate all the ways human writers have written about their experiences, and produce text based on that.

Here’s journalist Sam Kriss, explaining what he sees as one of AI’s creative writing pitfalls:

Early in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes one of her characters looking out over the coast of a Scottish island: ‘The great plateful of blue water was before her.’ I love this image. AI could never have written it. No AI has ever stood over a huge windswept view all laid out for its pleasure, or sat down hungrily to a great heap of food. They will never be able to understand the small, strange way in which these two experiences are the same. Everything they know about the world comes to them through statistical correlations within large quantities of words.

Kriss and Grok agree: the AI cannot draw its own parallel between two experiences, because (of course) it cannot have experiences.

The most human humans

In early 2026, The Observer ran three articles about Zoë Hitzig, a research scientist and “anti-tech bro” who quit her position at OpenAI over the company’s decision to introduce ads to ChatGPT. She feared for the privacy and psychological safety of the chatbot’s 800 million weekly users, and likened the monetisation of ChatGPT conversations to the Pope selling “a trillion confessions”.

Hitzig is also a poet, and her poetry may well have made her more employable. She has published two collections, Mezzanine (Ecco, 2020) and Not Us Now, winner of the Changes Book Prize (Changes, 2024). Not Us Now is about the future of language. Its “future world” is “remembered in an even further future”, in the words of its blurb. Post-post-human computer entities reminisce about simpler, post-human times. Language is both “survivor” and “cargo”. As such, it “delivers [I would say ‘attempts’] an astonishing act of ventriloquy in reverse”. The book won big – a $10,000 cash prize, international distribution and a launch event in New York.

So, poet: check. Poet writing about computers and language: check. Dual passion for linguistics and technology (and a PhD in economics from Harvard): check, check. What more could OpenAI want? “If you wanted the most human humans training your machine learning,” suggests the Observer’s Melissa Denes, “you might go out and hire a poet.”

Another poet in the AI crossover rabbit hole is Sasha Stiles, from California. Stiles has spent years developing an AI “alter ego” called Technelegy, mostly by uploading data sets of her own poetry to the OpenAI interface. The result is a generative language system trained on her writing, and a book of poetry she describes as “AI-powered”. She frequently collaborates (her word, not mine) with Technelegy. They recently exhibited at MoMA. ‘A Living Poem’ is an “infinite text powered by human imagination and computer algorithms”, which “rewrites and performs itself anew every 60 minutes”.

Ring any bells? It sounds an awful lot like my art project ‘Poet my thesaurus’, which (quite rightly) never made it out of Hoxton.

I like the first entry in Hitzig’s Not Us Now. It’s a lovely William Carlos Williams-esque prologue, and I’ll quote it here:

This intro, however, lulls you into a false sense of security. My problem with both Hitzig’s Not Us Now and Stiles’ ‘A Living Poem’ is that they don’t seem to have been written for a human reader. Trudging through Not Us Now I felt neither engaged nor compelled. Page after page, there are obstacles to basic comprehension, let alone enjoyment. It seems to me to be literally designed to discourage a human being from reading it. As for Stiles’ work – I find it almost impenetrable. You can find videos of MoMA visitors sitting on benches amid her exhibits. Most of them are on their phones. It’s almost as if we, as human readers, are more inclined towards poems written by, and for, and even about, humans. As if poems written by – or with – computers are on some level inherently uninteresting to us.

Who would have thunk it?

Bruno Cooke is The Friday Poem’s Spoken Word Poetry Editor. He has lived in China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, cycled in 50+ countries, and written for several news, opinion and humour websites. Find more of his creative writing on his personal Substack publication called My Special Interest.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3600-odd subscribers. It’s run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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We were brought up in isolation from the history of the time. This was partly a rural isolation; Devon was really remote in those days, and London almost inaccessible except to the rich, though as a family we did quite well in this respect, having four free passes a year on the railway and any number of privilege tickets. National happenings were far away. But in our case it was also religious. Politics was for the children of this world.

I could not go on roundabouts, take part in raffles or games of chance, or do any dancing except Country Dancing. […] There was almost nothing Brethren were allowed to do.

Beer describes her sister and herself as “girls of working-class background with [a] possessive mother[…]” – as the title of the memoir indicates, Beer’s mother dominated the household, so much so that her father is a largely peripheral figure in the book, and steered her daughters firmly toward the middle classes. Beer had other ideas:

She does say, though, that her father had “a veneration for literature, especially the poetry of Milton” and the Brethren had at least one positive influence: “Hymns were the first kind of poetry I heard”.

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Despite her background, Beer’s memoir contains fond memories of her years up until her mother’s death, from cancer, in 1933, at which point Mrs Beer’s House ends. Beer went on to university at Exeter and Oxford and taught for seven years in Italy and then England, notably at Goldsmith’s in the Sixties.

In her Collected Poems (after which two late collections appeared), Beer included just 15 poems from her first two books. Foremost among them is ‘The Wake’, which opens with brilliant precision:

In his tall room my grandfather lay dead.
Downstairs late afternoon lurched like a bee
Round the perennial hearth shadowed with mourners
And the coals shone and clicked like gorse in bloom.

Both similes, so full of the outside world, beautifully illuminate the funereal interior. The poem contains further wonders – “And the river-green eyes of the little girl, my sister, / Flashed with swans” – and ends with a vivid, child’s-eye metaphor:

He was the Alps against the setting lamp
And in his heights we heard no news at all.
Only a bell nodded its way round the mountain
As the warm everyday beasts went home.

Thematically, Christianity’s lingering influence, though long since diluted, seemingly, into Anglicanism, appears in a significant number of her poems: in ‘Concert at Long Melford Church’ she sees “those coming out of church”

[…] spread all over the churchyard. They scan
The crowd, recognize, smile and shake hands.
By each tombstone a well-dressed person stands.
It looks just like the resurrection.

(Or perhaps Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’.) It would, though, be a mistake to label her as a Christian poet in the way that, say, Eliot or Jennings were, or as a visionary, like Blake or Kathleen Raine; faith doesn’t dominate her poetry. Her subjects were varied and surprising, e.g. an elegy for Constance Markiewicz; Pound in Italy; the Battle of Waterloo; Père Lachaise cemetery; ‘Transvestism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë’; etc.

Her best poems arguably stem from the personal, not just childhood poems but also those about her locale and daily experience. Take ‘Christmas Eve’, which ends with a metaphor that segues into an astounding simile:

As it gets dark a drunk
Comes tacking up the road
In a white macintosh
Charming as a yacht.

Beer’s Devonian identity surfaces in many poems: ‘Driving West’, ‘Return to Sedgemoor’ (“I first made love on a battlefield, / I remember – though not which or who – / And realized there was a difference / Between love and war: I don’t remember what”); ‘The Lie of the Land’, about the miraculously safe crash-landing of an Exeter-bound flight in a field near Ottery St Mary; ‘The Scene of the Crime’, about Lorna Doone; and ‘The Branch Line’, which, with trademark neatly-turned phrases and unobtrusive rhymes, is a key poem. It relates the passing, in 1967, of the last train on the Beeching-axed Exmouth to Budleigh Salterton line, a subject which, given her father’s profession, must have been dear to her heart. Initially, the tone is cynical:

Photographers were there,
For the only time perhaps
Since the railway groped
Down into these shires

But the poem proceeds to stress the importance of the railway: “The villages that gave / The stations their names / Were always out of sight, / Behind a hill, up a lane, / Dead, except when a train / Fetched somebody forth alive.” The line’s axing, “has left no ghost / Even”; yet, the ending spills into undisguised bitterness, in stark contrast to the previous indifference, and implicitly compares the axing to an altogether different kind of cessation:

My past has been defaced
Because it ran together
So often with this line.
Trains exist elsewhere
But different, sinister:
Heads, looking out for a last
Good-bye, freeze and weather
To the sky, as at Tyburn.

Beer frequently wrote about the seasons, but without sentimentality. ‘The Underground Garage’ would seem to be an unlikely subject for a poem; in Beer’s hands, though, it becomes an existential tour de force:

Now the bad breath
Of the garage meets the no-breath

Outside. Two months ago Hyde Park
Breathed mildly, wetly and its leaves
Fell in a twist of scents. Winter
Has made everything too dead to smell.

‘November Evening’ is more disconcerting; eleven lines across four stanzas, with large leaps between them. Its opening lines are lulling, but as soon as the description of the moon as “brown enough” appears, one knows that this poem is extraordinary. That weirdness continues in the opening line of the second stanza, which is shocking in both content and expression, but redolent of the language of young-reader books: “The child sets fire to the house”. The reader is then thrown by the explanation – ‘Hoping to see his fireman father / Clanging up the street in uniform’ – for the boy’s behaviour (it’s interesting that Beer uses ‘child’ before ‘his’ reveals the gender). The third stanza leads somewhere else still:

Nobody now bothers to please.
Frill after frill has blown off
The avenue of skeletons.

The generalising, self-contained first line augments the strangeness. With that “Frill after frill”, which is either scathing or merely descriptive, the next two lines possess a pleasing ambiguity beyond the face-value meaning that the skeletons, presumably put up outside houses for Hallowe’en (or the Day of the Dead if this is Mexico or another Latinx country), have been stripped of much of their decoration by the same winds which have denuded the trees. The final stanza returns to the leaves, and puns on ‘soles’, which, following the third stanza, recalls All Souls. The off-rhyme pattern of the line endings adds a modicum of coherence to an otherwise disquieting poem.

Beer brings her great technical skill to bear in longer, elegiac poems too, like ‘The Conjuror’, a beautifully funny poem wrought from attending a funeral, and ‘Lost’, her heartfelt response to the Penlee lifeboat disaster of 1981. ‘The Conjuror’ is a poem which could easily have been over-egged, but manages in its four quirky quatrains to evoke a wholly believable life out of death. In ‘Lost’, Beer’s approach to tragedy is exemplary in how it acknowledges and shows the impact of the events on the wider West Country community. The distance from Upottery, in East Devon, where Beer lived, to Penlee Point, in Cornwall, where the lifeboat was based then, is “two moors away and three lighthouses” as the poem says, but the congregation are nonetheless greatly affected by it:

Yet when the vicar paused in his prayer that Christmas Eve
There was true silence in the church as though
The lost souls had been found for a few minutes
Who had no time for ‘Nearer my God to Thee’.

‘The Lost Woman’, concerning, or, rather, arising from, her mother’s death, was published fifty years after that event, reflective of its traumatic legacy. Beer and her sister, then 14 and 15 respectively, were not allowed to be with their mother at the end or to attend the funeral. It’s little wonder that the poem becomes fantasy: “She never returned and I never saw / Her buried. So a romance began. / The ivy-mother turned into a tree / That still hops away like a rainbow down / The avenue”.

It ends movingly and painfully: “But my lost woman evermore snaps / From somewhere else: ‘You did not love me. / […] You are the ghost / With the bat-voice, my dear. I am not lost’”.

Beer’s last, lovely collection, Autumn, opens with the superbly melancholy title-poem:

Weeds start up out of the wall now that summer has ended.
Holiday-makers already begin to turn yellow.
Shadows look brave but have lost the bone-marrow of August.

The poem finishes in a hospital, where “an old man, / Fenced in by chrysanthemums, […] follows the agile young nurse with his eyes, calling ‘Mother’”. It’s a quintessential Beer image; dryly finding humour in unlikely material.

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Beer wrote, “I have never been accused of imitating any particular poet”, and it’s certainly difficult to discern any major influences in Beer’s poems. She mentions a liking for Gray in her memoir, borne out by an early poem, ‘Epitaph in a Country Churchyard’. She also stated, “Our audiences at poetry readings have demanded that we go confessional, that we go American, with threats that if we do not we shall be labelled […] cold, academic or parochial”, but her tacit refusal to accede to those demands shouldn’t be mistaken for any kind of manifesto; conversely, her poems could be as intense and quietly personal as those of, say, Lowell or Plath, albeit not ostensibly influenced by either.

If there are any lines among Beer’s poetry which could be read as her own personal creed, of a highly successful woman in a then overwhelmingly male-dominated field, it’s those which close ‘In Memory of Stevie Smith’; sub-consciously at least, as much a portrait of herself, presumably, as it was of Smith:

A heroine is someone who does what you cannot do
For yourself and so is this poet. She discovered
Marvels: a cat that sings, a corpse that comes in
Out of the rain. She struck compassion
In strange places: for ambassadors to hell, for smelly
Unbalanced river gods, for know-all men.

If ever a poet were ready for re-discovery, it’s Beer.

Patricia Beer’s poetry from Autumn and Collected Poems is reprinted here by kind permission of Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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Lancing sits above a long shingle beach between its larger neighbours of Worthing and Shoreham-by-Sea. It was to here that Walker’s father cycled from Birmingham in 1932, during the Depression, in search of work. A carpenter, he established himself among the local boat-builders quickly enough to marry his fiancée on Christmas Eve 1933. Their first-born, Edward Joseph, arrived 11 months later, “in the room that was to be [his] for the next eighteen years”, in a small house on the Brighton Road.

In The High Path, Walker describes a meagre but largely happy childhood: “The living-room was more constricted than any I have been in since; we had no option but to be a close family.” The death of his sister Ruth, aged just six weeks, had a great impact: his mother was confined “to a mental hospital where she suffered enormously”. The outbreak of war put Lancing at risk of invasion. Walker’s father and Uncle Jack – his father’s parents and siblings had all moved down from the Midlands by then – joined the Home Guard, and the beach was tank-trapped and mined. His Uncle George was killed in action in North Africa. Later, one “terrible afternoon […] a policeman rapped at [their] seldom-opened front door” to say that Jack, “the least convincing pseudo-soldier in Major Moate’s improbable squad”, and who had evidently been a chancer, had been killed by a mine in a cordoned-off area where he “had been to gather firewood from one of the few houses still standing beside the road to the shipyard.”

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Aged ten, Walker started French lessons with ‘Mr Jupp’ (“Short, bald, fat, old, friendly and enthusiastically garrulous”) in preparation for the “eleven-plus examination [which] took place on Empire Day” 1945: “I knew that the rest of my life would progress according to how well or badly I performed.” He passed and transferred to Steyning Grammar School; then to St John’s College, Cambridge, to read Modern Languages (French and Spanish, primarily).

He married his childhood sweetheart, Lorna, in 1956, having proposed to her seven years before when they were just fifteen. Both became schoolteachers, and had four children. Like Sylvia Plath, Walker’s initial poetry publications credits included The New Yorker, the first of which, along with some short stories, earned him enough money to buy a house in Sussex, where he and Lorna lived until her death from cancer in the mid-’80s, as he went on to describe very movingly in The Last of England. In 1988, he married Lorna’s best friend, Audrey, also recently widowed, and, sick of Thatcher’s Britain, they mostly lived in Spain until he died.

Walker’s first collection, Fox on a Barn Door, unsurprisingly contains many poems set in Lancing. The first 11 map out the shoreline which Walker clearly knew intimately and loved, beginning with ‘By the Saltings’, whose lively terza rima propels the poem from its lovely opening, “When the wind is in the thrift / gently, down by the saltings”, to an existential ending: “alone / as you are and as fearful // as some crab beneath some stone.” The second poem (which enabled the house purchase) is the book’s major achievement: ‘Breakwaters’; eight five-line stanzas which, from the unsettling first line – “Elms are bad, sinister trees” – onwards, cover considerably more than the groynes’ physicality:

Ultimate green of eelgrass
soothes with the comfort of hair
all the tiny agonies
that crawl in hidden places

and sing when the tide is low
and death is not imminent,
scrabbling in an eczema
of pink and white barnacles
and mussels of midnight blue.

Through deployment of powerful adjectives and by making passive actions as prominent as active ones, the empiricist influence of the Movement poets and Walker’s slightly older contemporaries Plath and Hughes might be detected among these lines, including that acutely sensory “scrabbling in an eczema / of pink and white barnacles / and mussels of midnight blue”, though he had already developed his own distinctive voice. Walker then describes the scene as, “Terrifying as altars / by night, black, a sea-Stonehenge”, and personifies the sea and the breakwaters:

In his calm he will lap them,
then batter their waists away,
emphasize their Celtic heads.
And when they are old and raddled,
thin, thin as a Belsen arm,

they will stand bare and skinny
and their stringent, hard old hearts
will disregard his knocking.
Dour, malignant to the core,
they will try to outlive him.

The angst caused by the Cold War is undoubtedly implicit in the poem, with its allusion to the horrors of the war he lived through as a boy. Whilst we might now question the ethics of the Belsen reference, the Holocaust had long been on his mind. In The High Path Walker writes, “One Saturday morning [in 1945] my father made me look at the Daily Mirror photographs of Belsen. I saw lines of skeletons, each one with a vellum of skin stretched tight and membranous as a bat’s wing. […] ‘This must never be allowed to happen again,’ my father said quietly before walking away. He made this seem like my responsibility: which, of course, it is.”

‘Porpoises’ builds from a lulling, though characteristically inventive opening – “Sometimes in summer the sea / looks infrangible; dull steel / dimpled like a dinner-gong” – to another disconcerting, Darwinian ending:

And sometimes, along the shore,
you come across one stranded
like a great, obscene, black slug.
Age, exhaustion, impotence,
but no disease can kill them.
They die when they fall behind.

This run of dark, liminal poems finds its apotheosis in ‘Lancing Beach’, his first attempt in verse to address the death of his beloved Uncle Jack:

It was a sea-leukaemia
and the sea convulsed with it,
throwing up silver brit

and the body of a man.
Here it was they found him, here
with little eels in his hair,

and from his unstoppered husk
fluid flowed. Balls of black flies
rolled in the pits of his eyes.

One wonders how long and hard Walker deliberated before drafting such unflinching imagery, let alone seeking its publication. He ends the poem with words for himself: “The grief I cast is for me. / There is a smell of sickness – / I must come to terms with this.” Walker’s emotions surface throughout his oeuvre, but were never fresher than in this first collection chocker with imaginative and potent description.

Walker’s second collection, The Solitaries (subtitled ‘Poems 1964–5’) broadly continues where Fox on a Barn Doorended. Whilst some of the subject-matter might be slighter, his style is eccentrically ruminative, pessimistic and intriguing, and contains his trademark gift for compelling, surprising phrases and lines. Even in ‘Crocuses’, he accentuates the flowers’ brevity, as a metaphor for the human condition, rather than their beauty: “So, before our brooms burn through / the smash of bloom that springs ago / we left the wind to scatter, // briefly we pause: regret / the vacant seemliness / by which we live.”

In one of his boldest poems, ‘The Brothers’, he revisits his Uncle Jack’s death:

Winter was probable the August
I was nine. The leaning pipes
of tank-traps slobbered wet rust
at the end of our garden,
letting easterlies in from the sea.
I had had a month, perhaps,
out of the hug of Thermogene:
but now on my bed again
I crouched four-square for the heavy
brother of my asthma. I sobbed
at draughts by the window-jamb
and suffered the rising tide to toss
its rice in fistfuls at the sea-green glass.

In tone, distanced end-rhymes and assonance galore (probable / slobbered / sobbed; August / rust / easterlies; rising / toss / rice / fist / glass), the influence of Robert Lowell’s ground-breaking poems of childhood and family in Life Studieshangs heavily. But it’s mixed with the specifically British, Kitchen Sink-ish details of wartime austerity and with his boyish imagining that the explosion heard by him and his parents ‘sipping tea’ has been caused by a swan landing on the mined beach:

But, choking on sacks of empty
feathers the bang was strewing in my mind –
smashed enamel particles of beak,
shreds of black, rubbery web –
I left untouched the dainty slices
of my breathing, I vomited
air, fell slack with thoughts of eyes.

Then, easier, I saw my father’s tears
come sudden after the knock;
man’s tears, terrible, miraculous
as diamonds. Now Jack. Now Jack,
rare in the starry clover
as his other brother dead
among the sand by Tobruk.

The ‘k’s here – sacks / beak / black / slack / knock / Jack / Jack /Tobruk – underscore the tragedy. Walker’s recounting is masterly. That outrageous simile, ‘miraculous as diamonds’, is, perversely, more powerful because of its incongruity – and, perhaps, because the gasping repetition of ‘Now Jack’ follows. First George, now Jack. There’s so much else to admire, though: the word ‘strewing’, sonically similar to ‘stewing’; the unexpectedness of ‘my breathing’ after ‘the dainty slices of’; the surprise of ‘easier’, and its assonance with ‘clover’, which then chimes with ‘other brother’; and how ‘among the sand by Tobruk’ is rendered almost idyllic-sounding through that ‘by’, rather than ‘at’ or ‘of’.

The rest of the collection contains much to enjoy, despite a melancholy tone becoming discernible beneath Walker’s world vision. ‘Moths’, from which the collection’s title derives, is an atmospheric, Existentialist study as much as a nature poem:

When there is fog they come,
the solitaries, some
who pass your door and then
turn and pass and turn again.

They linger with harm in them
underneath the streetlamp’s hum;
criminal with loneliness
they sip the evening yellowness

sifting from the evening windows
still uncurtained.

The ascription of malevolence to the moths here is unfortunate, yet the mood, again, must surely be reflective of the threat of nuclear annihilation. (It can’t be a coincidence that the title of another poem is ‘Apocalypse on the jetty’.) Menace looms in that ‘uncurtained’.

Another of Walker’s heartfelt family poems, ‘Father’s Gloves’, is arguably the collection’s masterpiece; an extended sonnet of sorts, which grabs the reader’s attention, as his poems always do, from the outset:

Not garments. A craftsman’s armour
Worn to blunt the hooks of pain.
Massive, white asbestos mitts
He brought back from the shipyard
Hang cool by his blowlamp
And his sailmaker’s palm.

Whilst focusing on big nouns, these short lines, between six and eight syllables each, apparently contain a mixture of respect, pride and pity. The poem’s importance is enhanced by capitalising each line’s first letter. In the second stanza, he turns his eye on gloves worn for leisure:

He keeps them all, the pairs
We give him on his birthdays,
Crammed in drawers too full to shut.
Some of them may have a use
At family ceremonial:
But, christening or funeral,
Pigskin, suede, kid or calf,
We’d have him carry them, because
His hands are warmer with them off.

These lines are flush with love and understated joshing. The end-rhymes between ‘use’ and ‘because’, ‘ceremonial’ and ‘funeral’, and ‘calf’ and ‘off’ are more pronounced than in the first stanza due to their closer proximity; consequently, the ending has a neat formality.

The title of Walker’s third collection, The Night Bathers might deliberately allude to W.S. Graham’s 1955 collection The Nightfishing, and it certainly feels more expansive in theme and form than its two predecessors. Partly that is due to nine of its 33 poems being what the jacket calls ‘graceful adaptations’ of a roll-call of illustrious poets’ work: Hölderlin, Leconte de Lisle, Lope de Vega, Lorca, Montale, Neruda, Rilke and Verlaine. His Walker-isation of Montale’s ‘Portami il Girasole’ is appreciably lighter and more succinct than the turgidly verbose version published in the Penguin Modern European poets series the year before: “So bring me the plant that will lead me / There, where the sun’s depth rises, / And life is a spirit-vapour lifting. / Bring me the sunflower crazed with light.” Many of Walker’s finest contemporaries – notably Feinstein, Gunn, Heaney, Hughes, Levi and Tomlinson – shared his outward-, particularly Europe-, facing outlook; but Walker’s skill was born of genuine linguistic ability, honed at Oxford and on his travels. For all his poems of England, Walker was never quite a little Englander.

The Night Bathers nevertheless revisits familiar matters; not least Uncle Jack, in an elegy, ‘For John Charles Walker, Killed on Shoreham Beach’. This detailed, anecdote-heavy and affectionate portrait begins wryly:

I don’t think you would ever have approved
Of being in a poem. ‘Mushty, look,’
I hear your spectre saying, ‘keep it dark;
I wouldn’t want my mates to get to know.’
But, uncle, how else can I honour you?
Time’s gone when I could do the things you did.

Walker the nephew duly does keep it dark, as the poem progresses to its conclusion:

And when
I get most sick of my gentility
And all my careful life’s futility –
Pruning the bloody roses for next year,
Setting the prunings tidily on fire,
Sweeping the ashes away – why, it’s then

I almost envy you that booby-trap.
All alive-o you strolled to pinch firewood
From the one innocent house that still stood
On Shoreham Beach. You never knew what it meant
To look for blood in your daily excrement;
You never knew the mine that blew you up.

Walker sustains the poem’s a-b-b-c-c-a rhyme-scheme across seven stanzas without it ever jarring. In The Last of England, Walker extolled Larkin, and it’s easy to note the influence of Larkin’s formalist technique upon Walker’s poetry – and possibly of the former’s studied misanthropy.

This poem aside, The Night Bathers is the least coherent of Walker’s collections, and more like an assortment. Nonetheless, it contains some typically first-rate nature poems – e.g. ‘Swallows’: “Blue is warm of swallows’ wings: / rich spillings of their sapphires / glint along the dark, nettled end / of garden” – as well as musings on his and his children’s childhoods, including the rather peculiar title poem, in which he worries, it seems, about how despondency might be inherited: “Dark is a lenient harm / over Cardiganshire. // I am alone as now / my son is alone.”

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Walker’s fourth collection, Gloves to the Hangman, continued his tradition of eye-catching titles. Again, it contained translations – five; of Góngora, Laforgue and Quasimodo – among its 21 poems; again, comparisons of his versions with those in the Penguin series are instructive; and his adaptation of Laforgue’s ‘Pierrots’ provides a pleasing collection-closer. But it’s Walker’s own poems which shine. The 10-stanza ‘A Celebration for Autumn’ displays Walker’s great gift for discursive yet precise poetry of time:

Something has wearied the sun
To yellow the unmolested dust
On the bitter quince; something is lost
From its light, letting waxen bees drown
In their liquor of fatigue.

As ever, it sounds as good on the ear as it looks to the eye: the internal rhyme between ‘bitter’ and ‘liquor’ helps. It’s a beautiful, mournful poem which deserves to be read and appraised in its entirety.

The book continues with a succession of fine, but downbeat nature poems: ‘One Magpie for Sorrow’, ‘Snow in Southern England’, ‘New Forest Ponies’, ‘Letter to Barbados’, addressed to his brother, and ‘Polecats in Breconshire’, which ought to be included in any discerning anthology of British nature poetry:

And all the while there was night
they would shark through the thickets,
incising behind the skull
beasts that would be the pellets
of their pleasure. Armoured with

stench, and teeth to score tungsten,
they would slummock on fat eels.

In Walker’s attentiveness to the animals’ behaviour and his verb choices, this poem, like many, exemplifies how impressive Walker’s nature poetry was. There’s no attempt to drape the creatures in myth, but simply to present them as his senses perceived them, occasionally with an implicit comparison to human existence.

Gloves to the Hangman also includes a rare long poem; seldom does a poem of Walker’s stretch much beyond a page or two, however ‘Pig Pig’ is a nine-page, 13-section poem, the epigraph of which gives the collection its title and which tells the story of how a sow in Falaise in 1386 was sentenced to mutilation and hanging for having attacked a child. Whilst it represented a brave attempt by Walker to venture beyond his comfort zone, its narrative plays out more as drama than poetry and constitutes a rare false note in his poetic oeuvre.

By the mid-70s, Walker’s poetry output had slowed. Burning the Ivy was to be his last collection until 1999; another slim volume, again of just 21 poems. Curiously, the cover photo, of Walker looking stymied by middle-aged spread and ennui, mirrors the contents, which are thick with discontent; concerning funerals, elegies, raptors, snakes, and maddeningly hard-graft gardening: “Nine years ago I killed the ivy: / But once more it swarms the ancient wall / Round my plot” (from ‘Ivy’). One of its quietest poems, ‘Night Rain’, is among its loveliest:

I have brought
into my garden everyone
I love, even those an ocean

separates, to share the taut
perfection of the unscented bud
and the waxen feel of the leaf.

I wish them all roses – though if
it were in my gift, surely I’d
keep back the sound of rain on them

by night.

‘Mountain Ponies’, too, sees Walker distilling natural beauty: “They gazed / in sleep, nuggets / of fresh-hewn coal / their wide-open eyes; // still as an ambush; necks thrust to the moon.”

With such innate flair, it’s almost unfathomable to understand how Walker was subsequently unable to write poetry for the best part of 20 years. ‘You need a strong stomach for poetry’, Walker wrote. His belated comeback, the again-splendidly-titled Mangoes on the Moon, was very much a last hurrah. 23 poems set in Australia comprise more than half the book. Those at ‘home’ tackle difficult subjects, above all Lorna’s death: ‘In the Side-Ward’ has a pained sequel, ‘For His Dead Wife’: “Forgive me, that you looked the bride / You’d been; who slept at peace, alone, / Warm after love; one from whose side / So furtively I’d slipped”. Other poems pay dues to various relations, including Walker’s second wife; and, finally, address his new, emigre life in Spain:

Time was, days long lost amid the dark groves,
When I’d have braked, stopped the engine, looked
Hard for hard, sour little oranges concealed among
The lacquered, evergreen swags; when all was
Unfinished orchard, for ever memorable. Not now.

How marvellous it would be for a collected edition of Walker’s poems to appear. The last word is his: ‘What poets see around them at times of heightened emotion are the images of their inner landscape; all else gets screened out, as irrelevant.’

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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The importance of family is evident right from the off, in ‘Egg Time’, a paean – dedicated to the poet’s Yorkshire mother – to eating a boiled egg:

[…] May this teaspoon
teach my tongue the taste of lunch hour
on a school day when I’m six, hugging
the bump under mum’s dungarees.

Even in this short extract, one can intuit Mnatzaganian’s poetic skill: the unusual but highly effective wish cast by that “May”; the jaunty meter; and the economical and subtle conveying of information to the reader, especially that last, rather lovely image mirroring the shape of the egg. That the dedication reveals that her mother’s name is Madeleine adds to the Proustian nature of the memory.

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It is, though, Mnatzaganian’s patrilineal, Jerusalem-Armenian side which imbues the pamphlet with its most intense flavours and memorable lines. ‘My father taught me at night’ recounts how he whispered “love words into the womb”, at first in Armenian and then:

[…] in West Bank Arabic
to darken my hair and make my heart
strong enough to live:

Ahlen wasahlen habibti.
May you arrive as one of the family, darling
and tread an easy path on your way.

More languages follow. Mnatzaganian’s mixed heritage yields a diversity of experience which she bestows upon the reader as a gift to be cherished. In ‘Araxi’, one of the pamphlet’s many highlights, we watch her “aunt’s comely neighbours in Jerusalem”:

They spoon spiced coffee into a steaming pan,
watch it bubble, foam and slowly rise three times
and three times stir it back into peace,

soothe it with sugar and fill row after row
of tiny cups to warm the mourners of Araxi, 85,
whose house the priests now claim as theirs[…]

The accretion of detail here, augmented by the anaphora of “three times”, is very impressively rendered. The poem ends unforgettably with the majestic image of the priests sitting, “bearded and beautiful, waiting for baklava // bought fresh this morning from the souk / by Araxi’s daughter who leans against a wall, / pale with jetlag and a migrant’s guilt.” It is Mnatzaganian’s ability to say so much with such concision which makes this poem so enjoyable.

The marvellous title-poem is one of three commemorating Mnatzaganian’s Uncle Hagop. It relates, wonderfully, how, years ago, he “planted lemon trees outside his house / where small passionate tortoises collide each spring / with the hollow pock of a distant tennis match” and goes on to depict him, very movingly, as he neared the end of his life. An elegy, in the form of a direct address to Hagop, is equally moving; but it’s the third of the poems, ‘Uncle Hagop in Stratford-upon-Avon’ which is arguably the most remarkable. In it, Hagop tries a spot of wild swimming:

His joy buoys him up like Dead Sea water.
Floating head and shoulders high, he walruses
his favourite lines:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

If music be the food of love

He’s in his element, twice.

The natural comedy of this scene is enhanced by that ‘walruses’, an enviably perfect piece of poetic daring.

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The women of Mnatzaganian’s family, herself included, are no less heroic and worthy of celebration, as some of the pamphlet’s best poems amply illustrate. The densely-layered praise-poem ‘In Praise of Armenian Cooks’ encompasses the genocide of Armenians undertaken by the Ottomans in 1915 (and which Turkey still refuses to acknowledge) – “I cook in memory of women / who lifted heavy breasts / into the mouths of children / whose fragrant heads / were snatched from their arms / and broken against walls” – and her forebears’ tradition of making dishes which Mnatzaganian continues: “Let’s make lahmajoun, ma’loubeh. / Mince the lamb fine, grind allspice. / […] / Our children are coming home.” Three poems feature Mnatzaganian’s daughter, and three feature Mnatzaganian busying herself in maternal assistance to her son, including ‘Food Run’, which describes her loving compilation of what my own mother used to call ‘a Red Cross parcel’, and the bittersweet loveliness of the couplets in ‘Cake Again’:

When there’s no way to touch
or give anything but words

it’s time to reach for butter eggs
spice syrup honey nuts apricots,

to melt-stir-beat myself into a bowl
and ask what more to add of zest

or juice to his tomorrow.

The absence of commas to punctuate the list of ingredients is well-judged, as is the compound verb before that surprising yet vital ‘myself’ – as if she really is putting herself into the cake which, as the poem shows, she goes on to take down to the Post Office for despatch to her son away at university. Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter also poignantly touches, in ‘Intifada Street’, on Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians; in this, as with the rest of its bountiful poems, Mnatzaganian’s word-choices are suffused with a palpably inherent and generous sense of love, warmth and humanity.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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Opener ‘King’s Mill’, a three-part exploration of Sansom’s Nottinghamshire roots, unfolds like the map which triggers it. Here is Sansom’s distinctively conversational syntax:

That other King’s Mill, the hospital, is marked here too.

[…]

They all lived here in time, another brother
though only briefly, quite suddenly dying
of pneumonia, the old man’s friend – when I arrived,
breathless, the cousin I asked which ward
told me with a smile the morgue, and I never thought
to hit him till now, and still don’t really,
dead these days as he is too.

Long-suppressed anger morphs into characteristic deadpan humour, a difficult trick to accomplish without appearing trite – while he’s no formalist, Sansom is as highly-skilled as any contemporary poet; as evidenced too by the spaced alliteration of ‘brother’, ‘briefly’ and ‘breathless’ and the assonance between ‘ward’ and ‘morgue’. The poem’s final section contains Sansom’s manifesto:

I look and it’s all here. The M1 runs out South
to the big noise, the road to somebody’s success,
and North in time for us to the M18
and happy Cleethorpes, the kids just as they were.

Family life and love, far from London’s glare, trumps all. Sansom underlines that sentiment in ‘Twice Round Me’, recalling his own lineage: “That generation who never learned to drive / stayed put or only moved in walking distance.”

‘Brian’, about another of his brothers, packs a conspicuous emotional punch, mixing a recounting of painful events with Sansom-as-narrator’s thoughts:

I drove thirty virtuous miles
with the dozen years of our growing up,
to say I’m here and sit with him in the dayroom
once a week for a month, though he was there
longer.

This jumbled use of time- and distance-units foreshadows Brian’s ECT:

What do I know?
His sister thought it would work, they had to
try something. And as she pointed out later,
‘cheaper than drugs, cheaper than talk’

‘Larissa and Sienna’ beautifully portrays a happier familial scene, of young granddaughters:

Lala, calm
behind (inside) a Peppa Pig stickerbook,
a year from being able to read, and Sisi
the big sister looking on, sideways,
just about to comment. The cavern
of a car holds them in their baby seats.
I could cry looking at them.

A similar tenderness dominates several poems about friendship, especially ‘Barbara and Derek, Derek and Barbara’:

Night was all talk,
Blue-jean Derek, Jean-Paul Derek, nervy
Gitanes fingers, Blue Oyster Cult sweatshirt
and John Berryman beard. And Barbara
like an aunt, brilliant in a travel-ironed blouse
with plenty that she didn’t need to say.

The rosy memories are undercut by a poignant thought:

I never thanked you, but I thank you now,
a decade too late, Barbara and Derek,
Derek and Barbara and Dinah the dog.

Lanyard includes more overt elegies; for poets – ‘Gerard Benson’ (“Your Barrow Poets’ single / topped the Australian charts”) and ‘Poetry Society’ (for Sarah Maguire: “So many spoke / because of you”, a line that could equally apply to Sansom, and to Ann, his wife, for how they inspire poets, of all ages, to write their best poems) – and family, as in ‘Phone Call’:

[A]nd then there’s Auntie Tad
and Auntie Olive too who loved me
so much I still have the birthday mug
You’re The Cream In My Coffee
with a stave to sing in your head
when you made a drink.

The positioning of ‘so much’ exemplifies how cleverly Sansom uses enjambment to create different emphases, enabling a perfect balance between sadness at the individuals’ absence and the warm glow of their memory.

The list of cherished places which Sansom has commemorated throughout his career is long, and Lanyard adds to it: Ullswater, Halifax, Whitby, previously celebrated in 1994’s January, (“Another time just then and there / a nice American asked which / was Dracula’s grave”), and Notts. again, in one of the highlights, ‘Alfreton and Mansfield Parkway, June Evening’, in which Sansom quite marvellously distils what he observes:

Three drunk women are fighting
on the Nottingham platform,
in the same pair of glasses, owls
out on the town. They could be

my sisters. A train comes in
and they stop like actors
between scenes. On they get,
off they go.

Once more, creative use of enjambment is notable, and prefigures the poem’s melancholy conclusion. Similarities to ‘Adlestrop’ – the quatrain form, the rural railway platform backdrop, the same month, and the contrast between Thomas’s “No one left and no one came” and Sansom’s “On they get, / off they go” – may be coincidental, but I suspect not.

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‘Darter’ is another of Sansom’s fine sport poems; as ‘darty’ a poem about darts as one could imagine:

Hour after hour with the same three darts
thrown the same Zen way, week-in week-out
for the idea of a nine-dart checkout.

The title-poem closes the collection. On Radio 3’s Free Thinking Sansom recently referred to the lanyard which teachers wear as ‘a happy noose’. That sense is transmitted by how Sansom sees knowledge, however fleetingly, being absorbed:

The lanyard meanwhile is a badge of office.
You put your head in like taking a medal
perhaps even the gold, ok, not the gold,
but you were there, fifteen minutes, long enough
it transpires to look up, coming round to a sea
of careful faces, listening to the music.

Prize-judges and newcomers to Peter Sansom’s poetry might feel it’s insufficiently metropolitan or on-trend, but they would be missing out, because his output is full of gentle, bittersweet and funny moments, the work of a poet and person whose outlook on life is immensely engaging, engaged and likeable.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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Purely narrative poems are rare in her oeuvre, and those that do exist are discursive, like a film or a novel branching into sub-plots which may or may not be resolved. Her exterior focus has not become rehashed Imagism; nor have her inward investigations been detained in the Confessional.

The 34 poems in Fool, Stoddart’s first collection since 2015’s Alive Alive O, are, in general, noticeably looser in form than their predecessors, with more white space. That freedom assists the conscious quest(ion)ing expressed within the words. Stoddart ranges dazzlingly across the nature of time, reality, happiness and self in what feels like an understandably feverish, obsessive anxiety. From the off, self-doubt and notions of self-knowledge are front and centre, as the poet reflects on her younger self training in physical theatre at École Jacques Lecoq:

and it wouldn’t be so bad to die then
being as I was so without fear
so without anything
being as I’d found who I was
in the act of being
that girl on the bench
fool that she was
for all that she didn’t know.

Only in the title poem does the word ‘fool’ appear to be deployed in the sense of the archetypal figure as in, for example, King Lear; moreover, the senses of ‘being fooled’ and ‘foolishness’ are the principal concerns – how one is fooled by appearances, and how, and in what circumstances, one is a fool; and whether these matters should be accepted or fought against through a questing for knowledge.

If that sounds dull, Stoddart’s poems are anything but. At times, the quest seems almost unbearable for the poet in its examination and, later, in its relentless self-examination. The child-like querying of ‘What is a Question’ is answered at the start of the next poem, ‘Perfect Field’: “But then I think having all the answers / would be a bit like being dead.” The way the poems are ordered in the book is important, because they flow into each other. In the next, ‘Second Nature’, a long unbroken prose poem, an implicitly self-berating statement sparks off a serious of digressions:

I have always been very bad at remembering facts. When I would like to be someone who has some purchase on the fundamentals.

As much as say the influence of Bishop, Brock-Broido possibly, or Donaghy, there are shades of great prose-writers, maybe Berger, Borges, Marías or Sebald, and even the diverse exemplification in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, in the way that Stoddart shifts the viewpoint in her poems through time and place. In this poem, the focus turns, wittily, to sainthood (and then on to miracles):

Once I came across a modern-day saint in a church in Seville. I have to say I found it hard to feel reverence in front of a faded Kodak photograph. A saint is not supposed to have worn a cagoule or wandered down the aisle of a supermarket. But clearly I am out of touch. I myself stuck in a past of gloomy churches and flat impressive faces. What are saints anyway but our own better selves following some fierce instinct right to the brink of self.

Stoddart’s searching is never so deadly serious as to get stuck in blind alleys; or not to encompass the absurd, which reaches its apotheosis in the Beckettian monologue of another prose poem, ‘The Long Grass’ – “What am I doing here staring at the moments as they move and gather, gather and move” – and its facing poem, ‘Performance’:

[…] I don’t feel I know
very much at all
but my poems – look at them
waving their inky little hands in the air!

The theatrical connotation of that poem’s title continues in the next one, ‘Flowers for my Ego and a Dark Stage’, a concrete poem resembling a spotlight’s beam.

As well as metaphysically, Stoddart’s poems sometimes hark back subject-wise to those in her previous books: an intruder in ‘How I Come to Clean the Window’ – ‘Go little spider go!’ – echoes the poetic dissertation of ‘Spiders’; ‘What is a Tree’ links back to another gorgeous concrete poem, ‘Wild Pear’. It is enviable how Stoddart has constantly pursued certain matters, but always with a freshness of angle and expression, and with a technical brilliance masked by the deftness of her touch. She mixes the dark with the light as well as any poet writing today. The bleak, middle-age despair of ‘Cold and Lonely Wastes’ ends breathtakingly:

We want time to imagine
how it will be and what
we’ll find when we cup
our hands in the new
silvery pools not knowing
if it’s good to drink or if
it will sustain us

Here, as elsewhere in Fool, the absence of punctuation bestows a crisp spontaneity upon the thought. Two poems later, Stoddart returns to the realm of the eerie with ‘The Little Living Room’, an utterly marvellous tale (it opens “When I was nine / a family came to live inside me”) reminiscent of Calvino:

and so they’d climb up
into the little living room of my heart
where they’d sit in chairs and rock gently back and forth
and murmur about the day that had been

Among current major UK poets, Stoddart’s poetic voice is perhaps as hard to categorise as anyone’s, except in its excellence. Even more than its wondrous three precursors, Fool will demand re-readings to absorb its full richness.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

Haiku is a form, but it isn’t any old form and it deserves respect. Nevertheless, the ‘rules’ of haiku are there to be broken and it is futile to seek a consensus about what haiku is. Rather, it’s easier to define it by what it isn’t. The haiku poet and editor Martin Lucas wrote that, ‘Haiku isn’t as easy as just looking, and it isn’t as easy as it looks’. They’re not just nice observations or nature notes.

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Neither is haiku child’s play – it may be on the English National Curriculum but that doesn’t mean that adults shouldn’t expend serious effort on haiku. Haiku has the concept of ‘beginner’s mind’, that, very occasionally, someone new to haiku can write them with freshness and lightness; but, as with all literary forms, its most consistently proficient practitioners are those who have bothered to research its origins and history (as they would for, say, writing sonnets), to read the oeuvres of some of its finest exponents and only then, after practising their craft, to publish their own output, and do so sparingly.

Equally, writing haiku isn’t merely a tool for sharpening a longer-form poet’s abilities – though it very helpfully can be! In such a short poem, word-choices stick out; hence line-beginnings, line-endings, line-breaks, rhythm, internal rhyme and the mysteries of poetic sounds are as important in haiku as they are in longer forms – and arguably more so because there is nowhere to hide.

A haiku isn’t just any old tosh written in three lines of five, seven, then five syllables, any more than any old tosh written as 14 lines makes a sonnet. While most, if not all, accomplished haiku poets will have written some haiku which naturally fell into a 5–7–5 rhythm, it’s often too many – and padding out lines in a haiku is even more glaring than in poems in iambic pentameter. People who insist that haiku must be written in 5–7–5 are Flat-Earthers. Haiku’s essence isn’t syllable-counting, because Japanese sound-units aren’t directly comparable to English syllables, but its spirit.

Spirit? I hear you ask. Yes, a feeling of being in tune with the present and capturing that feeling in a ‘haiku moment’. Before you retort that that sounds like Zen (or airy pretentiousness), then it’s worth investigating haiku’s origins; though I won’t go into that here as there are plenty better qualified than me who have already written engagingly on the subject, among them William J. Higginson, whose The Haiku Handbook remains as good an introduction as any.

Yet writing haiku is about more than just being acutely attentive to your surroundings and what your senses are picking up. Translating that attentiveness into haiku requires a keen, intuitive appreciation of how, and why, a moment is special and worthy of recording in a brief poem. The worst criticism to be made of the proliferation of badly-written haiku on social media isn’t just that they lack poetic qualities, but that their subject-matter is banal and, crucially, that they are unoriginal.

Haiku shouldn’t tell stories either; its two parts shouldn’t be cause and effect. Two parts? Yes, they normally, though not always – and particularly not in one-line haiku – comprise two distinct parts, with an obvious or more tangential relation to one another. One of the parts is usually, but not always, a season reference or time-stamp. It is for the reader to sense the spark – comparison, contrast, connection, unifier – between those two parts and thereby complete the poem.

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The most memorable haiku tend not to be pyrotechnic ones but those which have an enduring, affecting resonance, with an emotional core derived, firstly, from a superficial reading of the haiku and the moment it articulates, and, secondly, a deeper, maybe metaphorical one. For example, a haiku depicting a moment in nature can possess an implicit metaphorical reflection on the human condition or state of mind – and which the poet might not have consciously intended.

Haiku possess a concise simplicity which all but forbids overt similes or metaphors, and conspicuous adjectives and adverbs. But they shouldn’t be simple to the point of unpoetic; the opposite is true. In his influential essay 'Haiku as Poetic Spell', Martin Lucas (with input from Stuart Quine) discussed how many of the most resonant haiku, including those written as one line, contain extraordinariness, so that they cast what he called a ‘poetic spell’. The essay is essential reading.

My addition to Lucas’s arguments is that the choice of verb(s) – active or passive – in haiku is key. (As ever, there are exceptions to this, because there are many fine haiku which are verb-less.) One verb is usually enough, and as the ‘action’ word it propels the haiku; therefore, it must be apposite, though not necessarily the most obvious – though neither should it be an exact synonym for the obvious one either. Too many poets use dull verbs, and dull verbs unsurprisingly make dull haiku. Haiku can seem so-what-ish and / or formulaic – at worst they can be trivial, clichéd, uninspiring, and generic – but the finest of them glimmer in the mind.

So let’s examine some examples. The following aren’t the best three haiku ever written, but each has exemplary qualities which merit close attention, as much for what they don’t say as what they actually do.

*

longest day
the slowest duckling
tries to catch up

(by Jack Barry)

Barry is one of a few contemporary American haiku poets who follow(ed) a simple, reclusive life, reminiscent of Thoreau, Gary Snyder (as fictionalised as ‘Japhy Ryder’ in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums) and Kerouac himself (in the haibunesque Desolation Angels). Their haiku exemplify an ability to let observations find their best poetic distillation, whether that takes a minute or years. This haiku was originally published in Presence in 2005 and later anthologised in Where the River Goes (ed. Allan Burns, Snapshot Press, 2013), subtitled ‘The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku’. It presents a familiar scene, and does so with an enviable simplicity which could easily have slipped into triteness without very considered word-choices born, I suspect, of intense looking and thinking.

The first line places the reader squarely in midsummer; we can feel the heat and the torpor. We know, too, that daylight will stretch into night. It takes a bold poet to use two superlative adjectives in one haiku, taking up a third of just 12 syllables. That ‘slowest’ serves three purposes: implicitly enabling the reader to imagine the duckling as the last of several siblings, almost certainly with a large, maybe growing, gap between it and them; reinforcing the sense of torpor, that any strenuous movement feels like hard work; and bestowing an unspoken sympathy for, or empathy with, the duckling and its plight: who among us hasn’t seen, or been, that duckling? It begs the question as to why the duckling is the slowest – has it momentarily been distracted by its curiosity to explore its surroundings and thus not noticed its family sailing away? That the two nouns both begin with ‘d’ and each follow one of the superlatives enriches the poem’s sonic balance.

Barry might’ve chosen a more explicit present-tense verb in the third line – ‘struggles’, ‘hurries’ or ‘rushes’ perhaps – but ‘tries’ is markedly more ambiguous, and so it opens up any and all of those alternatives. It also sounds better, because it’s one syllable rather than two. Is there an implicit ‘and fails’? And what about the infinitive verb? Would ‘to keep up’ have been better or worse? For me, ‘catch’ is simply the right one.

*

working weekend—
the Oxford Spelling Dictionary
shouts asshole at me

(by Hamish Ironside)

This poem, from Ironside’s 2018 Iron Press collection, Three Blue Beans, is what haiku poets would call a senryu, a haiku solely or mainly about an aspect of human life, characteristically lampooning a foible. Ironside arguably writes senryu which are as sharp and funny as anyone’s in the small pond of English-language haiku publication. In ‘working weekend’, we encounter self-deprecation; a laugh at the poet-persona’s expense, enhanced by a very British reference book blaring out a very American expletive when he assiduously checks a spelling. Beyond the comedy, however, lies a harassed individual at the old toad work, involving editing or typesetting, who’s undoubtedly aggrieved to be having to work at the weekend, either to meet a deadline or because of the money, or both, rather than relaxing and enjoying himself. As with much of the best comedy in any form, an underlying seriousness renders it bittersweet and consequently richer.

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A look at the structure shows that here we have the typical two parts: the first has a concisely expressed time-stamp (though not a season reference) and the second encompasses the action. Again, the poem’s verb is important: ‘shouts’ is an inspired choice, almost as if the poet-persona’s grievance has become paranoia. The choice of expletive, too, works well, through the rhyme of ‘-hole’ with ‘Spell’, and within the context of the third line as a whole, perhaps because the stress in ‘asshole’ is trochaic and because its ‘a’ sound is repeated in ‘at’. There’s an incidental end-rhyme between the last two lines which quietly augments the sound-pattern.

*

deep chords
from the practice room …
a bee stirs applemint

(by Peggy Willis Lyles)

This summery haiku, first published in the online journal , has a lot going on within its 2–5–6 syllabic structure. Note the structure: the caesura, or ‘cut’, comes at the end of the second line which puts extra emphasis on the content of the third line, which, in this case, it fully withstands and abundantly justifies. Instinctively, the reader presumes the poet is in a garden, and that the chords from a room in the attached house emanate from a piano. Maybe a young person is at their daily practice; or perhaps it’s a band rehearsing and those chords are coming from guitars. Are doors or windows open; or is the music loud enough to be heard outside? The poet can’t give the full picture in such a compressed form, and each reader may complete it differently, so the words effectively become shorthand. The poem’s adjective is noteworthy: as the opening word, it sets the tone, and as a word with multiple meanings, it opens out the poem rather than facilitating a closed, definite interpretation.

The ellipsis allows a brief pause before the second part: a focused, visual description, providing more specific information: it is the mellifluously-named applemint with which the bee is concerned. Naming it implicitly conveys the colour(s) of its flowers. Let’s look at the verb: ‘stirs’ is an inspired choice. Its half-rhyme with ‘chords’ falls subtly on the ear because the two words are separated by a line, but we see the rhyme also. (Of course, there is a more noticeable, fuller rhyme in the haiku, between ‘deep’ and ‘bee’.) Moreover, it’s a word which implies, and so economically, that the bee’s movement is loosening the nectar in the plant’s pinkish-white flowers, so that life’s cycle will continue. The music coming from the ‘off-stage’ practice room soundtracks the bee at its work. Perhaps the reader is also invited to discern a comparison, as if the bee is busying itself at the pace of the music, thereby providing a joyful, light and timeless picture of synchronicity. For a nanosecond frozen in time, all matter – both human and not – is in harmony. Here is Lucas’s poetic spell. The best nature haiku might just be the purest ecopoetry you’ll ever read.

In this essay, I’ve barely explored haiku’s possibilities. If you’re interested in haiku, then whatever you do, respect it like you would an old friend: don’t take it for granted and make sure you care for it.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

Mexborough lies in the South Yorkshire coalfield, and Parks’s inherited memories, and dread, of his father’s ever-dangerous career loom large. In ‘The Cage’, we see Parks’s gift for illumination as clear and bright as that of his dad’s miner’s lamp:

The cage was lowered
on a rusted thread;

the men were crowded in
behind steel bars.
And then began

the drop into the dark –
a sharp descent
that took the breath away

which afterwards he heard
in his worst dreams.
Through me his dreams persist.

Here Parks demonstrates a knack for knowing when not to adorn description. The straightforward adjectives nonetheless carry considerable weight because of their simplicity – the precariousness of that “rusted” for example – and the short-line and short-sentence form cleverly mirror the cage’s descent.

Among Parks’s major achievements is how he has addressed the bitter times and legacy of the 1984/85 miners’ strike and the subsequent demolition of the industry and its communities. It is no mean feat to write this well about ‘political’ subject-matter without letting partisan emotion overwhelm the poetry. Parks does so with admirable restraint and subtlety, and by placing it within the broader context of English history with its still-palpable struggles and scars of previous bloody conflicts:

Like this at Wakefield, Towton, Marston Moor
or any place where men have come together
to settle a dispute by force of arms:

helmets in the sunlight, push of pike,
a trampling down by horses in the mire.

(‘Orgreave’)

The poem ends brilliantly with the personal: “my father bringing home a bloody nose / to show he’d not been slacking in the fight.”

In ‘The Wheel’, Parks depicts ‘the slow dismantling’ of the collieries: “The slag heap was grassed over; it became / an innocent green mound where cattle graze.” Parks’s poem imagines a reversal of, and a revenge upon, Thatcher’s destruction:

Someday we’ll come with picks and dynamite,
dislodge it from its concrete plinth.
We’ll drag it from the valley floor,
aim it at the cities of the south,
set the wheel in motion, watch it roll.

Key to those lines is the use of ‘we’, the northern working-class community, in which some remain ostracised years later:

Sitting at the far end of the bar,
ignored by those who went on strike,
they spend all afternoon over one pint

or stare down at the carpet’s threadbare swirls.

(‘Strike Breakers’)

In that precise, unforgettable image, does the reader discern a hint of sympathy for the breakers’ desultory plight? Perhaps; but that – and how the poem and its title deliberately eschew the word ‘scabs’ – should not be taken as a sign that Parks’s affinity is anything but very clearly with those who “scraped the slagheap / for a bucket full of coal // or held the line at Orgreave”.

As an illustration of how well he writes about those who fought – and implicitly those who are still fighting – to gain full rights and recognition from the ruling class, Parks brings his tremendous ‘Jarrow March’ to a heartfelt conclusion:

And now the last of them is dead
I look out on the dripping rain
and wonder what it meant

or what it means to live without a voice
in this bland, slipshod democracy
we need to reinvent.

His masterpiece, ‘Elegy for the Chartist Poets’, lightly, but no less impressively, distils, over 86 couplets in six sections, his clear-sighted erudition, and indisputably proves that he is as fine a poet about English political history as anyone writing today:

In Manchester, in Sheffield, and in Leeds –
in all the places where their mark was left

the statues of the undeserving rich
gaze down impervious from their stone-hewn plinths.

The traffic slides and judders to a halt
where shopping centres interrupt the flow

of what we were and are or might still be.
Your songs preserve the bite and spleen of it

and when you sing them without compromise
the voices of the dead who sang before

join in to swell the chorus of your song.

The commanding register and details of these lines surely allude to, and bear comparison with, Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’. Note how that “stone-hewn” pointedly implies so much.

But Parks should not just be pigeon-holed as a political poet, because his range is wide. His love poems are rightly esteemed for how perceptively he writes about matters of the heart, as in ‘The Lighthouse’: “This is what it’s like to be in love: // to find perspectives shifting constantly; / to always be approaching some fixed point / but never arriving at its source”. Sometimes his romanticism is tinged with even more melancholic regret, none more so than in the beautiful ‘A Last Love Poem’, where the imagery exemplifies his trademark concision and turns of phrase:

That’s what it feels like these years on:
you were quite unexpected and it seems
I’ve used up all the images I know –
midnight stations, coastal roads,
red wine, high windows, lace and sudden snow.
Don’t be surprised if language fails me now.
I turn to face the sunlight. Let it go.

Here, too, as always, Parks lets the words dictate the length of the line and the poem’s overall form.

The book also contains superb evocations of place, both far-flung and nearer home, such as ‘Anderby Creek’, with its echoes of Larkin: “Something had edged me closer / to the brink, dissolving my identity // in sea and sand and air.”

What should a ‘selected’ ideally provide? A general introduction to the breadth of the poet’s oeuvre, which might then prompt the reader to seek out the collections? A mid-career retrospective which consolidates the poet’s reputation? A collation of all the flashier ‘greatest hits’ alongside slow-burning, quieter and often more resonant poems? In a beautiful production from Bob Horne’s Calder Valley Poetry, this generous selection fulfils all those objectives, and more.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

Your parties are legendary:
videos of Dixon of Dock Green
on a huge black and white television
to the sound of Captain Beefheart, Chicken Shack
and Duster Bennett live at Frank Freeman’s.

(‘Poem on the Decline of the Carpet Industry’)

As well as the madcap teenage bohemianism of Worcestershire, Yates captures the quiet, everyday closeness of family relationships and friendships, including a gentle mockery born of affection. The comical start of ‘Telescope’ leads to a lovely, fraternal conclusion:

November 2am frost. My brother
on a deckchair in the back garden
is dressed for it: balaclava, socks on his hands,
two overcoats and a blanket.

[…]

I give him the last of my chocolate
take off my shoes and socks and walk on the grass.

It’s a companion piece to a similar poem, ‘Oakworth’, in which their mother makes a cameo appearance: “She’s staying for Christmas. I leave her on the sofa / watching television in front of the gas fire.” By using the present tense here, as he invariably does, Yates invites the reader right into the scene, like a welcome friend.

This ability to write fine, homely poems about ordinary day-to-day living, usually without exaggerating or fictionalising, is rare. Yates is acutely attuned to what’s going on around him and makes art out of all kinds of unprepossessing matter: buying breathable membrane at Travis Perkins, predictive astrology, a conversation in the rain about bicycles, half-remembered dreams, shoes (an especially fine poem about his father), buying flowers for his wife. One of the book’s many highlights, ‘Baldwin Road’, exemplifies his ability with a cinematic flourish: “Dad cycles up the hill / on his way to work, haversack on his shoulder, / beret pulled low”, while, in a Kitchen-Sink-realism-meets-Blue–Velvet fashion,

Next door but one, the John Denver lookalike
is burying something in the garden, watched
by his new dog, ears back, tail moving.

This is more artful poetry than it initially appears, and Yates must have expended many thousands of hours of effort in making his style so apparently effortless.

From the reader’s perspective, it helps greatly that Yates’s philosophy is such a positive one. Like his confrères, Ian McMillan and Peter Sansom, Yates looked westward, to the example of Koch, O’Hara and other New York School poets, for inspiration (and permission, of sorts) to deploy humour – both to raise a laugh and as a vehicle to make, perhaps subconsciously, a serious point: that for much of the time, existence consists of a succession of pedestrian moments enlivened by fun, occasional oddity and, above all, the warmth of human connection.

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You might imagine all this to be overly blokey at times, but the joke in Yates’s oeuvre is often at his own expense, particularly in putting up with wisecracks from his wife and children. The comedy in his poetry is frequently disconcerting, surreal and dry, and reminiscent of the slow-paced drollery in Alan Plater’s three 1980s TV serials The Beiderbecke Trilogy. Moreover, one intuits that he believes – rightly, surely – that the comic aspects of living are a crucial part of its beauty. One stand-out poem in this regard is the splendidly-titled ‘I’ve just invented the Tai Chi Sprout Stalk Form’: Yates is practising various Tai Chi moves in the garden when his son, , “opens the back door / and lobs the sprout stalk at [his] head.” This leads to Yates incorporating the stalk into new moves, to which he assigns absurdly funny names such as “Sherbet Fountain Takes Umbrage and Spins”. The names then turn the second half of the poem into a delicious list-poem.

Occasionally, where Yates gives full rein to that endearing daftness, he takes the poem to a different place altogether, as in ‘Kidderminster-on-Sea’, where “You can buy cockles on Coventry Street, fish / for eels off the Swan Centre, cast your net / in Castle Street”. The poem then cleverly wrongfoots the reader by segueing into a soberingly poignant series of remembrances of characters from way back when. Among these is a down-and-out, Charlie, “shouting in greeting your name, a thousand / miles from Poland, the only English you know.” It takes confidence and skill to pull off a trick like that.

In the brief selections from Yates’s 2021 Red Ceiling Press chapbook Another Last Word, the silliness quotient is consistently high, to the point of being rather meta: it’s comprised of short monologues by, or dialogues with, his wife, who always leaves an amusingly choice bon mot hanging in the air, as, for example, in ‘DANCE’:

‘It’s great the way we dance around each other,’
I said, ‘when we’re getting the meal on.’
‘We only do that because you get in the way.’

Here, undoubtedly, lies the influence of Geoff Hattersley who has long plied a similar schtick. Elsewhere, Yates is just funny per se, in a nicely understated way, as in another brilliantly-titled poem, ‘The End of the World Again’:

I’m reading Exit Music from the shelf
I always bang my head on coming down the stairs,
we’re sharing a box of Maltesers and wondering
why we have to drive all the way to Cornwall
and rent a cottage in order to live like kings.

Yates’s range of cultural references is wide, and his interest in life and all its facets is deep. As to his poetic techniques, he is ordinarily neither formally nor thematically adventurous, and is instead happy to let the words and their musicality determine his poetic forms and to let his ear and eye dictate the line- and stanza-breaks without any deliberately unsettling or jarring jaggedness. In short, he trusts his material to work its magic. That may sound dull to some readers’ tastes, but this book shows that the results are, in fact, individually and cumulatively uplifting. That sense derives not just from the settings – the psycho-geographical ramblings around the West Midlands and beyond, including several poems set in Paris and other continental cities – but also from how the most incidental, quotidian things might trigger the poems. Sometimes he constructs them from a succession of non sequiturs, in recognition no doubt, that thought-processes, conversations and events don’t always follow logical sequences: ‘Phil and the Tension Wire’, for example, happily moves from examination of the ‘dodgy’ wire, through a diagnosis of the problem and on to an unexpected and delightful nature-note epiphany.

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As may be apparent, Yates is not an ‘issues’-driven poet, nor a flashy one, and that makes his style a little unfashionable. In lesser hands, this type of poetry could verge on the bland or complacent. But even when Yates’s poems are at their least consequential (and it has to be said that a few in the book only just about earn their place), they contain more than enough charm and wit to keep the reader engrossed. I’ve resisted the urge to quote more extensively from them because I don’t want to spoil their treasurable surprises. A lot of contemporary poets seem keener to tug at the reader’s heartstrings than to entertain. They might read Cliff Yates’s poems and learn how to do both.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

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Hattersley has had an itinerant poetry career; he’s been published by Littlewood, Bloodaxe, Wrecking Ball Press and Smith|Doorstop. He has now found a home at Broken Sleep Books, which is very good news indeed. Few poets can write poems which have as consistently brilliant openings and last lines as he can – and what comes in between ain’t bad either. Take ‘Stuck With It’, which starts and ends as follows:

He looks like he ended up with the face he earned
after smoking opium for ten years
through the oily barrel of a rifle

[…]

There’s an old jazz melody in his head.
Orange was the colour of her dress, then blue silk.
It’s good to think of stuff like that at times like this.

Some of Hattersley’s poems are like those word-ladders where you’re given a first and last word and a number of intervening blanks, and you have to change the first word into the last by altering one letter at a time: you know it will all make sense even if at first it looks impossible. He also writes fine portraits of odd, often fragile and sometimes criminally dangerous characters encountered in West Riding towns, such as “the ugliest gravedigger / in the whole of England” who’s “already threatened / to smack my face in once” (‘Head of Steam’). In ‘Bottleneck’, an old acquaintance is remembered:

He went to a very dark place
his wife tells us, her face like chalk,
and stayed there till the day he died.
We try to picture Pete in his dark place.

The last line contains both Hattersley’s dry humour and a more serious undercurrent. The backdrop to his poems is the post-Thatcher urban landscape in which employment has, for better or worse, long ceased to be industrial and steady, and “levelling up” is as fictional as it is gimmicky. ‘Warehouse’ revisits the impact of the old industries on Hattersley’s father: “We drove to work / in silence, more or less; / he was hard-of-hearing / from the steelworks – / fifteen long years then just like that / no more steelworks.”

In one poem, ‘Hey There’, the subject might be the poet himself, and its principal cultural reference has connotations which take the poem to a wholly different place:

How come you find it acceptable
to watch quiz shows all of a sudden?

[…]

You scaled Masada once like a gazelle,
now look at you.

This derision – which continues superbly with “You’re there like a bongo / no one ever bangs a rhythm out on” – is affectionately wounding. Its comedy, like Hattersley’s more broadly, isn’t straightforward, and is likely to catch the reader unawares. In ‘Grumpy’, what could just be a joyless rant about the detriments of train travel in the north of England, is enlivened by comic exaggeration concerning his fellow travellers: “God’s second son / could fly by the window on a winged pig // and not one of them would notice, / not one.” Occasionally, the humour can be very dark, as in ‘Knife’ which opens “Always carry a knife” and is short, sharp and surprising. It can also take off into a flight of fancy, as in ‘Action’ which starts “One time I was a computer salesman / who stapled his scrotum to this thigh for a bet / and that wasn’t even the stupid bit.” (It gets more surreal in the next stanza.) Hattersley can do knockabout too, though always with sombre undertones, as in two adjacent poems:

You were scoffing fish ’n’ chips by lock gate six
when things went BOOM! You were burnt black, hairless,
rendered quite deaf, and you lost your sense of humour.

(‘Another Fine Mess’)

Punching the same ragged riff half to death
the tuning all over the place
he just knew he’d never impress anyone. So

he did a Pete Townshend, which was a hoot,
and taught himself instead to drink eight pints
without losing control of the pool table.

(‘1970s British Blues’)

Both these poems are in tercets, a form which Hattersley frequently employs. There is consummate subtlety and skill in the shape and sound of his poems. It is not just their stanzaic aspects, but also their varied line-lengths, line-endings (the dramatic pause of that hanging ‘So’) and – crucially – musicality (it’s instructive to read aloud that ‘Punching’ line) that combine to bring the best out of the stories he tells. Anecdotal poetry is scorned by some critics of contemporary poetry for not being sufficiently high-register and apparently too easy, but – essentially – it is the making public of what were once private stories, for wider benefit. In the case of Hattersley’s poetry, I have no doubt whatsoever that it enhances the poetic wellbeing of the UK and beyond, and its production is far from easy. If the anecdotal mode was invariably the default of the New York School poets, then its transplanting with a Yorkshire accent and attitude should not be disparaged. But however much those poets influenced Hattersley, he is without doubt his own man. Nowhere is that better illustrated in this book than in the five-poem sequence, ‘In t’ George’, of dramatic monologues by various Wombwell locals in their own voices:

Ah’d love a good smoke o’ resin though
Afghan black, summat like that
Like it used ter bi, ah meeun, back in t’ days
Tha cun’t g’ wrong wi’ that stuff

Thi mind went fuckin’ ivvrywheeur

(‘4. Cockroach’s Lament’)

To write in dialect English is an innately political act, an assertion against the ever-increasing spread of received pronunciation and the privilege underpinning it. Here, Hattersley augments the nobility of that act by capitalising the start of each line, something he does in other poems only rarely. Each of the five monologues captures an individual’s cadence, whether airing resurfaced memories or simply in mid-flow about their current fixations.

A parody of ‘If’ provides a long, but memorable list-poem, encompassing gems like these:

and if Tarring Neville was not a village but a procedure
and if Peter, Paul and Mary had been called Dick, Balls and Quim
and if no one spent their life looking for stuff to sniff at

The collection’s third and final section consists of poems set – and/or presumably written – during the Covid pandemic. Hattersley recalls the unreal scenes already receding into history, such as queueing for ages just to get into the supermarket:

A Nigel Farage thinkalike
in front of me turns round
to give me his version of things,

which goes on and on
as the shopping body shuffles forward
like it’s not well, forty minutes

(‘In the Springtime’)

The tedium and pain of that period, which included, for Hattersley, the onset of his father’s dementia, reaches its apogee at the end of ‘Winter Lockdown Blues’ with “Sometimes I get so desperate I recollect / something in me tired of turning the other cheek.” I think most of us can relate to that. But we can also surely relate to Geoff Hattersley’s chief existential concerns: everyday cynicism, fear and general sense of dissatisfaction, interspersed by extraordinary moments which enable faint optimism to prevail. It is heartening to see the return of this unique talent whose wisdom and wit are as relevant and necessary now as they ever were.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi

His previous collection, Hotel Anonymous, was published by Pindrop Press in 2021. Some would say that a space of only two years between full collections is too short and must surely produce a dilution of overall quality; but not in this case; the pandemic presumably gave more time for Barlow to write. ( A Land Between Borders also includes all bar two of the poems from his 2017 pamphlet, A Promise Boat.) One poem – ‘Like Members of a Vanished Tribe’ – set during lockdown recalls the “soundbites infectious with statistics”. Covid times might also account for the even sparser, more liminal population within this set of poems. Barlovia is an unremittingly dark and unsettling region, if not positively medieval or post-apocalyptic. Barlow paints it without sentiment, as if he, or his personae, thrive on it:

here
on a small patch of land I’m hefted
and content in my lifelong discontent – borders,
boundaries, rules, fitting me like a carapace.

(‘The Hills’)

Even in town, human contact is merely to be guessed at:

I had a neighbour I never saw. No one did.
He was a hole in an untwitched curtain,
invisible life of gossip.

(‘Rumour in its Squat’)

If home is dubiously congenial, abroad, wherever that might be, is no better:

The town itself was soporific,
the inhabitants like sleep-walkers, eyes open
but fixed on a make-believe horizon.

(‘Getting Away’)

Maybe the poem, with its deadpan ending of “None of the pictures have come out”, is meant to be ironic. Gauging who the narrator is, or is meant to be, in Barlow’s poems isn’t straightforward and a simple equation of any of the lugubrious personae with the poet himself needs to be resisted.

Isolation is no more apparent than at the coastline, where the damage humanity is wreaking is also painfully clear in ‘Along the Coast Road’:

Sea’s smack of blood on the wind,
tideline a berm of kelp tangled around plastic,
gloop of spilled oil, the carcass of a gull
its harbinger cry still haunting the air.

The omission of an article before “Sea’s” bestows an immediacy which the poem, with its rich sounds, sustains as the narrator picks through flotsam and jetsam. That phrase “a berm of kelp”, connoting fortification, reinforces the sense of nature’s battle to survive. This oil spill is one of three in the book.

When the marine seascape is used metaphorically, perhaps for Britain as a whole, that absence of warmth, despite the best intentions, is keenly felt:

Wade ashore, breathe the island’s brokered air,
subverted history, quiet resolutions, easements.
And I’ll respond as if you were my own, you
with your grudges, your alien ways, me
resentful, old heart choked with judgement.

(‘The Isle of Discussion’)

The title of another poem – ‘An Island Break for the professor of Orthodontics’ – promises something whimsical, yet the content is still bleak:

A fish and oatmeal diet we might think healthy.
He’d have it otherwise: plaque
brought gum disease; in those days
no one over thirty died with their teeth in;
though when he went, he went with a full set,
amalgam and gold cremated with the rest

Only in the most nautical poems does Barlow belatedly shift the register – if not necessarily the mood – into dramatic modes, no more so than in the neatly-titled ‘Finn the Finn’:

our captain like a marionette
strung from swinging yards
paced and paced the quarterdeck

the slow neurotic march of him
our windless collective sigh
when up spake Finn the Finn
our fo’c’sle fixer

usually a card trick man
with now a claim to conjurie

Here, Barlow lets the wholly lower-case and almost punctuation-free language do his work for him in a more overtly musical manner than usual. ‘Sea Voices’ works similar wonders: “No matter how the wind blusters and breaks on your ears / or the chop slaps the sides or the surf rattle sits shells”. While you can’t sail a boat to Bolivia, you can clearly sail to Barlovia.

Another of Barlow’s trademarks is the mystery poem, which provides the reader with a fair amount of work to do; the type of poems at which Matthew Sweeney excelled. Although Barlow’s ‘The Deal’ and ‘The Hum’ (“wherever you turn it’s there”), for example, are intriguing, they don’t, alas, reach the heights of Sweeney’s black comedy.

The book’s final section is the most miscellaneous, including some ekphrastic poems and curiosities such as ‘Listen’, a stand-out monologue of a phone-hacker, its content as fine as the subject-matter is unlikely: “I’m an old hack listening in / to the heart, its complicated rhythms, / the sluicing of seconds, the dogged / morse of muscle”. ‘Witnesses’, in which the anonymous eponymous people are “here, there, everywhere”, concludes on Barlow’s familiar downbeat song of the otherwise unnoticed:

We know the score
and keep it, bear witness the future will forget

as it dissembles great affairs. Grist and fodder,
we’re a dumbed-down chorus no one listens for.

A few character studies, ‘Doorkeeper’, ‘The Old Abbot’ (“At the end of a long laboured silence, / he’ll step though the noise of the present // where everything lasts forever, / to disappear before his own eyes”) and ‘The Old Campaigner’, are pleasingly-turned, like poetic Toby jugs.

Barlow’s style and techniques aren’t showy, and his mostly stanzaic forms are generally traditional. Happily, he does produce the occasional flourish within them; for example, in one of his quirkier poems, ‘They Came down from the North’, one quatrain cleverly includes three incidences of ‘where’:

They came down through the borders,
the porous and mutable borders
where where you come from
is never where you find yourself.

It takes a certain amount of confidence not only to defy the grammar-checker in Word in that third line, but then to compound it by adding a third.

These poems are unfailingly well made, as one would expect from an artist–poet who counts the National among his competition wins, and many are individually excellent. But for me, as a collective entity, they somehow lack a spark. That’s partly attributable to the poet’s refusal to name people and places, which makes them insufficiently tangible and at the same time renders the poems they inhabit frustratingly generic. Moreover, too many poems are tonally similar. Sharper editing might have helped to address these issues, not least in the sequencing. Nonetheless, however dark the experience may be, we poetry readers need to visit the lands and waters of Barlovia every now and then.

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked for many years in local authority children’s services. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

Until recently we maintained the Friday Poem website (thefridaypoemdotcom) as an archive of 700 posts published between 2021 and 2024 (including most of the original Friday poems) but following a hack in late April we decided to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts – Friday Poems, features and reviews – here on Substack.

Help support The Friday Poem

Buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, especially to our regular donors. If you can’t afford it, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.

Support us on Ko-fi