Hiram Maxim invented many things, some less destructive than others. A pine vapour inhaler, for example, that he claimed could relieve asthma, tinnitus, hay fever and catarrh. He fondly named it ‘Pipe for Peace’. Others called it quackery. His first patent was for a hair-curling iron. Later came mousetraps, sprinklers, devices to discourage ships from rolling over, and the invention for which he is most famous: a recoil-operated machine gun. “If you want to make a pile of money,” a friend advised him, “invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.” Well, he did. And, they did. They also killed Africans (see Hilaire Belloc’s ‘The Modern Traveller’: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not”). It was a killing machine, and earned him much more praise than when he applied himself to inventing an “apparatus to prevent human suffering”, i.e. that stupid inhaler that he hoped might unblock people’s noses. The Maxim gun was an essential tool of imperial conquest; the ‘Scramble for Africa’ wouldn’t have been the same without it.

This is useful backstory if you want to fully appreciate Francis-Xavier Mukiibi’s poem ‘To The One Who Holds the Maxim Gun’, which was itself a response to an exhibition at the British Museum.

Mukiibi’s entry has strengths. He uses the tools at his disposal to maximise the impact of his poetry. We’re in a war zone – we don’t know exactly where – among infantrymen of the British imperial army. Staccato sentences and broken phrases mimic the uneven rhythms of combat; pauses, quick changes of pace and prompted audience claps reflect the rat-tat-tat of gunfire fading in and out. Even the stark blue lighting is on his side, not to mention whoever edited the video. The cuts match the line breaks. Overall, it is a slick, immersive production, building in a crescendo to a climactic (though ambiguous) pop. A gunshot. Whose? Mukiibi enunciates well, projects confidence, and has clearly thought about how best to bring life to the words he’s written. He has also written a decent poem: light on description, figurative when it needs to be (“trigger tremors through your bone until / your body reborn as blitz”), with repetition and quick line breaks to build pace and tension.

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But it is not the best of this year’s shortlisted performances. Nor is Takunda Muzondiwa’s ‘Diamonds’ or Maureen Onwunali’s ‘When I give up my seat for you’, though they too have their strengths.

‘Diamonds’ begins in the voice of a wedding celebrant – “We are gathered here today”, etc. – but subverts the register in order to highlight the suffering caused by the global diamond trade.

So, with this diamond ring
do you take joy
in how many Africans died mining your happily ever after?

To my mind, Muzondiwa abandons the conceit too quickly (and with too little subtlety), and the setup would mean more if the question were less rhetorical. In other words, I want the celebrant character to be more believable, to fool the audience for longer. The fact that the question can only have one answer – er, No – means the rest of the poem risks sounding like a rant. Perhaps the point is to be unsubtle, the subject matter demanding directness. Unless you’re a venture capitalist with an imperial bent, there aren’t really two ways to feel about the manufactured scarcity of diamonds, let alone blood diamonds. But poetry as a medium allows for so much nuance and ambiguity. Muzondiwa succeeds in her handling of colour and symbolism. White, innocence, sacrifice: she hates how the diamond “mimics ice, cold like the corpses that died to unearth them”. Red, blood, guilt: “We all clap till our hands bleed raw / leaving us all red-handed”. But the play structuring the poem, which begins to lull us into being guests at a wedding – a false sense of security – fails to realise its full potential.

So many unnamed men have been sacrificed ​
in the name of Michael Hill and Tiffany’s. ​
So tell me, is it wicked of me
to call this wedding a funeral?

Maureen Onwunali’s message is very different. ‘I used to think we were doomed as a civilisation,’ she says in her interview segment with the Forward Foundation. ‘And then I got on the tube.’ Hurrah, hope at last! Onwunali finds solidarity and society deep underground, in the “accidental eye contact” of strangers in a moving carriage of a London tube. “When I give up my seat for you,” she says in her poem (of the same name), “I mean, their attempts to divide us will always fall short. I know you were also born scared. We share the same furrowed brow.” Delivered with a knowing, unassuming half-smile, theatrics reduced to a few hand gestures, Onwunali evidently has faith in the words of her poem. As such, she doesn’t so much take us on a journey as invite us to sit. Sit with her – indeed, in her seat – and sit with the idea that strangers being cordial in a fast-moving underground box is, in and of itself, evidence of civilisation. ‘When I give up my seat for you’ belongs in the artistic tradition of locating beauty in the mundane, romance in the aromantic, and so on. It is a well-trodden path and, oddly enough, would seem more hackneyed and overdone were it not for Onwunali’s calm, steady delivery.

When I give up my seat for you on this London tube I mean
‘stranger’ is just an eight-letter word for blood that flows outside of me […]
Come share this recycled breath with me

But if it were up to me, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem - Performed would go to either Ellie Rose Amit’s ‘Frozen Fruit’ or Biff Smith’s ‘Dumbarton East’. The former for poetic flare and unfurling like a flower, the latter for taking me by surprise, and making me laugh out loud more than once.

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‘Frozen Fruit’ is about Amit’s first love, or first kiss. First extended bout of kissing, maybe. “We kiss for the following hour, in the MUGA”, Amit and Ruby, aged thirteen or fourteen, testing and dispelling the myth that being gay is contagious, and “this time the blade does its job”. The performance is tight, with controlled, precise cadence and well-held pauses. Repetition, subversion and a conversational tone make it engaging, accessible and delightfully light-footed. Amit told the Forward Foundation that a “seamless merging of theatre and poetry is what I hope to do with my work”. Their writing influences form an eclectic lineup, from James Baldwin to Little Simz via Leonard Cohen, Kae Tempest and the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. A year at Jacques Lecoq Theatre School in Avignon may have rubbed off: Amit has poise and timing; their movements are subtle and deliberate. And the poem stands up on its own, with changes of pace and mood written into its structure and syntax. Images echo throughout. Ruby is ruby, like ruby-red chard or the ruby Amit affixes to their crown – “a real queen”. Frozen fruit in the Nutri-Bullet; “I can’t move, I’m frozen fruit”; fruit melting and spilling “out of me and eventually onto Ruby”; “Wet. Wet. Ruby …”; until it comes full circle:

I am diced. I am dyked. I am fruit, in and around the Nutri-Bullet tip.
My hips are weak, hardly childbearing, my mother tells me the next
morning as she pours a kale and carrot juice into her glass with speckles of
ruby-red chard.

And so to Smith, Biff Smith, who insists, “Go to the open mics. There is much to be learned here”. Wise words, and Smith appears to have heeded them. ‘Dumbarton East’ is the most interesting of the five poems shortlisted by the Forward Prize, partly because it is not about any of the spoken word poetry topics typically filed under Done to Death. (Also because it is tightly rehearsed, varied, and weird.) Stage poets often mine deeply personal experiences for their poems. There are good reasons for this: relatability, scope for emotional connection, therapeutic value. But it’s also a get-out. At worst, emotionally manipulative. The most common downfall is being unoriginal. Earning solidarity is one thing, getting audiences to actually like your poem – your poetics – is another. What Smith achieves with ‘Dumbarton East’ is the delicate act of hinting at something deeply personal by talking about something completely different, and trivial. It is about a train station, and the idiosyncratic configuration of the Scottish rail network. Thank God!

“This is a love poem,” he opens. Black shirt, black trousers, boots. Intonated in crisp Glaswegian. “For a train station...”. Critiquing it feels like picking apart a joke, which only rids it of its humour. Yet here we are, our attention drawn to the fact that some towns (e.g. Dumbarton) have an East and a Central train station, but lack a West. Others have a West but not an East. “Odd, that,” muses the poet, building slowly and steadily this, er, train of thought. “Lopsided. Almost as though the town-planners overestimated just how much Dumbarton there was.” Quite. “Well, clearly not enough to balance the compass.” These are mundane thoughts; it is absurd to be imbuing them with meaning. And yet Smith brings them to life with ample silence, occasional flamboyances – just enough theatricality – and dynamics. He is absolute sincere; his movements are studied. He knows when to speed up, when to stop, and when to look quizzically at his open hand or suspiciously at the audience. (They’re laughing, by the way.) “Let us deal with one disappointment at a time.” The stark lighting also helps: this poem is about binaries, sort of, “a balancing of books, if I may”. For me, it just works. It’s tight, crisp, bizarre and delightfully funny, yet manages to hint at questions about why we love, what we love, how we find meaning in life … while sticking close to Smith’s preoccupation with, of all things, train stations.

I think then of the peace that comes in being forgotten.
And then how getting lost was the escape route all along.
And I wish for you your turn to ride on a one-way ticket
clattering happily down the Never Line, calling at Atlantis!
Shangri-La! El Dorado! Elysian Fields and a Wonderland!
Arriving at last at the one you never had and so loved the best
Dumbarton West.

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Bruno Cooke is The Friday Poem’s Spoken Word Poetry Editor. He has lived in China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, cycled in more than 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 more than 3800 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 – 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.

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who scythes the miles
screeching, sleeping
on the wing, then curves
towards a small hole
under the eaves
and, finding it filled,
arcs away without pause
as if she had not invested
the whole ocean in it

‘There’s a swift’ is from The Professor of Transformation by Elaine Ewart (New Walk Editions, 2026) — big thanks to New Walk for letting us reproduce it here.

The fifteen poems in Elaine Ewart’s evocative pamphlet take us on a journey of landscapes, birds and flight. Before we even reach the poems, the Contents page speaks powerfully of this journey: of blue tits and collared doves; of the fieldfare and the swift; of the nest, the playing field and the fen.

Ewart’s keen attention to detail runs throughout the entire collection. Although The Professor of Transformation does not shy away from large themes – its poems speak of history, loss and transformation – these concerns are always anchored in sharply observed details: the “small hole under the eaves,” the “knuckle-bleeding cold,” the “blunt pencil stub,” the “meagre beakful of spider legs,” the “spell of snow,” the “smell of cut grass.”

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At the same time, a haunting feeling of something lost or missing underpins the poems: something destroyed or searched-for; that which is lost when there is a lack of mutual understanding. This kind of absence is powerfully evoked in the innovative use of white space in the three-page poem ‘Inspector Vortex’. Ewart plays interestingly with form throughout other poems in the pamphlet too, from the devastating concrete poem, ‘Michaela brings bad news from the blue tit nest’, to the couplets in ‘Fieldfares’ and the interview format of the title poem, ‘Application for the post of Professor of Transformation’.

At the heart of this collection sits the glorious sonnet, ‘Take the collared dove’, which opens:

       Do a thing badly, often enough, and it becomes
       success. Take the collared dove: fucking all year round,
       pushing out eggs into a construction of three twigs.

Like the collared dove, the poems here persist, trying again – even in the face of “smashed shell and dirty yolk”, in the face of misunderstanding, lost love and unseen birds.

Tender, precise and urgent, The Professor of Transformation calls us to pay attention to the minute ways in which we encounter the world around us, showing us how attention and care can transform devastation into wonder.

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Rachel Bower is a poet and novelist from Bradford. Her debut chapbook, Moon Milk, was published by Valley Press in 2018. Her latest works are It Comes from the River (Bloomsbury, 2025), Bee (Hazel Press, 2025) and Family Lines (Faber, 2026).

Sprawl

She’s the sprawlingest bed-fellow said the maid
of the Duchess of Malfi. That am not I. I keep
on the whole to my lane. Except sometimes in sleep
I sling my right leg and arm sideways across the bed
in engulfing embrace and then, unopposed, wake
to find that you’ve gone. Not gone for a pee
or down to the village on your bike for the paper
but always, irrevocably, gone.

‘Sprawl’ is from Tumbling by Elizabeth Cook (Mariscat, 2026) — big thanks to Mariscat for letting us reproduce it here.

Tumbling will be launched on Monday 2nd Nov 2026 at 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Market Street, Edinburgh, with readings from Michael Stephenson and Elizabeth Cook and music from The Self-Righteous Brothers. Book your place at the launch here (it’s free).

I read the first dozen or so poems of this new pamphlet from Mariscat, then left it for a while. One poem — the sixth in the collection, a five-line, untitled piece — stayed with me and kept popping into my mind as I did mundane tasks around the house and garden. I later discovered it’s on the back of the book and in online publicity material, so I’m going to quote it in full:

I thought I would still be the me
that I was when you lived when
you died. I could not then see
that your death would bereave
me not only of you but of me.

Makes you think doesn’t it? Well, it made me think. About marriage, love, companionship, the way a couple grows together over the years, and how much of one’s identity is stored in a kind of shared memory bank. And then about how it might feel to have that memory bank removed, or broken.

There’s much to reflect on in Tumbling. Elizabeth Cook approaches the serious subjects of bereavement and grief with delicacy, precision and occasional light touches of humour. The pamphlet title, which has the obvious meaning of falling down but also the implication of clowning or acrobatics, fits the work well. These are poems about the “balm of being known”, memories of a generous Sicilian farmer offering “more fruit than we were truly able to carry”, and the reassuring and familiar “friendly fragrant fug” of coupledom.

The poet’s deep appreciation of such things runs alongside a profound sense of loss. In ‘Smoke without …’ the narrator remembers how she and her partner would work together in the garden, which is now overgrown and neglected: “The high grass chokes / the small parched apples”. In ‘Chair’, she dreams of a shared plan to repair and re-upholster the piece of furniture. On waking, she slowly realises that the chair isn’t even there, and that there is “nothing / for us to repair”. Losses and hurts are considered in depth and with subtlety, without veering anywhere near sentimentality.

The diction here is interesting and specific. In ‘Oiling the Tortoise’, the tortoise would “enquire of the foodstuffs ahead” and, after eating, its “equipage” moves on. In ‘Next time’, the poet proposes that she and her late partner should spend their next life together on the eastern coast of Sicily, near a beach with “whiskery / grasses and light / complicated seedheads”. And I learned a new word from the title poem, which opens, “Feu notre mère: ‘our late mother’.“ The idiom is new not only to me, but also (as it turns out) to the narrator’s brother.

Tumbling closes with a delightfully whimsical piece called ‘Balloons’, in which a man at the edge of the park holds a large bunch of balloons that “gently, painlessly, knock and bounce” together. Of course the poem isn’t only whimsy, and of course it’s about more than just balloons. It ends:

Some strain against their strings. He feels their tug —
the tug of his jostling, busy, beloved dead
wanting to be more free, wanting, perhaps,
to lift him from his feet and take him.

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Hilary Menos is Editor of The Friday Poem. Buy her books here (signed copies, and posted from France so the postage is a bit of a sod, sorry).

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3800-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 have republished some of the poems, features and reviews here on Substack, and will publish more 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.

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‘Las Cigüeñas’ by Matthew Stewart was our Friday Poem on 11/06/2021 — we chose it because it handles its subject matter so deftly and beautifully, from the opening image of the storks’ nest balanced precariously on the stadium pylons to the slightly ominous urgency of the last line. Stewart tells the story aslant, building a mood of unease throughout the poem and preparing us for trouble, so by the time we arrive at the rapid dash home in the last line we are in no doubt that what has been lost is more than just a football match.

Las Cigüeñas

The storks’ nest teeters on floodlight pylons,
bushy hair over thirty-two white eyes
that shine against the darkening skyline.

Just seconds left, the home team’s pressing hard
for a winner. He sits in Fondo Sur,
where he’s always had his season ticket,

and would normally scream at the lino,
the ref or their clumsy centre-forward,
but today the match goes on without him.

Two storks launch, swooping down across the pitch
to hopeful cheers. At the final whistle,
his eyes track their landing back in the nest.

Neither babies nor goals, that’s what they bring.
All of a sudden, he only knows
he’s got to get home to his wife.

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. His second, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance, 2023), is reviewed on TFP here. Recent poems have featured in The Spectator, The New European and Wild Court.

Matthew also writes and reviews for TFP. Read Beyond the Bubble, his piece on how poetry can reach out to a wider readership, or his essay on the work of Michael Laskey. He has also reviewed Still by Alan Buckley (Blue Diode, 2025), Everything is Present by Anna Woodford (Salt, 2025), The Conjurer by Pedro Serrano translated by Anna Crowe (Arc Publications, 2024), The Kentish Rebellion by Robert Selby (Shoestring, 2022), Same Difference by Ben Wilkinson (Seren, 2022), and The Storm in the Piano by Christopher James (Maytree Press, 2022).

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We chose ‘Presence’ by Marcia Menter as the Friday Poem on 10/04/2022 because we are suckers for a tidy sonnet, and this one is particularly tidy. We love the half-rhymes, the sonic echo, the compression, and the restraint. It’s deft and controlled while at the same time being tender and deeply compassionate, tightly packed with feeling. We like this poem very much indeed. Marcia Menter says: “It is the literal truth of my experience with Susan’s illness. I wrote it down as a sonnet, and there it was. Her death at the end of October, at age 59, haunts me still. This is her poem as much as it is mine.”

Presence

I.M. Susan De Sola

I had to mute my phone and cover the screen
to keep your texts from waking me at night.
Something evil, something you’d almost seen
had breached your dining room and lay in wait —
a waking dream, you said. But it was real,
a malignant presence. And it wanted you.
You wouldn’t go downstairs to get your pills
but sent your husband for them. He said no.
Said it was nonsense. Said it was in your head.
Said you knew better — and of course you did.
The tests were negative. The scans were clear.
Metastasis was possible, but rare.
You almost knew it was in your clever brain.
The minute you turned to face it, you were gone.

Marcia Menter‘s poems have appeared in The Dark Horse, The Rialto, and The Hudson Review, among other places. Her critical essays have appeared in The Dark Horse. Her poetry pamphlet, The Longing Machine, was published by HappenStance Press in 2007.

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‘The Laugh’ by Christopher Arksey was our Friday Poem on 04/11/2022 — we reckon it does a pretty perfect job of being a poem. It has a neat pattern of half rhyme, landing on near full rhyme at the end. The line endings feel entirely natural and also add to the sense – look at the enjambment, how the third line tips you into the fourth, and how the fourth line stretches along with the delayed reveal. Each of the first two stanzas is a single sentence, and if you’re into syllables, get counting. The whole is a neat, tight little machine – controlled and expressive. Ten lines, in which Arksey proves he can do it.

The Laugh

It was like you’d surfaced after a spell
underwater; spent and roused at the same time,
breathless toward the inevitable
big-reveal of your long-delayed punchline.

Then you let fly — the laugh of someone twice
your size — with such potency it rocked your frame
and sent you seeking my arm for balance,
stopping short of doubling over from the strain.

Only this soundless record of it exists.
And I forget the joke, but I’ve got the gist.

Christopher Arksey is a writer and voice actor living in Hull. His poems are published in the Broken Sleep Books anthology Companions of His Thoughts More Green: Poems for Andrew Marvell, and in Full House, Moist Poetry Journal, Porridge, Sledgehammer Lit, and The York Journal. His debut poetry pamphlet, Variety Turns (Broken Sleep, 2024) was reviewed on TFP here. For Christopher Arksey’s Friday Poem Castaway feature he chose poems by Philip Larkin, Christopher Reid and U.A. Fanthorpe to take to his desert island. You can find him on Twitter @chrisarksey.

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Image made by Andy Brodie from originals by Ali Abdul Rahman, Wynand Uys and Thom Bradley on Unsplash

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has nearly 3800 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 – 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

None of us can remember him arriving,
brought to us perhaps in a heavy rain shower.
There was a phone call I think,
then the doorbell rang.

He had had quite the time of it:
three days on MDMA. The ketamine chaser
had left him lost from himself.
His face had beautiful angles.

I knew at once I wanted to keep him,
brought fresh orange juice,
a blue duvet and told him
everything was alright now.

It seemed okay to stroke his hair
even though he had no back story,
and couldn’t remember his own name.
I left him sleeping and busied myself

with planning our future.
Checked in on him around midday,
cup of tea in hand, a KitKat,
a DVD we could watch together.

The duvet was crumpled
his spot on the sofa still warm.

’Foundling’ is the first of ‘Three poems about Felix Hirst, visitor to the homeless hostel in York’, from Missing Person by Zoë Walkington (Smith|Doorstop, 2026) — big thanks to Smith|Doorstop for letting us reproduce it here.

The very structure of Missing Person, Zoë Walkington’s second pamphlet, sets it up as something rather different from the average themed collection. Briefly, it’s a detective story told through poems of various forms. But more than that, we’re offered a ‘storyboard’ that includes a cast list, a back-story and an epilogue, and poems concerning the suspects, the witnesses and the investigating team. Armed with a great deal of information, readers encounter the investigation itself in the latter half of the pamphlet. We’re invited to solve a mystery. A ten-year old boy has disappeared in contemporary York. Who took him? This certainly encourages careful reading.

So Missing Person isn’t a typical poetry pamphlet, and the experience of reading it isn’t typical either. While pamphlets occasionally demand more interrogation than we might wish to get at their meaning, here’s one that’s created expressly to encourage us to puzzle over it and make notes as we read. And then to go back and read again, applying whatever powers of deduction we can muster. “The collection is solvable”, the author tells us in the brief introduction. But if my experience is anything to go by, this mystery won’t be solved with a skim read. Repeated readings are required!

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Here’s a short poem from the opening section (‘History’):

Babies

I’ll show you the way
decisions get made.
Like the naming of a son,
part by the parents
and part by the town.
In Hebden Bridge, he’s Felix,
in Huddersfield he’s James
and whatever they are named
their mums sucked hard
on gas and air, just the same.

They might be left-handed.
It will be possible, in time
to hide your disappointment.
All that smudged ink.
When Felix is in Emmerdale
and James is Head of Finance
no-one will know, because
who needs to hold a pen these days?
Not actors. Not Heads of Finance.
That’s who.

Having read this poem three times while preparing my review, and now having carefully typed it out, I’ve got a growing list of ‘things that might be useful to the investigation’. I seem to remember something later in the collection about Felix not getting into RADA, but did he manage a bit-part in Emmerdale (that popular Yorkshire-based TV soap opera)? And the bit about being left-handed, with the resulting “smudged ink” – that’s got to be important. And was James a Head of Finance? I’m not sure.

Many of the poems provoke similar questions. I’ll share no more of my thoughts for fear of spoiling your fun. And, reader, it is fun to flick back and forth from poem to poem, piecing together what each might offer to the uncovering of the truth. And isn’t uncovering the truth one of the things that poetry often aspires to? Here, of course, we know what truth we’re after – who took the boy. But like the best detective stories, we come away with more than just an answer, and the poet’s leaps of imagination make this a really arresting (no pun intended) read.

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As an example, here’s a short poem in the voice of ‘THE GRAFFITI ON THE WALL OF THE SUBURBAN UNDERPASS, YORK’:

Sevenling (What the graffiti saw)

What the graffiti saw was young lads booting
a ball, a coke can, each other.
The vixen who stopped to snout through twitch grass

which crept underground through rhizomes,
that held secrets, lost language, and hope.
Impassive and cool she loped onward

her mind already turned towards prey.

That term, “rhizomes”, is important – perhaps. It simply means (according to the dictionary) horizontal underground plant stems, but these help plants ‘survive unfavourable conditions’, and this perhaps tells us more about the environment in which our investigation takes place. And every poem in this sequence, in whatever form, offers us a little more, not just to help solve the mystery but to create a remarkably complete portrait of a place and a time. The entire setting is portrayed in such detail and through so many points of view that even the urban underpass – the scene of the crime – is alive with meaning.

After repeated readings, I’m still not sure if I’ve solved the mystery – or whether that even matters. But what I am sure about is that this is a fascinating exercise in putting poetry to good and unusual use. It would be fascinating to know how Zoë Walkington approached the whole project. Did the mystery develop as the pieces were written? Did she use one of those pin boards we see on detective shows, full of photos and statements linked by bits of string? And what about the boy? Will no one think of the boy? Goddamn it! Who took him? And is he OK?

There’s no doubt in my mind that Missing Person is a satisfying and unusual read (and re-read), whether you solve the mystery or not.

[If you have worked out who took the boy, please message The Friday Poem —Ed.]

Jonathan Davidson is a poet, writer and literature activist, living in the English Midlands. His poetry has been widely published, and he has also written memoir and criticism. His radio dramas and adaptations have been broadcast by BBC Radios 3 and 4. Much of his work is focussed on how writing – especially poetry – is experienced by readers and listeners. His latest poetry collection is Downland – Paintings by Anna Dillon & Poems by Jonathan Davidson (Two Rivers Press, 2024). Jonathan Davidson’s website is here.

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.

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This poem is from Goyle, Chert, Mire by Jean Sprackland (Cape, 2026) — big thanks to Cape for letting us reproduce it here.

Why include an unfamiliar word in a title? Chert? – yes, I know that one, a type of stone. Mire? – yes, a shoe-sucking marsh. But Goyle? That’s one for the imagination, or the footnotes, and Jean Sprackland tucks it away, beyond the title page note (“found in the dialects of Somerset and Devon; etymology unknown”) and into the body of the opening poem:

Broken gate jammed across the ditch,
tied with rope so old it has become interesting
and you suddenly remember art.

[…]

This is the goyle bottom, the clogged
and leaf-logged anticlimactic place
where all loose items come to rest.

Isn’t it familiar – that sludgy ditch at the side of a country walk, ignored and unloved? It’s a good metaphor for life’s detritus. Sprackland has made her readers work just hard enough to be invested in the poem and, incidentally, has also given the geographical location. Fourteen lines, and no title: notice, too, the ‘you’ in the third line. Is ‘you’ the poet, addressing her inner self? Or is ‘you’ the reader? Or both? At this point in the book it’s easy to slide over the subtle shifts of pronouns, driven by curiosity about where this unpoetic (“anticlimactic”) ditch will take you, following the bidding of the final line: “Turn your back on the light and crawl in.”

But first, how will this collection fit together? Three sections of fifteen poems, each part headed with one word from the title. No further titles. These are three sequences, each a different landscape. Don’t believe everything you read in reviews; one reviewer has described these as “unrhymed sonnets”. Fourteen lines, yes, and unrhymed, yes, but they don’t have the interior shift that characterises the sonnet form. There can be something overly self-contained and neat about sonnets that wouldn’t lend itself to the flow within each sequence, however tactfully it was employed. These poems are units for creating the larger structure of each sequence, fitting together and joined by cross-references. I’ve avoided using words like ‘blocks’, ‘bricks’, ‘building’ because they feel too heavy, too solid for how these poems connect. Fourteen lines is a constraint that proves effective because it’s unobtrusive; it allows plenty of space for variety in the content and can be read in one breath.

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This method of structuring is a new departure for Sprackland. It’s her sixth collection (her first appeared in 1997), previous titles having won major prizes. Goyle, Chert, Mire, however, is her first use of single-form sequences and demonstrates what a powerful format this is. In brief, the Goyle sequence describes her land and its damp and dark boundary, her new home:

You will own this parcel of land,
said the solicitor (as if it came wrapped
and containing secrets). From here —
he clicked his propelling pencil — to here.
When you tried to pace it later, that line
was lost inside a hedge

Those “secrets” will appear, but not until the final section. Legal paperwork is precise but this land far less amenable to clarity. Sprackland is not ‘I’ here; there is only ‘you’, as established in the opening poem. This distances the writer from the “parcel of land” as she starts to learn its ways – “Your house is a simple instrument / for the telling of weather.” “And now the goyle / is the deep groove you think along.” ‘You’ also carries the suggestion of a solitary life when the only person you have to talk to is your inner self.

It’s not all house and land, however: “The recent illness flares and settles inside you.” If you (the reader) have read the publisher’s blurb on the inner flap, you’ll have seen that she’s referring to meningitis and its aftermath. If you haven’t (and, significantly, the illness is not named in the poems) you might interpret the references as a less-definable state, perhaps something closer to Alexander Pope’s “this long disease, my life.” The vocabulary of physical illness – quarantine, sickness, cures, recover – can equally function as metaphor. There’s a sickness in the natural world. It’s in seed-heads, or where “Cold sweat runs down the face of the wall”, or where an ash tree suffers “Lesion, necrosis, death of the crown”. All this is contained in the overarching description of exploring the route of the goyle: the personal and the natural world are fused and held together within the same time frame.

The Chert sequence – and chert is a local stone, too hard for sharpening scythes but good for roads – opens at a distance, in the third person:

A woman walks the same field for forty years,
and the field speaks to her because it knows her.
She stops, picks up a word, and with quick eyes and hands
translates it. Knife. Arrowhead. Pick. Adze.

The woman is an amateur archaeologist, field-walking, cluttered with the physical stuff of history, but also alert to a parallel play with metaphor even as she dismisses it:

Pain worked to the surface, words shaped into tools.
The field itself brings them forth
from the utter dark of the deep self —
Oh rubbish, she thinks,
it’s just walking and finding. She ought to stop.

Is this woman Sprackland herself, or perhaps a neighbour? Either way, she acts as an introduction to the history of the valley and the surrounding high ground, and to the following two poems where the stone-workers – women, children, paupers, miners – populate the landscape. In the fourth Chert poem the poet returns to using ‘you’, linking the finds to shards of broken crockery, “the kind of stuff your grandparents could afford / but not afford to lose.” Sprackland is aligning herself with the reader, again, and with a glance back to the almost-rejected metaphor in the opening poem:

No end to the fields you’d have to search
to find the shattered pieces of yourself.

In the next poem she also finds shreds of plastic with “their cellular determination to survive / over every timescale.” Sprackland’s initial focus is one valley, but her focus expands to include a part of the much larger world. Gradually, personal memory surfaces and ‘you’ is now the self-reflective ‘you’:

Language itself is prone to collapse, you think.
it’s like an old house
where the rain gets in and ruins everything.
The walls sag, the ceilings cave,
one room of words falls through into another.

Halfway through this section, the vocabulary of illness enters, at first in landscape description – “bruised blues, medicinal pinks, / sickroom yellows” – then more specifically:

In the quiet lanes of the parietal lobe
the illness has installed a truckload
of listening equipment

[…]

You’re picking up static, said the doctor,
white noise outside the range of hearing.

For many poets this would signal a movement towards focus on the self and the effects of the illness, but Sprackland is not one of those. This is emphatically NOT an egocentric ‘my journey’ or ‘my battle with’ collection. It places the self within a larger, longer timescale and landscape. “Illness has scrambled the year” begins the penultimate poem in Chert. But “Despite all the losses you are still alive”. The final piece returns us to the ‘woman’ of the opening:

A woman walks the same river for forty days.
She comes here to recover.
Underfoot the bed of chert. Under it, greensand. Under it, ooze.

[…]

So this is meaning, she thinks. Minor bodies
in their millions, scuttled and sinking, becoming sediment.
Day and night collaborate on the difficult work of translation.

This looks back to the start of Chert, these ‘forty days’ reminding us of the ‘forty years’ earlier. Now it’s the river that’s restoring words “from the utter dark of the deep self.” There’s a sense of recovery.

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So, after this, where will the Mire sequence take us? At first it’s up, into the air, but then it shifts, with that significant adjective “desperate”, down to the water table:

All day a buzzard calls over the mire,
like the desperate note of a whistle
blown by a search party. You are marooned
on quag and quaking bog – a dark
anoxic brew of mud and dead matter.

We learn more about how she came to buy this house on a springline via a land agent, the language reminding us of the solicitor at the start:.

They have no value, said the agent,
spreading his empty hands on the desk,
wet places, these waste places.

[…]

I’d forget it if I were you. These barren places
are only fit to be fenced off, written off,
cursed, or wished away.

But Sprackland also shows readers the alternative, how the value of this land can be read by those with greater knowledge and a wider vision:

Archaeobotanist, anthrocologist,
palynologist, paleoentomologist:
all come with their various petitions,
all kneel and name what they seek:
God of the mire, grant us artefact, ecofact,
furnace, cesspit, midden and posthole.

All those ‘-ists’ really exist, specialists working on the minutiae buried in mud, accessible only to those with the patience for seemingly undramatic research. Sprackland’s attention is drawn to their equipment (“a chambered or Russian sampler”) and the skills to “magnify five hundred times” until “under your lens, eleven thousand years / swim into focus looking much like now.”

Quietly self-effacing, the poet reflects on the ‘illness’ as she gets it into perspective – ”The illness pressed at one wet valve, / then another, and another, / trying its luck until it sprang a lock.” She can recognise this as “Petty vandalism, nothing more”, imagining a future historian prising apart her diary pages before returning to the immediacy of the shipping forecast, the winter weather and finally – in the poem that heads this review – the world outside, spring bringing it into life, renewed. There are no pronouns in this final piece, only the fullness of the natural world. Sprackland’s previous collection (Green Noise, Cape, 2018) considered what’s been described as “the background noise of the world” and Goyle, Chert, Mire has built on that.

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The reader can map these poems in many ways, tracing words, phrases, repetitions within each sequence and then the collection as a whole. Sprackland makes the whole thing look easy but you can’t move a single poem out of position, nor would you want to. She understands where strength comes from in a collection and how to work with it. It’s an intelligent and mature set of poems, firmly committed to what can be achieved by craft when it’s balanced with human experience. I’ve lived with it for months and it’s not going on the shelf yet: it offers more every time I look into it.

D.A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second collection, Common Ground (HappenStance, 2014), won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her most recent collection, The Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022, and her pamphlet Continuous Present was published by New Walk Editions in 2025 (and reviewed on The Friday Poem here).

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.

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It cannot be said I’ve never had
lapses of sanity or taste, the short-lived
belief in a me who can stride not teeter
but if you change the way you look at things
the things you look at change
says Wayne Dyer, and it is indeed nice
for us to be able, occasionally, to kiss
without you having to bend down
or me stand on tiptoe.

’High Heels’ is from Flying Change by Naomi Jaffa (The Garlic Press, 2026) — big thanks to Michael Laskey for letting us reproduce it here.

Flying Change is a beautifully made book and one I’m taking care not to leave around for fear of ‘borrowers’. With slightly wider pages than usual, coloured endpapers and generous French flaps, it looks as if it could be pricey but Garlic Press ask a modest £12 (none of that £11.99 nonsense).

This is a sophisticated first full collection, though it does include some work drawn from two earlier pamphlets. For once, I’ve been reading from front to back, and I’m glad I did, because Naomi Jaffa has given particular care to the running order. Her short opener, ‘Round Here’, serves as an invitation into the rural and agricultural setting of the first part of her book, with its “tractors in yards, trundling across fields / trailing muck down the road ahead” and “Village halls doubling as part-time / post-offices, crèches, farmers’ markets, / pop-up pubs, drop-off centres for donations”.

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I’m interested in how Jaffa is able to seize the most quotidian of activities (say, driving home) and make a poem from it. She opens ‘Have You Ever’, for example, with

driven Suffolk back roads
on a June Saturday at 10.30pm
– nothing yet dark about it,
still a kind of extended dusk –
after Exaudi at Blythburgh
in something of a state of ecstasy,
and become acutely aware
of how you’re all unconscious
competence when it comes
to dipping and un-dipping,
to choosing gears over brakes

She writes of her mind as a gearbox, about worry, about ‘Some of the Usual’. “Oh, humpback of the week” is how she begins ‘Poem for Wednesday’ – all of these early pages draw you in with their well-tempered warmth. We’re still ‘round here’ with poems about horses and about birds, and it’s one of the equine pieces that serves as the title poem. The careful construction of ‘Flying Change’ perhaps acknowledges readers like me uninterested in horses (I had to Google ‘flying change’ to be sure I’d ‘got’ it) with its self-deprecating opening:

While I’d rather offend than bore
with any story involving my grey mare,
I feel impelled to share
these few seconds from the day before

Even readers like me, however, will ‘get’ the pleasure of this sonnet-like poem’s ending: “we quietly broke / to a joyful free walk on a loose rein”.

Most poets of a certain age, or those whose parents have died, write about their family and childhood memories. Naomi Jaffa does too, but disarmingly prefaces hers with ‘Spoon’, a short poem that begins:

Can’t help being born
with a silver one
rammed down my throat

She insists that any privilege didn’t, in fact, allow for all that easeful a life, “given all those opinions / spoon-fed as facts.” Both her parents were professional musicians. In ‘The Knowledge’, she examines how their profession dominated family life:

Never to disturb him practising
arpeggios in his dressing room
behind two sets of closed doors.

and then later on as her father ages:

That the television got louder
and his temper shorter
as Niagara roared in his ears.

That you’d always forgive him
when he held the violin under his chin
for Sicilienne or Schön Rosmarin.

In backward glances such as this, Naomi Jaffa seems able to evoke both how her childhood felt while she was experiencing it and, at the same time, how it appears to her now. ‘Rarely in Favour of Less is More’ opens with

I wanted more than anything
to return, after the arrival
of the unexpected twins,
to being the only one.

though two poems later, ‘Sunday Lunch’ recounts

As eldest grandchild
I got to sit bottom right
next to Poppa at the head

A few pages on, such moments are re-contextualised by ‘Driver’, in which she discovers both parents had been on concert-tour in America, leaving her “For eight weeks at nine months”, for not quite the reasons she’d always thought. This is a searing piece, in which the writer is able to reach in to the long-term effects of such childhood separation (“something to live with, latent / like herpes or shingles”), as well as envisage herself in the future position of having to care for her mother in old age.

But adult life is peppered with high heels, a new blue dress, childlessness, sex (not many poets would risk a long poem titled ‘Good at Sex’), neighbours – as well as the death of a parent. By now I’m not surprised, after her openness so far, that she’s able to talk about house clearance with such direct self-awareness and good humour, as in ‘Set’:

When I seized and ferried home
my mother’s copper-bottomed
saucepans, it was because
I badly didn’t want them
in anyone else’s kitchen.
(Let’s be frank, by ‘anyone’
I mean my sister.)

All the poems attend to “my little life”, as Michael Donaghy used to put it. It’s rare to find a whole bookful of such an approach so very readable. I think there are three reasons why it works so well here. Firstly, there’s the lovely flow of the poems speaking to each other across their great variety, so the effect builds cumulatively; it’s difficult, for example, to isolate a ‘favourite’. Secondly, the poems are so well made – they’ve certainly been through some tough processing. In particular, I’ve enjoyed how skilfully they play with lineation, something that always pulls its weight in this poet’s work. (Glance back to that quotation above about the twins, for example, and see how she places “to return” and “arrival” on the same typically short line – or the effect of the “unconscious / competence” line break in the quotation at the beginning of this review.) Thirdly, the voice has a convincing, even startling, openness such that you trust it whether it’s contemplating what to do with some five-inch heels, getting up in the night for a pee, or talking to her late father while ‘Driving along the Spexhall Straight’.

“No”, I shall say to the next would-be borrower of Flying Change. “I’m still reading it.”

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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 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

I found her long black coat
Way back in the closet. Dark enough
To be without dimension, dark enough
To hold nothing but itself in its sleeves.
I’ve lain on the ground in the dark enough
To know what comes crawling out,
So I do not check the pockets, do not
Smash my face in its frangipani and inhale.
The wail I make hardly comes out.
I have an affinity for moths.
I have my own dark enough.

‘Dark Enough’ is from Creature Feature by Dean Young (Copper Canyon, 2026) — big thanks to Copper Canyon for letting us reproduce it here.

Helena: This is a good poem to open with because it’s accessible, emotive and comparatively straightforward. In many ways it’s classic Dean Young (thrives on repetition, great last line, aurally satisfying). In other ways it’s wholly untypical (short, clear, one coherent thought, a consistent, slightly formal register: “I do not … do not”). Strangely, it uses first-word-in-line-capitalisation. Why is this? He doesn’t do it anywhere else, and it places the poem in a curiously formal tradition. It even almost rhymes between coat/out/not/out and moths/enough. It’s definitely Dark Dean – little hope here – but then his elegiac self is never far away. He likes playing the fool, but even in the depths there’s Shakespearian wryness: “I’ve lain on the ground in the dark enough”, “I have an affinity for moths”.

Hilary: What was Dean Young’s “dark”? I guess a lot of it centres on his heart disease. It’s everywhere, manifesting in myriad ways. He had a heart transplant in 2011 and his life ended when the transplanted organ packed up just over a decade later. If the human condition is mortality, he felt it more keenly than most (in an interview with Anthony Tognazzini in BOMB Magazine in 2012 he says he found life “simultaneously utterly poignant and utterly absurd”). Fall Higher (2012) is filled with poems afflicted with literal matters of the heart. In an interview in 2011, he said: “For me, it’s an actual concern because I’ve been living with this diagnosis for over 10 years. My father died when he was 49 of heart problems, so it’s been a sort of shadowy concern for me my whole life”.

Helena: Yes, and Creature Feature’s actually the last of three collections compiled after his heart transplant; we know from the editors’ afterword that he saw them as a trilogy. You and I haven’t read the first two (Shock by Shock, 2015, and Solar Perplexus, 2019), although you have Bender (the 2012 New and Selected) and we both have Fall Higher (2011) and we’ve obviously scoured the web. This is a poet who wrote a great deal. In terms of poetic style, he said he tried to be “as influenced as possible”. Influences included New York School poets (Koch, Ashbery, Tate, Revell etc) and Surrealists like Breton and Apollinaire. He loves wild leaps of illogic, revels in bizarre imagery, and cultivates unexpected shifts of register. He may confuse, but he doesn’t bore. In an interview with the journal Jubilat, he said: “I want to put everything in”. And also: “I think to tie meaning too closely to understanding misses the point.”

Hilary: He had poet-friends who wrote great essays about him. Mark Halliday and Tony Hoagland, for example. Halliday (in Living Name, 2025) calls Young’s central theme his “Constant Inescapable Flooding Subject”, namely “the overwhelming baffling exciting maddening confusion of being alive”. Dean Young wants readers to feel this intense confusion as a living experience on the page. Or maybe he just couldn’t edit himself … ?

Helena: Well he was certainly prolific. I’ll never read all of it, although I do enjoy him. And some individual poems seem to me to go on too long. But the technique’s developed and deliberate. I think he could and did self-edit. I just don’t always like his editorial decisions. Periodically he lets a poem get out of control on purpose. To have fun.

Hilary: Yes. He wants to be alive, moving, changing, amorphic. All the same, although he may be demonstrating life’s confusion from the inside, some of us (certainly Mark Halliday) want poems that recognise chaos while considering a way through. Or offering a way to survive it. But Young is a lyric poet too. You can see that in ‘Dark Enough’, the poem we began with. He works towards a high point, he plays on the emotions. Occasionally he makes a startlingly personal assertion, straight from the heart: “I’ve lain on the ground in the dark enough”. That’s not an elaborate mask or persona, and it’s certainly not a joke. It’s him. He’s alive. He’s in there.

Helena: Agreed. He can write wild, he can write silly, he can jumble up registers like no other. But some bits are starkly potent: “dark enough / To hold nothing but itself in its sleeves.” At times I’m stunned. How did he do that? That’s what I find myself thinking.

Hilary: Our main focus is Creature Feature, the posthumous collection that came out in May 2026. Maybe we could look closely at a few of its poems. ‘Dark Enough’ may be the shortest of the lot. Let’s go for something a bit longer. What about ‘Spark Theory’, the opener? He’s good at opening strong, don’t you think?

Helena: I do. And I find ‘Spark Theory’ arresting. It’s also fairly brief (in Dean terms) but there’s a bit more oddness about it, more bafflement. Twenty-five lines and the weirdest (but lovely) final image. A good bit of death in here, though anything but morbid.

Hilary: Plenty of death, yes – a hearse in line two and again in lines seven and eight,. Later there are ashes, someone “not being here, / yet being nowhere else”, “occasions for evaporation” and, at the end, a man in pieces. Also lots of references to things that might be associated with danger, burning or cremation. There’s electricity “bouncing off the streets”, spilled gasoline, “perfumes of / incinerated instance”. Link these to the title, ‘Spark Theory’, and you have a heady and combustible mix. I tried to find what Young might be referring to with that title – I found references to various Spark Theories in the fields of data energy, maths, biology, philosophy and psychology, but nothing stood out as being particularly likely. Have you had any joy there?

Helena: He wants the title to sound like a scientific theory, I reckon, but there are at least three kinds of sparks here. Apart from electricity, there’s inspiration and incineration. You can’t cremate a body without sparks. And then what about the sources of poetry? The odd sparks that fire up a poem. Eye-catching things that are curious and odd, or even beautiful. (In ‘Poem Nearly Without Imagination’, he says: “Sometimes it’s exactly like bashing / rocks together to get a spark.”)

Hilary: And ‘Spark Theory’ trips along exhibiting many of Young’s characteristic style mannerisms. Repetition, for example, where he describes a hearse in two seasons (“The hearse a little yellow with pollen. / The hearse almost covered in snow.”) and again with: “Here comes / a strange mailman. Here comes / a Chihuahua with a rubber hand / in her mouth.” And there are surreal elements – plywood making “a peep”, that rubber hand (where we expect rubber band), and “otherness in its flimsy dress”. In any poem, he may leap off at some point into a list of strange and seemingly unconnected things, and here we have exactly that:

[…] A bird flown into
a cotton tree, a love letter crammed
in a plastic mannequin head, what
she said that day by the water
with the ashes making their arabesques.

There’s a link between the hearse and “Some plywood makes a peep”, perhaps, via a cheap coffin, and I see a link between the excess electricity and ‘flow’, which he mentions twice, in the first line and the ninth. But the longer list is an instance, I think, of him wanting to create that sense of “overwhelming baffling exciting maddening confusion”. Life, in all its random strangeness. Part of which is that final image: “a man carried / from his own home in pieces, / like a harp.” Somehow that harp conveys an anatomical quality. It’s all angles and curves, it’s large, it’s unwieldy. For me, a harp heralds angels, or choral music; something ethereal and ritualistic.

Helena: A Scottish harp, a clarsach, isn’t big. But logically this final image shouldn’t work at all. If the man’s in pieces, isn’t the harp too? But I think the harp’s intact. I think it’s a fragile instrument that has to be carried with enormous care, perhaps even shouldered. Just think what comes out of it. Music itself. Isn’t a harp a sort of lyre? Doesn’t it represent the poet himself? I find the end of ‘Spark Theory’ moving. Heart-breaking actually.

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Hilary: Oh yes, endings. We should say something about his genius/knack for ending a poem. Over the past few weeks we’ve fired various Dean-Young endings at each other, haven’t we? (Approvingly.) ‘The Burning Laboratory’, for example: “Does anyone / really expect these restraints will hold?” And remember the last two stanzas of ‘Estate Planning for a Snowflake’:

I’m just trying to enjoy the cortege,
the lambs out front garlanded with bells,
the look over the edge, the dogs
trotting by with human limbs in their jaws

as if that’s how to tell what’s dreamed
from the genuine aggregate of indeterminate
quanta. It’s all in the mind anyway.
Just probably not mine.

That’s a typical Dean Young ending, isn’t it? Droll, wry, funny, self-deprecating – and tragic, to a greater or lesser degree.

Helena: Absolutely. But back to ‘Spark Theory’. What about the sonic play stitching parts of the poem together? “Flow” is a key word – he amplifies it with “yellow”, “snow”, “flow” (again), “rowboats”, “rainbows” and (later) “flown”. Then there’s “peep” and “streets”. He has fun with “insufficiency of electricity” and “incinerated instance”. The poem’s confident, at ease with itself. Crazy but linguistically skilful.

Hilary: As well as being jam-packed with death. Not just the hearse references but also “ashes making ... arabesques”. Where did the ashes come from if not from one of the “occasions / for evaporation”, an “incinerated instance” i.e. a cremation? As for “Simultaneously not being here, / yet being nowhere else” – surely that must be the guy in the coffin?

Helena: Yes, I think so. ‘Spark Theory’ is about death, as well as the sparks that generate poems, and the electric effect and brilliance of life, and the inevitability of cremation, and fragility of humankind. It’s a vision.

Hilary: And yet the sentences are easy to get hold of. Here are the first three lines, for example:

Things flow one into another.
A hearse pulls up and idles.
Some plywood makes a peep.

No fewer than five out of the first eight lines are end-stopped statements. He does this a lot in this book, more than in earlier collections, so far as I can see. You might get lost in his allusions and his imagery but not in the syntax. I welcome that.

Helena: So what happens when he does use more complex sentence structures? Let’s take a look at ‘So You Want to Write a Poem’. I know it ends with snappy units, but most stanzas are enjambed, and just look how it starts:

Compose yourself with a cat in your lap
like a stopped escalator. The cat’s there
for connection to the living creatures of this planet,
the simile connection to everything else,
the very thing your mother warned you about
but you’re going to have to do most of the heavy lifting yourself

and in that way it is like falling in love
and other maladies.

The opening simile, broken across the line, enacts one of his main tenets, doesn’t it? The cat in your lap is not like a stopped escalator, which is the point. He wants disruptive images, although absolutely any simile will invoke some oblique way in which two things are like each other. It’s not impossible to make the case for a cat and an escalator. But this isn’t poetry of consolation or comfort. The cat in your lap is a joke, as is “compose yourself”. The line about your mother’s a bit of fun too, and the image about the “heavy lifting”, the hard work of poetry, makes sense (to me, at least). However, “in that way” i.e. the heavy-lifting way, writing a poem is not, so far as I can see, like falling in love, though falling in love could be seen to be like other maladies. But is the syntax helping or hindering the meaning? Or am I tying meaning too closely to understanding and missing the point?

Hilary: I think the person is the “stopped escalator”, not the cat. I see someone sitting, side on, so bent at the hips and knees and ankles. You adopt the zig-zag shape of stairs when you sit (and are also stopped from moving by the cat sitting on your lap).

Helena: Oh wow. That never occurred to me. Maybe you have a point.

Hilary: However, the comparison between writing poetry and falling in love is, yes, a bit of a challenge. He’s suggesting for both of these things that we do most of the emotional work ourselves. So falling in love isn’t something that descends on us from outside, like a gift. It requires internal slog. And the following (glorious) few lines support this and and continue in the same vein:

[…] Reports vary but everyone
is squished by at least 800,000 kilos of earthly burden
like the squinched face at the bottom of the totem pole

when what you want is to be on top,
wings coming from your forehead, upright
worm that you are, quite a view.

It’s passages like this that make me adore this poet and want to try to write like him (I’ve tried; I can’t). His imagery’s spot on – that lovely shift from a totem pole, revered holder of history and lineage, to “upright worm” with the implication of something lowly with slightly risible aspirations. His tone ranges from newsreader to colloquial, from intimate and wistful to humorous and self-mocking. Although I’m less convinced by the ending here than usual; I find it a bit obvious. In the final stanza, he seems to be telling his readers how to write a poem for real:

You may have to take yourself apart.
Really get some dirt in your nose.
Now stork-like lift one foot.
Balance. Let the mind assert its blank.
Don’t quit. Now lift the other.

Helena: Oh but I love the last line, and its absurdity. How did you see it as obvious? I was totally wrong-footed by the step-by-step instruction that left me hanging. But in The Art of Recklessness, his 2010 prose book about poetry (which we haven’t talked about yet), he says: “One of the powers of poetry is to bring us up to the unutterable and then go on speaking. […] The poet is like one of those cartoon characters who has stepped off the cliff only to remain suspended.” Is that what’s happening at the end – stepping off the cliff? Even if the ending fails for you, Young says failure’s a necessary factor, I seem to remember, like cultivating uncertainty. If you’re going to risk everything, you’ve got to be prepared to shipwreck your reader at times. Which he does, doesn’t he?

Hilary: When he says “lift one foot” I half expect him to say “lift the other”. And he does. It’s not a failure, for me – just less surprising than some of his other endings. For example, in the poem you found online, ‘The Late Work of Pinkham Ryder’ (included in Shock by Shock, 2015), the poet’s had a “procedure” – possibly a surgical reference – and a friend drops by to see how he’s doing. He’s “arranged all the green rocks / of my collection, mostly fluorite, / at one end of the table” and he’s “winding up the robots at the other.” In ensuing stanzas he goes off on one, in inimitable Dean Young fashion, but eventually comes back to his friend, who he describes as:

[…] one of those people
who think it’s an emergency when you pee
purple or your head’s even a tiny bit
on fire or you’re talking in your sleep
which, by the way, I’m doing now
not that that inhibits my field command.
Robots, attack!

Howzat! I love the way he loops back to the robots. Everything feels like a table-top game – toy soldiers, wind-up robots – and the poet is either a child or crazy. It’s a mad mad mad mad world, but there’s fun to be had.

Helena: It’s unusually coherent, that Pinkham Ryder poem. A thread runs right through. Not a shipwreck in sight. Even a joke at the end.

Hilary: But back to The Art of Recklessness. The title’s taken from a John Ashbery quote: “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful”. The book has been lauded and panned in pretty much equal measure, and from what Dean Young says in interviews it sounds as if he rather cobbled it together from previous essays. It’s certainly more of a polemical anti-rule manifesto than any sort of manual on craft. Near the end he says: “I was hoping that at some point I would figure out what this book is about – maybe you are too.”

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Helena: Some of it’s great reading, though, don’t you think? Cheerfully provocative.

Hilary: I was interested in the part about the return to the primitive in Western culture. He says “artists turned from mastery of illusion and technique to a more unmitigated, raw relationship with the basic materials of the medium”, moving back to “barer, harsher, more directly expressive modes”. This struck me as important to understanding his own work. He’s placing himself in a kind of tradition, isn’t he – even if it’s also anti-tradition. He distinguishes between a communicative state and an expressive state i.e. “There’s the fire: we must leave the building,” versus “Yikes!”. Poetry, he says, is in perpetual negotiation between these two states. “These are the two forces that form must come to terms with.” I’d say he himself goes deep into ‘Yikes!’ (the expressive state that recreates the intense sensation of being alive in a startling, baffling world). Is that what you mean by “shipwrecks” the reader?

Helena: No. I meant the reader gets lost. Lost enough at times to throw in the towel. But I’m still thinking about Ashbery on recklessness. I don’t think it’s even true that most reckless things are beautiful in some way. Most things are beautiful in some way; recklessness is the least of it. Doesn’t ‘reckless’ suggest wild, careless, out of control? Recklessness is risky; it attracts admiration, maybe. But that doesn’t mean it’s beautiful. Recklessness can be awful. It can be fatal. I can’t agree that “recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful”. Good experimental art isn’t always beautiful, nor trying to be. Me, I’d rather it was interesting. I know the Ashbery quotation is out of context – but I hate grand poetic assertions. At least when Dean Young makes them, he immediately contradicts himself. I guess that’s the “permanent negotiation” you spoke about. I liked lots of The Art of Recklessness – liked it, more than found it useful. I think (like all books about poetry) it’s really the poet explaining his own methodology. I mean, how do you “get better at not knowing what” you’re doing?

Hilary: Maybe it’s like Keats. The negative capability thing. But what about those reader shipwrecks in Dean Young? Give me an example.

Helena: I can pick out poems in Creature Feature where he loses me, though they also have good bits. As you pointed out earlier, he often goes in for listing things. A list poem’s supposed to accumulate towards a pay-off. But this poet doesn’t aim to satisfy our expectations: that’s far too predictable. All the same, the poetry reader is needy. There has to be something in it for them. It has to be more than a random poet hurling great phrases. But that’s sometimes how it feels. For example, ‘island Life’ sets out as a Because poem:

Because my little dog knows me
Because of idiot backward calliope longing
The Z of it
How gladly I’d cut myself out of the photographs
Because after a heart transplant I have a right to stagger
Because of swimming under a sign saying not to
Jupiter in Cancer
Righty tighty, lefty goosey
An unlawful display of fireworks
Because this heart has had more car wrecks than the rest of me
I threw up the whole whale watch

We know how a Because Poem is meant to work. The missing half of the Because – even if never stated – is supposed to be inferable, eventually. In ‘Island Life’, equipped with your previous Because-Poem experience, you start the deduction process. You get nowhere. “I threw up the whole whale watch” looks like a promising precursor to “Because my little dog knows me”. But it doesn’t seem to mean anything. So you look at “The Z of it”, even though it’s not even a sentence. I’m guessing it meant something to the poet (maybe a TV reference?). For me it’s a ‘duh’ clause, as is “Jupiter in Cancer”. Two or three more of those and I’m offski. Perhaps I could make a case for what the poem might be telling me but … life is short. Still, ‘Island Life’ doesn’t lose me as fatally as ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’, which sets off being playfully random and then goes on … and on … and on. “There’s nothing worse than a poem that doesn’t stop” as he says himself in The Art of Recklessness. This is the poem that includes the lines: “I’m sure I’m not the first to think / I’ve discovered a way to put everything in”. Blimey. This poet-fiend is proud of the thing that’s driving me nuts! Who on earth wants a poem about everything?

Hilary: Dean Young, apparently. I’m not sure whether the urge is inclusive or arrogant. There’s a couple of lines in ‘Ever the Night, Ever Sunrise’ which seem to call in ‘everything’ all at once:

An ocean rushing through a pinprick,
the whole universe tear-dropping from an eye

Is Dean Young the pinprick through which the whole ocean rushes? Is his the eye that cries (for) the whole universe?

Helena: I don’t think so. In this romantically titled poem he’s experiencing the pinprick (whatever that might be) so intensely that an ocean rushes in. Similarly, just one tear affects him so intensely that it’s “the whole universe”, or at least it’s that quality of sensation he’s trying to communicate (cf Keats – from whom Young is not so very far – “Oh for a life of sensations rather than thought”).

Hilary: But he swings from wild intensity (“I broke my fingertips. I broke my tongue”) to self-deprecating (the pinprick – he’d like that, he’d find that funny, and “but really was it all so terrible?”) and even relatably pathetic (“It’s not that we all don’t try”). Again, the poem is a crazy jumble of stuff, made to provide us with the experience of living in the world of Dean Young.

Helena: Crazy it may be, but more than just a jumble. Things are not as reckless as they look. Isn’t ‘Ever the Night, Ever Sunrise’ mostly about dedicating your life to poetry – “really was it all so terrible?” He compares writing to being one of many, another tiny being, like a tadpole aiming for the light above the surface and mostly merely scratching the underside. “Gasping like lightning in a lake with a rope swing”, I admit, is jumbled, perhaps the confusion of mortal risk and nearly-there-ness and never-quite-making-it. But can’t any poet relate to this? And it’s sensory, it’s close, it’s intimate. Taste and touch: “I broke my finger-tips. I broke my tongue.” But the peak experiences include that ocean “rushing through a pin-prick”, and grief telescoped into a tear-drop. The grief is devastating. You can’t write it if you don’t feel it. The “smaller and smaller” birds are the whole crowd of us, all the wouldbe poets, and they’ve consumed even smaller insects/stars until we’re almost entirely made of sky. But still we try. We keep trying. We try so HARD. The word ‘try’ is all over the place in this book. The strivers create mountains of failed poems, shiny bits of value gleaming here and there.

Hilary: What about another one of the ‘ever’ list: “Ever the scarecrow with bees in its head”? We’ve met that scarecrow before in ‘Scarecrow on Fire’.

Helena: Yes, there are two poems by that title in Fall Higher. It’s an image of Dean himself, I think, here with poetry bees in his bonnet. The poet’s glove reaches clumsily for the roses (born to blush unseen & waste their sweetness etc), and here and there out of the mire some lauded bard or other rises up, at the same time as a revered creation is rubbished and destroyed. Meanwhile human love endlessly exerts its attraction and its devastating loss. Perhaps you can muster a wolf (all your strength, all your poetic skill) to fight on but that’s only the half of it. Doesn’t mean you’ll make it.

Hilary: If this reading’s right, there’s only one way to do poetry. Risk all you have. Feel the pain and do it anyway. “Always put your best foot in the fire.” Here we go with another spectacular and wholly unexpected ending. After a while, I feel you can spot the ‘typical’ Dean Young poem when you see it. Some lose me in the middle (OK, maybe I get shipwrecked) but when he’s good, he’s very good indeed.

Helena: Yes, always the anticipation of flashes of brilliance, some of which illuminate understanding. And in between – well, I like his voice. He’s not smug or cocky or supercilious. He’s congenial. Sometimes he makes me laugh. Even when I get lost, I don’t feel ignored. Or stupid. It’s like he’s a human being reaching out from a place of vulnerability. He knows nothing but experiences everything, which is a kind of vivid insight. I wouldn’t have missed reading Creature Feature. Not for anything. Which poems will you remember from this collection?

Hilary: One of my favourites is ‘If Anyone Asks’, Creature Feature’s final salvo. I particularly like the ending, which I don’t think we should give away. The first line continues the title – if anyone asks, then

tell them just because they can’t hear the moon
doesn’t mean it’s not screaming.
Tell them it’s just like being attacked
by a murderous lunatic in your own bathroom mirror
or by your own jewelry or toothbrush or taco
or panthers, entirely in-the-mind panthers.

That’s a fabulous series of images, each one both frightening and ludicrous, especially the “entirely in-the-mind panthers”. It’s as if he’s catastrophising, his mind spiralling out of control, leaping from one scenario to the next, each more awful than the previous one, but at the same time being held in check by his own self-deprecating, feet-on-the-ground humility. Two opposing forces.

Helena: Yes, but “if anyone asks” … what? Typically, he never says. He tells you, many times, what it’s like, but not what ‘it’ is. However, by line 11 he observes:

Anyone who’s tried to write a poem gets exposed
to some mighty whichway winds.

So I think it’s reasonable to infer that ‘If Anyone Asks’, like many in this collection, is about the whole art of writing poems. But also more than that. It’s about the business of existing inside a poem. I suspect inside a poem was the only place Dean Young felt fully alive (“I dare you to find a river any other way”). A dangerous place, but the only place to be.

Hilary: In the afterword, Dobby Gibson and Matt Hart say: “The entire point of a Dean Young poem is that it preserves the spontaneous energy and idiosyncratic mechanisms of its own invention.” Doesn’t this poem demonstrate that?

Helena: Certainly, and the editorial comment is true, though nowhere near as good as reading the poems themselves. This last poem is a favourite of mine too, although I think it gets a bit rambly in the middle where he’s not only exemplifying but also commenting on himself doing it. I mean, he gives three types of ‘moods’ and then says, “Here, I made a list.”

Hilary: But the jokey bit about the “ant farm of consciousness” and his mother makes me laugh, and I love the way he drops vertiginously from that into six serious lines aimed directly (and personally) at the individual reader. You wouldn’t forget this ending.

Helena: Nor the neat way the whole poem links back to ‘Spark Theory’. In that opening poem: “it’s not an insufficiency of electricity / that we need to worry about”, and in the closing piece: “Sometimes pressure creates electricity / but we always risk dust”.

Hilary: Yes, many things here look random at first but are interconnected, a skilful feature of the whole. It’s not half so reckless as it first appears. We think people should read this book, don’t we?

Helena: We do. We definitely do.

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Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, and publisher, founding editor of HappenStance Press and Sphinx Review, and Consulting Editor at The Friday Poem. Her first collection, Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003), was a Jerwood / Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot (Shoestring, 2010). She also writes and publishes light verse, including Down With Poetry! (HappenStance, 2016) and Branded (Red Squirrel, 2019). Her most recent collection is PEARLS: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (HappenStance, 2022).

Hilary Menos is a poet, editor and reviewer. Her latest pamphlets are Vox Wah-Wah (New Walk Editions, 2026) and Fear of Forks (HappenStance, 2022). Her first collection, Berg (Seren, 2009), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010. Her second collection is Red Devon (Seren, 2013). Her pamphlet, Human Tissue (Smith|Doorstop, 2020), was a winner in The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2019/20. She 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.

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Like any British road-trip, Mohamed’s whistle-stop tour of the UK includes pub stops and kebab shops, mixtapes and audiobooks, a joke about Marmite (“you either love it … or you’re broadly indifferent”), and a brief moment to consider one of this wet island’s more sophisticated cultural exports: fish and chips. But first, a bit of scene setting, and itinerising. ‘Road Trip’, the collection’s opening poem, features one of Mohamed’s witty, descriptive takedowns – the first of several. This may be one of his strong suits. After painting a generalised vignette of the tour itself, involving a “stupid argument” between two road-trippers (who could be “best buds”, “fiery lovers”, “siblings paying off an unspoken debt” or strangers “united under the unlikeliest of circumstances”), Mohamed takes aim at Old Blighty:

[…] This sinking land, this
drowning land, this haunted, haunting, cursed
and cursing land. This stubborn rainy kingdom
of cracked breezeblock and deflated swamp. This
sulky empire, primarily exporting derivatives,
entropy and bad vibes.

He calls his collection an “end-of-the-road trip”, a “farewell tour” and a “last hurrah for a collapsing island”. He may be driving the point home, or he may be repeating himself. It took me some time, and noticing that Mohamed is taking Farewell Tour around the country for a series of live performances (he’s calling it … Farewell Tour), to appreciate that many of these poems were written to be spoken. It actually struck me while trying to illustrate what I didn’t like about a particular poem. The person to whom I read it liked it. I found myself liking it too, and wondering why I’d singled it out. Stefan Mohamed’s comedy, we realised, works better when given voice. The obvious flipside to this is, however, that it works less well when it’s not. For example, this, from ‘Itinerary’:

You will cut like crows
through the heart of Marmite County
from Oodle to Mashing
to Gossip to Pummelling
via Bishop’s Heartburn
then onward to Halfwick, Beleaguer
Dimmington, Dogdiss
Heckhorn and Illtide
with a stopover at Queen’s Complaint.

does relatively little for me on the page. It’s more or less a list of place names – a strong list, whose entries tread well that line between daftness and reality. It’s about as gripping as a list can be, but it is still a list, and requires a bit of vim and vigour to get it off the ground.

Depending on where you draw your parameters, there are about seven poems in Farewell Tour that take the form of lists – most do so more explicitly than ‘Itinerary’. That’s one for every six or so others. It is a very particular format, and relatively easy to write. They are works of the imagination; we write them sitting down. But their scope is limited because of how hard it is to get a list of ideas to travel. Unless there’s something else going on, they sit on the page without doing much.

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‘Traditional Pub Menu’ replaces country grub with offerings of “[c]olonial hooligan bantering on a bed of / redacted wince” and “[m]ean-spirited queue baked in walloping / Thames, with flaked cronyism and stone circles”. The three ‘Mixtape’ poems take the form of track listings. Some contain wry observations and moments of satire; others feel like filler. This is from ‘National Anthems (Mixtape)’:

1: Remember When Dogs Were Wolves

2: Remember When Cats Were Wolves

3: Remember When Binmen Were Wolves

4: Remember When Wolves Were Mental

My issue is that, personally, I want a story, some story. And a collection called “Farewell Tour” ought to have story in spades. But poems such as these paint pointillist pictures, vignettes that don’t have time to fill out. They are static. If the track listings spoke to each other, belonged to characters in an overarching narrative, or represented a change in mood that somehow related to the body of work at large, then they would ask the reader to do more.

Several times throughout Farewell Tour, Stefan Mohamed begins to develop original, funny ideas, but in my view stops short of realising their potential. ‘Poem To Be Whispered Tenderly Into The Ear Of A Stranger Bleeding Out Outside A Kebab Shop At 2am’, for example, invites the reader to whisper it out loud – to perform it – but doesn’t reward the performance (by, for example, being something it would be absurd to literally whisper into the ear of a stranger bleeding out outside a kebab shop. At 2am.). That, for me, is the mark it doesn’t hit.

I was a flower of the greasy spoon, yes!
When I put the Marmite in my hair
like the girls from Greggs.

Or shall I wear Heinz Baked Beans?

And how he kissed me
under the low wall
round the back of the Co-Op.

And I thought, well!
As well him as another.

Similarly, ‘Poem To Be Bellowed From Car Window While Hurtling Down A Hill At Unsafe Speeds’ ought to be ridiculous and hilarious to bellow as if from a car. I’m all for the theatricality, but the payoff feels wanting:

Who are you saying is dead?
What would you classify as dead?
In this scenario, is agriculture dead?
Is the soil dead? The land dead?
An excess of nation dead?
Chauvinism dead? Status? Dead?
Is the general notion of civic virtue
and group dedication dead?

‘TripAdvisor Review – King’s Trauma’ details one unhappy customer’s experience of taking “the Hitler Bus to Atrocity Park”. En route are kittens “crying from burning trees”, “zombies pulling teeth in flooded / living rooms” and a “bulldog named Bailiff chewing on a landmine”. The poem invites us to read as if we are reading a review on Trip Advisor. Again, a neat idea, but structuring it as a sequence of simple sentences, each separated by a double line break, makes it read less like what it’s imitating. The register is too un-naturalistic, too poetic. Its last line is the only one that reads like it’s from a Trip Advisor review:

Mangy drones raiding the suicide bins.

A bulldog named Bailiff chewing on a landmine.

Tiny skeletons welded to a radioactive slide.

Trying too hard. Unlikely to go back. Toilets very
well maintained. 2/5

And the following poem, ‘Traditional Joke Formats’, riffs on classic forms and hackneyed phrases, but quite quickly uses up the value of the idea itself. It wants to pack more punch.

Of course, all of the hangups described here are entirely subjective – funny things are necessarily divisive. I may be missing something, and I’m willing to give Mohamed the benefit of the doubt because there are poems here that I like a lot, too. ‘Bertha Benz’, which sits squat on the page in a thick block of text, previews a fictional audiobook. It is a “radical / new adaptation of the classic historical footnote” that “reimagines Mrs Benz” (as in, Mercedes-Benz) “as a sort of proto-girlboss, / a Strong Female Character before there were / Strong Female Characters”. The poem has panache. Likewise ‘A Complete History of the Contemporary Now – Revised Edition’ carries a joke – half funny, half serious – boldly yet measuredly over three pages. It suggests and shows, rather than telling, and changes over time.

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And finally, credit to ‘A green and pleasant break (to be declared aloud by Richard Burton / and no-one else)’ – this is a example of a reading instruction that works! It takes its idea (something like ‘Jerusalem’ meets Poundland) and executes it neatly, leaving the reader feeling like they’ve taken part in something:

And was the holiday in Greece
with brother’s best mate’s stepdad seen?

And did the little boy divine
scream forth as I gave birth?
And was the bravest mum-of-six
run over here?

Bring me my 30-minute meals!
Bring me my secret lover!
Bag me my bargain: oh clouds unfold!
Get my hubby pregnant then marry me!

Farewell Tour is Stefan Mohamed’s second full collection, and builds on his successes as a comedy writer and performance poet. With moments of well-crafted humour, it takes us (via King’s Nob, Rimwell and Shufflebum, and “avoiding Little Bungle for obvious reasons”) on what amounts to a pretty grim road trip. There are arguments. There is a night in a dingy Travelodge. There is a well-observed discussion of UFOs, wherein the UFOs represent immigrants. (It’s not just UFOs. Hamsters and werewolves are at it too – stealing our jobs, seizing our allotments. “enough is enough.” I like his prose poems best.) But beneath it all, and just about seeping through the cracks, is love. Of a form. Mohamed rails against “this diseased / and crippled country”, “this haunted, haunting, cursed and cursing isle”, but chooses to end his tour with fish and chips – a wise choice – and, going out on something of a limb, a sonnet.

Bruno Cooke is The Friday Poem’s Spoken Word Poetry Editor. He’s written one novel, Reveries, four plays and two feature screenplays. He has lived in France, China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, working as a freelance journalist, writer, educator and occasional chef, and likes, among other things, black and white Japanese films, pub quizzes, fermentation and baklava.

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

It was about ten years ago. I came home from school, ready to get my hands on my dad’s computer. Only one goal in mind: slay the Ender Dragon in Minecraft. After weeks of preparation – getting the best armour, weapons, potions and even the rare Golden Apples, I was finally ready. An epic battle ensued. A man against a dragon, fighting on the dragon’s terms. Somehow, I was victorious. I jumped into the portal expecting to return home but, much to my surprise, I was faced with a poem – bright green and turquoise text scrolling on the screen. I felt … uneasy.

It was a surreal experience to say the least. I didn’t really understand what was happening, but couldn’t stop reading. A conversation between two people about how I was “reading their thoughts as if they were text on a screen” and “had reached a higher level”. The fourth wall was nowhere in sight, and the for the first time in my gaming history, I felt seen.

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Fourth wall breaks have been proven to disturb us psychologically. The fourth wall exists – in part – to protect us from the actions and consequences that happen inside the media. We can do things that we would never dream of doing in real life – we can scam and kill, or laugh at people’s misfortune, not conform to social norms – because we know that our actions have no real-world consequences. We are anonymous. But when that protection is lowered, it can put us in a vulnerable state. Suddenly, that anonymity is gone.

This poem isn’t just a gimmicky fourth wall break, though. That may be the source of my personal unease, but It’s so much more. It’s nine minutes of obscure, beautiful poetry that “wrote itself” about accomplishments, dreams, and the universe, using the fourth wall (or lack thereof) to make it feel personal, and touching. And there’s a rather interesting story behind it.

The End Poem (as it’s come to be known) was written by Julian Gough in 2011. He was asked to write the poem by Markus Persson (the creator of Minecraft) “as a friend” rather than as a business partner. When Markus told him that he should speak with his friend Carl about money he approached the conversation with the same mentality. He thought that they were all just art friends doing art things, and expected his conversation with Carl would be a friendly conversation rather than a full-on negotiation.

Carl was actually Mojang’s CEO, and Carl gave Julian a terrible contract to sign. Doing so would mean signing away all the rights, intellectual ownership and copyright – as well as entering into a non-disclosure agreement – all for a measly $20,000. (Even though the game was still in beta when he was asked to write the poem, Mojang was already a hundred million dollar company.) But that’s just the thing – he was wired the money before he signed the contract, heck, before he was even sent the contract. So he didn’t sign it.

Skip ahead to August 2014 – and one generous money handout to all the employees that didn’t extend to Julian Gough later – he received a message from Carl asking him once again to sign away his rights (to make it more convenient for Microsoft to buy Mojang). He decided to do the exact opposite, opening the poem to the public domain and relinquishing copyright.

But why did they need his work? They just needed some text for the end, and if it was such an inconvenience, why couldn’t they just write it themselves? Why have a poem at all?

Well, sometimes poetry is the only thing that’s applicable to a situation. A bit like how, for musicals, a general rule of thumb is you talk until the emotion becomes too strong for normal words, then you break out into song until the emotion becomes too strong for just song, then you break into dance. This can be applied somewhat in the real world; poetry being both song and dance in this weird cinematic-musical analogy. Sometimes normal words just can’t convey enough emotion, enough sentiment … enough meaning, which is when the heightened language of poetry shines most. The end of one of the greatest, biggest, most impactful video games in history is one of those times. Yes, normal speech would have been fine, but it wouldn’t have made an impact that I, and many other people, remember years later.

Whether it be the death of a loved one, the romance of two young adults, or the end of some impactful media – sometimes poetry isn’t an option, it’s the only option.

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You can read the End Poem below, without having to defeat the Ender Dragon, without even having to play the game, (though obviously it’s better if you do).

(And as for why they couldn’t write it themselves, well it was a spiritual writing experience for Julian Gough – he describes that he didn’t really write the second half, the universe did. He placed the pen on the paper and let Jesus (or your preferred deity) take the proverbial wheel. Something that Markus completely understood; Markus knew he couldn’t just write it himself. Plus, he isn’t a poet.)

What do other Minecraft players say about the End Poem?

Reddit user this_one_in_boots says, “When I beat the game for the first time, I had actually never heard about the poem. I was shocked when it started and I thought it was a wonderful experience, since I was already riding the high from beating the ender dragon. It was such an unexpected place to find something beautiful, at the end of a children’s game.”

Reddit user William27528 says, “The poem moved me in a way I couldn’t describe when I first read it. It’s strange, a little unsettling but overwhelmingly meaningful–and there’s nothing better than stories like that.”

Reddit user Barethyu says, “That poem made me cry as a kid and I still tear up as an adult when reading it.”

Reddit user wichitaesspresso says, “It is a wonderful piece, full of mystery and compassion, where a voice coming from a cube game felt somehow greater than everything and anything.”

For Julian Gough’s long version of events, see his Substack post ‘I wrote a story for a friend … In which I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft … and give it to you.’

Ender Dragon Image: Mojang/Microsoft

Inigo Brodie is a chef and beer enthusiast living in Lille, France, currently trying to combine the retro pixel-art aesthetic with French patisserie. He has been playing Minecraft since he was seven.

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. 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. If you can’t afford to donate, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps (and especially to our regular donors – you are brilliant).

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If you want to win a national accolade, don’t write poems about trees. Check out the weighty ‘over-arching themes’ for the 2023 Forward Prize shortlists. We’re talking post-colonial legacies, linguistic reconciliations, threats of mortality, human vulnerabilities, violent acts (various), mythic ideologies, issues of race/gender/class – even (phew) love. But not trees. So Katharine Towers’ 2021 collection, Oak, which is from start to finish about one tree, was taking a risk. Her two previous books The Floating Man (Picador, 2010) and The Remedies (Picador, 2016) found their way onto shortlists; the first won the Seamus Heaney Prize. Oak, however, didn’t win anything, unless you count being one of four in a Guardian poetry round-up.

Cue disclosure. As HappenStance Press editor, I published Katharine Towers’ The Violin Forest (2019) and – yes – this pamphlet has trees in it. Several. But it took me a while to get around to reading Oak, even though some of my favourite poems happen to be about trees. I don’t mean Alfred Joyce Kilmer’s annoyingly memorable ‘Trees’ (”I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree”). But I love Cowper’s ‘The Poplar Field’ (“The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade / And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade”). From my bedroom window as a child I could see a long line of poplars – a “cool colonnade”, no less. The thought that someone might come and cut them down was appalling: they were tall trees I could recognise and name. My first landmarks, and they’re not there now. Why? Because builders and developers – human beings worldwide – regularly chop down trees while poets / lyricists go off and lament the fact.

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Writing about trees being chopped down is easier than saving them. Hence the rich poetic tradition of arboreal elegy. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’ subscribes to the Cowper mode (“My aspens dear […] / All felled, felled, are all felled”) and his lament has never been more pertinent: “O if we but knew what we do / When we delve or hew — / Hack and rack the growing green!”

Edward Thomas was another tree lover. For him, an aspen was the tree that “ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves”, and if you suspect him of hyperbole, go get yourself a couple of aspens and one light breeze. Nothing compares to the extraordinary sound of their shivering leaves. (Larkin surely has a distant echo of Thomas’s ‘Aspens’ in his own ‘The Trees’: “Their greenness is a kind of grief”.) Then there’s Housman’s cherry, Robert Frost’s ‘Birches’, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s Charter Oak (the “tutelary tree”), not to mention more recent, but no less evocative, examples in Candlestick Press’s Ten Poems About Trees, edited by no other than Katharine Towers. But before I get to Towers’ tree book, I want to talk about Trees by Harold Monro.

Who? I mean the Harold Monro who wrote ‘Milk for the Cat’ and ‘Overheard on a Salt Marsh’ (both widely anthologised). The man who set up The Poetry Bookshop in London in 1913, hosting regular poetry readings in an upstairs room, even during a World War. The man who edited the first issues of The Poetry Review. The man who, under the Poetry Bookshop imprint, published the best-selling ‘Georgian Poetry’ series, not to mention the far less successful (at the time) Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound. The man who rejected ‘The Waste Land’ (he wasn’t always right). A poetry idealist, his modest independent income was dedicated to the cause. Numerous leading poets read at (or attended) events at his bookshop, despite its downmarket setting: Masefield, Yeats, Gibson, Graves, Hodgson, Bridges, Newbolt, Noyes, Drinkwater, W. H. Davies, De La Mare, Brooke, Eliot, Frost, Pound, Thomas, the Sitwells, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham and so on. Their host, Monro, was a problem drinker and a deep thinker, a married man tortured by his closeted sexuality. As a literary personage, he was widely respected. He was – in today’s terms – an influencer.

And this troubled bookshop owner loved trees. Had he known about the Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, or forest-bathing, he would not have been surprised. He was one of the first poets to know about, and experience, psychotherapy, and as for ‘mindfulness’, he was doing it before it was invented. Woodland, for Monro, offered a sort of mystical (albeit dangerous) access to a different form of existence, an escape from the tyranny of thought:

Tree-growth is but a corridor between
The Seen and the Unseen.
Trees are like sentinels that keep
The passage of a gate
From this sleep to that other sleep:
Between two worlds they wait.

Am I alone in hearing echoes of Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’ (“One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.”)? Either way, Frost’s poem is remembered; Monro’s is hard to find. Michael Cullup didn’t include Trees in his 2018 Greenwich Exchange selection, but the book is at least still in print. Dominic Hibberd’s excellent 2003 volume does include it but you can only get it second-hand, at some cost.

First published in 1915, in a single slender volume, Monro’s Trees is one long poem in four sections (with varying line length and orchestrated patterns of rhyme). It is sonorous and clearly intended to be read aloud. It evokes a world in which trees exert power over humans, not the other way around. Trees, says Monro, “[crowd] the brink of silence everywhere” and they

[…] follow and haunt us. We must build
Houses of wood. Our evening rooms are filled
With fragments of the forest: chairs and tables.
We swing our wooden doors;
Pile up, divide our sheds, byres, stables
With logs, make wooden stairs, lay wooden floors,
Sit, move, and sleep among the limbs of trees,
Rejoicing to be near them.

That vision of houses full of “the limbs of trees” has an eerie effect on me: I look again at the wooden desk I’m leaning on and the shelves weighed down by books. Even the walls in this room are covered in paper. When Monro talks about the felling of trees, it’s not a tragedy; his trees move on to new existences: “Some learn to sail / on white enormous wings, / Scattering blossom along their trail”, while others

Suddenly begin,
Oh, what a wild and windy woodland call
Out of the lips of the violin!

This is a tree-lover’s poem if ever there was one. I find it unforgettably different.

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Which is an irony, considering it seems to have been forgotten. I hope the same fate will not befall Katharine Towers’ Oak, not least because the two books fit beautifully into a common tradition, despite the century between them. They willingly hark back to voices older than themselves. In Harold Monro I hear Milton and Blake (“Oh, silly tree-adept!— / Out of arboreal delight I crept; / Crept, was afraid, and ran— / Too much mortality I kept.”) In Katharine Towers I hear Shakespeare, the King James Bible, nursery rhymes and proverbs, Edward Thomas, even Beatrix Potter. Towers is just as musical as Monro: even without a rhyming form, her phrasing and pacing is consciously melodic.

Different times; different formatting decisions. In 1915, Monro started each line with a capital letter, and his punctuation was traditional and formal. He experimented with line length to aid conversational tone and natural pacing. Towers, just over a century later, drops all caps and punctuation (the odd question mark and exclamation mark slips through). This means her line and stanza breaks are crucial. She must write in such a way that nobody gets lost. She succeeds. Oak is a brilliant (and rare) example of how a poet can drop all the prose pointers – the commas, the full stops, the colons and semi-colons – and still make everything work. She even gets away with suddenly capitalising a noun in the eighteenth-century way, promoting it to a major player. For example, the three ‘true loves’ of an oak are Air, Rain and Light:

and Rain will wash an oak tree clean
and the oak will hang out its leaves to dry
and the leaves will show forth
their perfect tiny geographies

The lines above are contemporary in their mode and absence of formal codes. But the diction, or the balance of phrase, invokes an archaic world with all its strangeness (see the repetition of “and”; the expression in “show forth”). You can’t read Oak without feeling the time spent with the tree has given the author a new poetry voice (search in vain for a lyric ‘I’ in this volume). It has perhaps changed even her attitude to language itself. Again and again, she defines her terms: “to flourish meaning to flower”; “soldier meaning one who is paid with gold coin”; “a sapling meaning one who’s young”.

She also experiments here and there with type size, though I’m less convinced this works. There are no titles here, just section divisions. But three pages have something in larger font that looks like a title; later, three pages pick out their concluding lines in a similar way. Once, she offers the phrase “joyous muchness”, and makes it ‘louder’ (by means of indentation, italics, a larger typeface, and even an exclamation mark). But I think her real strengths are in melodic understatement, precision, pacing and authority of tone. Like Monro’s Trees, this long poem is intended to be heard, and you can’t hear a bigger typeface.

It’s hard finding precisely the right ending for a long poem. Monro concludes with a key point, but his chugging tetrameter sounds like he’s run out of steam:

And you, be certain that you keep
Some memory of trees for sleep.

Katharine Towers is subtler. As she approaches the death of the tree, she artfully slows her pace through short lines, enlarged spaces, and hypnotic repetition. But as an afterword, she offers “and all this may take years” as though this time-scale is a surprising new idea. Has she forgotten the earlier conversation between the tree and the milk-cap fungi (“there may be a message / and such a message may take years”)?

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Oak is, nevertheless, so unusual, so tender in its development, its expression, its characters, that for my money it deserves exceptional attention, if not cash prizes. Besides, according to the marketing blurb, the book has “an ecocritical awareness that renders it utterly contemporary.” Oh dear. Do we really need to justify poetry in such hollowly topical terms? Is it not okay just to write about … trees? I don’t even think the book is ‘ecocritical’ except by implication. Would you even know that the attack of the oak processionary moth (it pops up in the poem) was made more likely by global warming? Harold Monro, on the other hand, does deliberately highlight the risks to the planet in his work – albeit not in Trees, which is about trees. In ‘The Earth For Sale’, he writes: “Is there no pledge to make at once with Earth / While yet we have not murdered all her trees?” He might even earn the adjective ‘ecocritical’, which still hasn’t made it to most of the English dictionaries.

But for my money, Oak should be treasured and remembered — not because it’s ecocritical, but because it’s original, delightful, well-written and innovative, and at the same time has a firm foothold in tradition. It’s accessible to all ages. Its roots (sorry about the pun) are pre-literary: it evokes the earliest features of oral storytelling. It relishes language without brandishing vocabulary. It teaches you something without erudition. Forestry terms are slipped in naturally (“mast year”, “sinker root”, “roothairs”, the risk of “windthrow”). You may not know about “the kindly milk-cap family”, “beefsteak fungus” or the “oak splendour beetle” but here they are, as real creatures not metaphors. This is a fabulous long poem about a tree. I predict that little bits of it will be extracted for anthologies, but in truth every element is carefully woven into the whole. Have you looked at an acorn lately – really looked? I’ll close with a few stanzas from Oak that may encourage you:

hold an acorn in your palm to see its shine
like well-loved furniture

and how it fulfils the tiny chalice
which is rough and seemingly unfinished

the cup partakes of the nature of the tree
being workaday and built to last

and the nut is the pearl of great price
bearer of a secret code

which is the singularity of an oak
alone in a field

Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, and publisher, founding editor of HappenStance Press and Sphinx Review, and Consulting Editor at The Friday Poem. Her first collection, Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003), was a Jerwood / Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot (Shoestring, 2010). She also writes and publishes light verse, including Down With Poetry! (HappenStance, 2016) and Branded (Red Squirrel, 2019). Her most recent collection is PEARLS: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (HappenStance, 2022).

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 are currently republishing some of these posts – poems, features and reviews – on Substack. 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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August Bank Holiday 1979, Marsh Farm Festival, Luton. The headline band is UK Decay. I am fourteen and my friend Alison is fifteen, and we have walked three miles across town to get here. I’d like to think that we looked the part – Alison in her yellow and maroon tartan trousers and blue fringe, me in my charity shop trench coat with the London Calling album cover painted on the back in white Dylon fabric paint – but London Calling wasn’t released until December 1979 and Alison assures me that, at that time, we still looked fairly normal.

Inside, however, we are all punk, or so we fancy. We listen to The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and, of course, The Clash, and we are in a band ourselves, though we can’t sing or play and we don’t own any instruments. Punk has put a rocket up the pop charts and divided the youth of Luton into mods, punks and metal heads, and on this August Bank Holiday most of them are converging on the Marsh Farm Estate to see UK Decay and their support band Pneumania, soon to be described as “two of the worst bands in the world” by Charles Shaar Murray and Danny Baker in the NME, a kind of inverse accolade which will drive sales of their jointly recorded Split Single, released by Plastic Records in 1979, into a second pressing.

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The festival field is filling up. Groups of punks loll in front of the stage swigging from cans of beer, kids kick balls around, a few families picnic on the grass. Over by the car park the MadCaps sweat in their greasy leathers, roll cigarettes and inspect each other’s bikes. Pneumania’s spike haired singer Gaynor Griffiths, aka Sno White, struts around the stage, shrieking and punching the air over some raucous guitar playing and a spatter of drums. The band have more enthusiasm than skill, but that’s what punk is all about and we are pleased to be there, settling down with our illicit two cans of Kestrel apiece and some squashed cheese and Branston Pickle sandwiches.

At the end of Pneumania’s set, while the bands mess around with gear, some lanky guy in drainpipe jeans, a Dennis the Menace t-shirt and Dr. Marten boots takes the mic and announces that he will read us his poem. He starts to shout something about Thatcher and Reagan and Greenham Common. It’s fast and furious, it rhymes, kind of, and scans – well, in parts. I’ve never heard anything like it before and it’s strangely compelling. He finishes with a flourish and a thank you, and stomps off stage. The four members of UK Decay come on to a hail of beer cans and thrash out a short set starting with ‘Car Crash’ and ending with ‘For My Country’, but I‘m still thinking about the punk poet. His name is Nick the Poet, and he is my introduction to ‘ranting poetry’.

I never see Nick the Poet again, but the following year Attila the Stockbroker plays the Cock, opposite Luton Tech. He clutches a beer bottle and shouts his poems through the mic. “I don’t talk to pop stars / and they don’t talk to me / it’s a mutual arrangement / – the way we like to be”. Alison and I both buy the Cherry Red album Pillows and Prayers, an eclectic compilation of 17 acts which sold for 99p and shifted 120,000 copies in the UK alone, and I listen to The Monochrome Set and Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt and Eyeless in Gaza but most of all I listen to track 14, Attila’s poem about being threatened by youths in burger bars, ‘A Bang and a Wimpey’: “Pre-pubescent pugilists, terror tots, South London’s finest / knee-high nihilists planning nursery crimes […] primary school but primed to kill or maim or terrorise / size you up and slice you through with Peter Sutcliffe eyes”.

Attila the Stockbroker, aka John Baine, was initially inspired by his father, from whom he says he inherited a love of rhyme and a sense of rhythm, and also by Hilaire Belloc’s comic poetry. Baine got involved in music as a bass player in various bands in the 1970s. He loved the rebelliousness and the DIY ethos of punk subculture, but soon worked out that his strength was words, rather than bass playing, so he started jumping up on stages in between bands to shout his poems. In ‘My Poetic Licence’ he introduces himself, and his politics:

Yo! I’m the MC of ranting rebel poetry
I know my history and my identity
I’m independent, a red cottage industry
DIY from here to eternity
Now let me tell you what’s been going on -
I take my inspiration from centuries long gone
Oral tradition of sedition, that’s my position
No court jester with a tame disposition ...

[…]

And yes, once or twice I’ve had to fight –
but when a fascist hits a poet, the poet’s doing something right!

While Nick the Poet and Attila the Stockbroker were ranting in pubs and at punk gigs in the South East, in a front room in Bradford two more punk poets were developing their skills. Julianne Mumford was the daughter of an “ex-military, ex-Territorial SAS” with advanced self-defence skills and no fear. At 19 she married Kenneth Denby, a ‘prospect’ in the biker gang Satan’s Slaves. In her twenties she divorced Denby, took a job as a bouncer at the Queen’s Hall in Bradford, and discovered punk.

Her interest in poetry started when she went to a poetry reading at her local library. The poetry she heard meant nothing to her. “Poetry was … smug, self satisfied, snobbish, and happy in its ivory tower”, she says. “It was all middle class people writing about their divorces and vacations in Tuscany.” She wanted to write “poetry that had meaning for people like us”.

Initially Denby worked in collaboration with the underground cult band New Model Army and in particular with the NMA singer Justin Sullivan, who also performed solo as Slade the Leveller, a reference to the seventeenth century political movement. She was the first manager of the band, designing posters, album covers and merchandise, and regularly gigged with them. She began to build a reputation as a touring performance poet, performing alongside punk bands and other punk poets. At the outset, she said, “I didn’t really do the same kind of poetry that they were doing but they didn’t have any girls so I got roped into it”.

The poet doing the roping was Seething Wells. On her blog Denby describes him as a “living powerhouse of scathing mental energy and furious polemic. Bullet-headed and rubbery with ire, his wild ideas and crazed humour were like a jolt of speed every time he opened his mouth.”

Steven Wells (aka Seething Wells aka Susan Williams aka Swells) was born in Swindon in 1960 but moved to Bradford when he was young. He got involved with the radical socialist Leeds art-punk band The Mekons, moved to Leeds and began performing as a ranting poet and comedian. He performed as a support act to various northern English punk bands, such as The Fall and Gang of Four, along with Attila The Stockbroker and fellow ranting poets Mark Miwurdz and Porky The Poet, better known now as Phil Jupitus. He was an angry skinhead with an Anti-Nazi League tattoo and if poetry was a fight, he never used a razor when he could bring out a sledgehammer. The Yorkshire Post described him as “about as subtle as a nail bomb exploding in a crowded room”. Wells vented his spleen on “sexists, toffs, vegetarians, homophobes, fascists and Tetley Bittermen” (Tetley’s was a beer brewed in Yorkshire and the Tetley Bittermen were the “typical Yorkshiremen” portrayed in their ads).

John Baine said, “He wrote to me, enclosing his fanzine Molotov Comics, saying he was doing the same in Bradford, and so were some friends of his including Joolz and Slade the Leveller, from a then unknown band, New Model Army. He called it ‘ranting poetry’ and from the moment I heard the phrase, so did I.” Wells said: “It’s about getting poetry back to basics – simplifying it and making it more direct. Why write about ‘cosmic experiences’ when you can write about your own predicament – being on the dole and having no money spare, ever.”

Police Dog

Drizzling rain, heavy fog
Being swamped by the Drug Squad
A police dog sniffs-out vitamin pills
Speed kills
These build your muscles
“What’re these Punk? D’you take drugs?”
The constable snarls
The dog looks puzzled
I’m quite fond of puppy dogs
It’s pigs that should be muzzled.

But where did these ranting poets find their inspiration? You have to go back a decade or so before punk arrived to find the man who is generally seen as the first punk poet. Part-poet part-comedian, John Cooper Clarke says he went to a ‘Salford slum school’ with its own coroner, and where they wrote essays titled ‘What I Want to Be if I Grow Up’.

In the 1960s, inspired in part by Pam Ayres, which was the only poetry on the telly, Clarke started taking his surreal, wry poetry out into working men’s clubs, folk clubs and variety hall venues. Bernard Manning gave him his first break. He read alongside ventriloquists and strippers until punk came along and he found his natural home, filling in between bands, warming up before bands and later supporting the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, the Smiths, the Fall, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Magazine, among others. From the heckling at punk gigs – and there was a lot of heckling – he learnt to work the crowd. He heard how the Ramones joked about the speed and brevity of their gigs so he sped up and began to deliver poems at breakneck speed. Poems like ‘You never see a nipple in the Daily Express’.

I’ve seen the poison letters of the horrible hacks
About the yellow peril and the reds and the blacks
And the TUC and its treacherous acts
Kremlin money – All right Jack
I’ve seen how democracy is under duress
But I’ve never seen a nipple in the Daily Express

[…]

This paper’s boring mindless mean
Full of pornography the kind that’s clean
Where William Hickey meets Michael Caine
Again and again and again and again
I’ve seen millionaires on the DHSS
But I’ve never seen a nipple in the Daily Express

It was the Beat poets of New York in the ’50s which really shaped Clarke’s self-image. “It was very difficult to get books by Jack Kerouac back then,” he remembers. “I found out about them via Mad Magazine, where there was a spoof on Beatniks in ’57. I finally got one, Big Sur, and thought, ‘Yeah, this is sensational.’”

Classic John Cooper Clarke poems include the magnificently dystopian ‘Evidently Chickentown’, with the unforgettable line “You’re fucking lost and fucking found, stuck in fucking Chickentown”, although the recorded version, which closed an episode of The Sopranos, had “bloody” instead of “fucking”. ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ was reworked and recorded by the Arctic Monkeys: “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner / Breathin’ in your dust / I wanna be your Ford Cortina / I will never rust // If you like your coffee hot / Let me be your coffee pot / You call the shots, babe / I just wanna be yours.”

Best of all, in my book, is ‘Beasley Street’ which draws on the poverty he experienced growing up in Salford under a Thatcher government. Beasley Street may be tailored to fit a past decade, but its atmospheric despair still chimes with us today.

The kingdom of the blind
A one-eyed man is king
Beauty problems are redefined
The doorbells do not ring
A lightbulb bursts like a blister
The only form of heat
Here a fellow sells his sister
Down the river on Beasley Street

[…]

People turn to poison
Quick as lager turns to piss
Sweethearts are physically sick
Every time they kiss.
It’s a sociologist’s paradise
Each day repeats
On easy, cheesy, greasy, queasy
Beastly Beasley Street

Protesting, political, working-class, humorous yet also deadly serious, the ‘ranting’ poetry of the 80s was the vibrant precursor of today’s spoken word poetry. But there’s another thread to this. Punk was inextricably bound to reggae. Both were music of youth rebellion and social action, and they were introduced to each other by Don Letts at the Roxy in Covent Garden – the first UK venue to cater exclusively to punk – where Letts worked as the house DJ. The Roxy is where Joe Strummer discovered reggae and it led to the Clash covering Junior Murvin’s ‘Police and Thieves’ in 1977 and then to ‘White Man In Hammersmith Palais’, released in 1978, a scathing attack on UK race relations over a punk reggae rhythm. The Clash’s landmark album London Calling was full of reggae riffs and inspiration. The Ruts’ third single for Virgin, ‘Jah War’, released at the end of October 1979, was a furious punk dub about police brutality. Don Letts also introduced Bob Marley to punk. Marley became inspired by the passion and rebellion of the punks and wrote ‘Punky Reggae Party’ in response.

While punk attempted to capture the sense of chaos and disenfranchisement of the late 1970s and early 1980s through music and ranting poetry, reggae – in the form of Linton Kwesi Johnson – found another. Johnson didn’t sing, or DJ, the pioneering Jamaican rapping style that was a precursor to hip-hop. On record, Johnson simply spoke his verses over a deep, heavy rhythmic backing, a style that became known as dub poetry.

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Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica and raised in London, and he bridged the gap between reggae poetry and punk poetry, infusing his music with politics and an urge for freedom rooted in his experience as a black man living in Brixton. He wrote in a unique marriage of Caribbean Creole and black urban patois. Amid reggae’s rising popularity and riding on a punk-reggae “anti-establishment” coalition, he opened for punk groups such as Johnny Rotten’s Public Image Limited – successor to the Sex Pistols.

Johnson paved the way for dub poets such as Oku Onuora, known as the “father of Jamaican dub poetry”, and Benjamin Zephaniah, self-described “Poet, writer, lyricist, musician and naughty boy”. Zephaniah’s blog notes, “In the early Eighties when Punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about SUS Laws, high unemployment, homelessness and the National Front, Zephaniah’s poetry could be heard on the demonstrations, at youth gatherings, outside police stations, and on the dance floor ... His mission was to take poetry everywhere, he hated the dead image that academia and the establishment had given poetry and proclaimed that he was out to popularise poetry by reaching people who did not read books, those that were keen on books could now witness a book coming to life on the stage. This poetry was political, musical, radical, relevant and on TV.”

Apples & Snakes was set up by a group of poets in 1982 to promote and encourage performance poetry, and worked with many of the ranting poets, including Attila the Stockbroker, Joolz Denby and Seething Wells, as well as other poets and musicians with a political message such as Billy Bragg. It has been crucial in the development of many of the high profile poets and spoken word artists working today including John Agard, Jean “Binta” Breeze, Malika Booker, Lemn Sissay, Kae Tempest and more.

Punk had a have-a-go, anyone-can-do-it, DIY attitude. It represented release, freedom, rebellion, fury and frustration with the establishment; it was dirty, funny, feral, anti-capitalist, counter-culture, anti-Thatcher, left wing, socialist, anarchist, political and all about the music. Much has changed since the 1970s and 80s – in particular computers and new technology make it easy to create music and poetry that sound and look professional, so the scrappy, hand-made element of punk is rarely found – but there are still poets whose work is fiercely political, who have developed their work with music firmly in mind, and who push hard against the structures of the establishment. Who embodies the have-a-go, political spirit of punk today?

In terms of music, how about Sleaford Mods, who are vocalist Jason Williamson and, since 2012, musician Andrew Fearn. They are, according to The Independent “the post-punk poets of the underclass.” The music is hard to categorise – post-punk, electro-punk, alternative/indie, minimalist. But the spirit is definitely punk – they sing about unemployment, modern working life, celebrities and pop culture, capitalism and society in general, and swear a lot. One fan, Steven Lovatt, says, “Jason Williamson has brought punk poetry to the masses over the last ten years”.

In the world of poetry, Outspoken Press, establishes by Anthony Anaxagorou in 2015, has something of the punk about it. It was set up with the aim of providing a platform for compelling writing from voices that are under-represented in mainstream publishing. The Press has published 25 titles to date by authors including Raymond Antrobus, Sabrina Mahfouz, Joelle Taylor, Harry Josephine Giles, Richard Georges and Fran Lock. Anaxagorou himself has a reputation for being a bit of a maverick – he was even awarded the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction – and his guest editors Joelle Taylor (2021) and and Wayne-Holloway Smith (2022-23) are both deeply political and fiercely independent.

Burning Eye Books is “Never knowingly mainstream”. It’s small independent publisher which specialising in spoken word artists. Editors Bridget Hart & Clive Birnie aim to publish emerging and established artists who might be rejected from other, more traditional poetry publishers. “We look for the bold, the fearless and the strange” and they publish a big list, including Casey Bailey, the Birmingham Poet Laureate 2020-2022, Joelle Taylor, Lucy English, and Johnny Fluffypunk – “A multiple slam champion who hates competition in the arts almost as much as hypocrisy” (though it is probably fair to say he’s as fluffy as he is punk). Hart and Birnie say, ”We live in a world where you have to stand up for what you stand for and we stand for dignity and equality for all”.

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And Nymphs and Thugs, based in Leeds, was established in 2015 by Matt Abbott and bills itself as the UK’s leading spoken word record label. As well as digital albums, Nymphs and Thugs has released CDs, vinyl, zines, and various merchandise. They also produce national spoken word tours and ‘LIVEwire’ events around the UK and have recently launched the Disarm Hate x Poetry Project. Stars of the label are Toria Garbutt, Luke Wright (from Aisle 16), and Salena Godden.

Godden first discovered ranting poetry from doing gigs in 1990s London with poets Tim Wells, Scottish poet Jock Scot, and John Cooper Clarke, and went on to make a name for herself on the performance poetry circuit as a punk poet. Punk crowds liked her boozy, dirty and honest take on her life. “I’d warm them up: it was mucky poems for punks,” she recalls. Her poem ‘I Will Not Vote For Mrs May’ is a blistering punk version of her earlier poem ‘Citizen Of Nowhere’ and opens, “I will not vote for Mrs May / This hard and xenophobic way”. Her poem ‘It Isn’t Punk To Seek Permission’ featured on BBC Radio 4’s Best of 2018 and is published in Pessimism is for Lightweights: 13 Pieces of Courage and Resistance, published by Rough Trade, a collection of poems written “for the women’s march, for women’s empowerment and amplification, poems that salute people fighting for justice, poems on sexism and racism, class discrimination, period poverty and homelessness, immigration and identity”.

Give us a go on your sun and watch how we’d share it
Give us a paddle in your sunlight, a splash of shiny-shiny
One hour of the sun that is fixed on you and your privilege
For look how strong we are and how tall we can already stand
Without your sun, without your gold and
Without your permission.

Also on the Nymphs and Thugs label is Kirsty Taylor. Taylor has a considerable dose of punk spirit. A fiercely proud Bradfordian, she “blends hip-hop influences with a contemporary take on kitchen sink realism”. The characters in her poetry are from council estates and shopping precincts and box bedrooms; her film poem ‘Go Safe’ addresses the issues of homeless and vulnerable young people. Her poem for Bradford, written for Bradford BID in 2020, was made into a spoken word poetry film; it details and champions the real working lives of Bradford people. In this, and in the way she integrates politics and music into her poetry, Taylor comes closest to being a worthy – if considerably more melodic – successor to the creator of ‘Beasley Street’. This is from ‘Go Safe’:

Go Safe / big lad / with them Aldi bags weighted / with everything you own [...] Your whole life is lived / on bread lines / last crust and crumbs of houses / no gardens, just sheds / just shells of a home / bagged up estate playgrounds / is all you’ve ever known [...] Go Safe.

Hilary Menos is a poet, editor and reviewer. Her latest pamphlets are Vox Wah-Wah (New Walk Editions, 2026) and Fear of Forks (HappenStance, 2022). Her first collection, Berg (Seren, 2009), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010. Her second collection is Red Devon (Seren, 2013). Her pamphlet, Human Tissue (Smith|Doorstop, 2020), was a winner in The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2019/20. She is editor of The Friday Poem.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has nearly 3800 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 are currently republishing some of these posts – poems, features and reviews – on Substack. 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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For some years I’ve been observing that interesting phenomenon, the ‘after’ epigraph. An ‘after’, as you may know, comes before a poem. Once upon a time nobody used ‘after’ epigraphs, although they did dedications (‘for’) and sometimes honoured the dead (‘i.m. or in memoriam’). Many poets liked prefatory quotations too.

I’m not sure when ‘aftering’ began. T S Eliot doesn’t do it (so far as I can see). Larkin and Plath, from a swift flick through their Completes, don’t use ‘after’. Ted Hughes, in Birthday Letters 1998, has no ‘after’ poems, though some of the contents are definitely ‘after’ Plath. The Forward Book of Poetry 2001 contains no ‘after’ poems. However, Don Paterson ‘aftered’ four times in Nil Nil (his debut collection) 1993 and has been doing it ever since.

I don’t remember seeing ‘after’ as an epigraph to a novel or a short story. I’ve never seen an artwork titled ‘after’ another artist, or a movie ‘after’ another film director. It appears that ‘After’ is exclusively poetry code, one of the secret signs you learn when you join the poetry cabal.

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An epigraph, according to Merriam Webster, is “a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme”. But ‘after’ at the start of a poem is not a quotation and may have nothing to do with the theme. (If there is a theme.) And it can mean many things. Over time most readers work the options out. Alternatively, we pretend we understand. Survival in the poetry business involves a lot of bluffing.

For example, if a poem titled ‘The Pond’ had an epigraph that read After Paul Klee, and you happened to know that Klee was a twentieth-century artist, and you happened to know what some of his most famous artworks looked like, the reference to Paul Klee might help you make sense of the poem. Or not. You might have to pretend you sort of knew about Klee. (Yeah right, that Klee.) The inference is that you need to be cultured in all the arts to read poetry. Alternatively, if the epigraph read After Paul Klee’s ‘The Goldfish’, and the poem happened to be about a pond containing a magical fish, you might find the reference helpful. You could even google “Klee” + “The Goldfish”. That way the poem would have an illustration. All you’d need is access to the net and a lively sense of curiosity.

Poets who write ekphrastic poems habitually reference the artwork they’re describing, or that they’re inspired by, with an ‘after’ statement. Often (but by no means always) you need to see the artwork to make sense of the poem. If you don’t need to see the artwork for the poem to work, is an ‘after’ necessary? Your call.

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But it’s not just artwork. Many poems are ‘after’ other poets, in one sense or another. Sometimes the ‘after’ statement might simply say ‘After Caroline Bird’ or ‘After Emily Berry’. (You, the reader, are not supposed to say ‘Caroline who?’) So much depends on what you’re already supposed to know, or pretend you know. Not only should you know Berry and Bird are contemporary poets, you’re supposed to know which of their poems (or which aspects of their style) the poet had in mind. If you’re lucky, there may be a clue – for example, the title of the ‘after’ poem may be the same as the title of the ‘before’ poem. And the ‘before’ poem may be googlable. Or not.

Speaking as one who has spent many hours treasure-hunting ‘after’ references, I’d say it’s mainly easy and often fun to find them. I can be post-modern – in moderation. However, sometimes I stomp round my poetry bookshelves growling. A poem prefaced After Simon Spoon-Turner doesn’t tell me whether Spoon-Turner is a poet, an artist, a politician, a personal friend, an alter ego, dead or alive. If googling turns up diddlysquat, what was the ‘after’ for? Shouldn’t poets ask themselves whom their ‘after’ references help? Is something vital to the poem explained by the reference? Ok, good. But should the reader have to look up references before reading the poem? More to the point, will they?

Sometimes I suspect the ‘after’ epigraph is there to impress (especially if the ‘aftered’ poet is someone nobody understands). Or it may be a matter of private understanding between the poet and a friend. Recently I saw a poem ‘after’ a tweet to someone I don’t know from someone I don’t know, while another poem was ‘after’ an inaccessible Chinese film. Grrrrrr.

Anyway, what sort of poetry club encourages an ‘after’ reference that only fans will find funny (e.g. Don Paterson writing after Ladislav Skala, when only those in-the-know know Skala is a Paterson pseudonym)? And speaking of Paterson, he often uses ‘after’ for loose translations (he calls them ‘versions’) of well-known Spanish, Italian or German originals. In this case, the ‘after’ will reference the author, e.g. Bertholt Brecht, Eugenio Montale, but not the original poem. Either you’re supposed just to know which famous poem you’re reading Paterson’s version of, or you have trot off to find out (it’s an education). Contemporary poets like making their readers work. Often, when I commence tracking down an ‘after’, the name is totally unknown to me. At such times, I feel sadly lacking. The poem is meant for readers who do recognise the reference. Isn’t that right?

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Today’s poetry workshops often use poems as prompts. All the participants write something inspired by, say, an Ian MacMillan piece. One of those attendees later gets the resulting poem published, and if some resemblance to the original remains (or even if it doesn’t), they put ‘after Ian MacMillan’ under the title. Nobody wants to be accused of plagiarism.

It’s undeniable that an ‘after’ epigraph always means something. But only the poet who put it there knows precisely what. It’s a password. The reader’s job is to crack it.

My favourite example of the after aftermath (so far) is in Tim Tim Cheng’s pamphlet Tapping At Glass. Here, ‘Ars Poetica with Translations’ is After Alycia Pirmohamed. (Anybody’s ‘Ars Poetica’ is also ‘after’ Horace, probably via Archibald McLeish, but that’s by the by.) On this occasion, I was lucky. I already knew Pirmohamed was a poet (I’ve met her, I’ve got her pamphlet, I’ve got her book). But which poem? I’m quite old, so first I looked in the book. No ‘Ars Poetica’. Bum.

I therefore googled “Alycia Pirmohamed” + “Ars Poetica”, which took me to two poems in Granta. Bingo! I swiftly scanned ‘Art Poetic with Footnotes’. Now I could see that Cheng’s ‘Ars Poetica with Translations’ was a playful allusion to that poem. I could also see how Cheng moves Pirmohamed’s ‘permanence’ discussion into the issue of ‘object permanence’. It occurred to me that Cheng perhaps knew Pirmohamed personally. Maybe her ‘after’ was also a bit of peer-poet banter?

But the unexpected bonus (and nerdy delight) was the discovery that Alycia Pirmohamed’s poem was also ‘after’ another piece of writing. This time the poem is After Dionne Brand. Dionne Brand was a familiar name to me, but I hadn’t read her. Novelist or poet? A Google search yielded The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos. Alycia Pirmohamed’s ‘Ars P.’ was clearly ‘after’ a whole book of prose poems. There are further clues inside the Pirmohamed poem, which begins:

The poet says she longs for permanence.
In the footnote, she finds a line in the shape of a warbler.
In the footnote, she plies apart the axis of her sexuality.

Oh how I would love to take a look at The Blue Clerk. But it’s an American publication, costly and not available online, though there are extracts on the Griffin Prize website (none of which mention warblers and none of which have footnotes). I wondered whether Alycia P. owned The Blue Clerk, or whether she was referring to the extract published in Granta. How unutterably gratified I should be if The Blue Clerk also had an ‘after’ epigraph! But alas, I have almost certainly reached what Russell Hoban, in The Mouse and His Child, calls “the last visible dog”.

Contemporary poetry, so far as I can see, professes accessibility but really continues to veil itself in codes. Terminology has always been useful for inviting some people in and keeping others out. On the other hand, every poem in existence owes something to poems that came before it. It’s a sort of relay race. One poet passes the baton to the next, and we are all in the same race. ‘After’ epigraphs would appear to make the debt explicit. But we poets can mean so many things by our ‘afters’! We so rarely say what we mean. I’ve heard it suggested that poetry is an abstruse ars. Well, er, yes.

Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, and publisher, founding editor of HappenStance Press and Sphinx Review, and Consulting Editor at The Friday Poem. Her first collection, Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003), was a Jerwood / Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot (Shoestring, 2010). She also writes and publishes light verse, including Down With Poetry! (HappenStance, 2016) and Branded (Red Squirrel, 2019). Her most recent collection is PEARLS: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (HappenStance, 2022).

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 are in the process of republishing some of these posts – poems, features and reviews – on Substack. 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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make a search of the room again. A fly’s
flickering against the window testifies
to its dream of elsewhere. In dim light
you kiss me, in this place we have entered

so rashly. The slant sun’s silvering
dismantles our memories. In your breath
in the cold, is a picture of the world.
There’s a feeling of something different

on the other side, where every piece
of the story would fit, where from cut
to cut the stills of the film of our lives
would become like our tears believable.

‘Tenants’ is from Forgetfulness by Ian Seed (Shearsman Books, 2026) — thanks to Shearsman for letting us reproduce it here.

I’ve been fascinated by Ian Seed’s work ever since I reviewed his 2024 collection Night Window. I went on to read Identity Papers and The Underground Cabaret with much delight; there is, as poet and critic Mark Ford has said, something addictive about Seed’s prose poems.

So I felt a little disappointed, at first, to find that Forgetfulness presents quite differently from previous collections. The poignantly comic, absurdist narratives are still in evidence, but they have a distinctly allegorical feel and are broken up by extended departures into other forms. It took time for me to see what Seed might be about here, but I began to suspect that the word ‘dismantles’ (see the introductory poem above) could be key. Because much of the collection concerns the death of Seed’s mother (a friend’s death is also memorialised), he probably needed to dismantle his customary poetic structures to allow for more unshielded self-expression. This very challenge seems to be alluded to in the opening poem, ‘Scattering My Mother’s Ashes’, where, in one dreamlike sequence, the narrator finds himself in Milan:

[…] the wind sweeping down the dark, deserted street where the bus had dropped me off. There was no sign of the poet who’d promised to meet me, but after a while I heard someone softly singing. A young man, who looked like a student I’d once known, emerged from the darkness. I wanted to ask him the way, but when he saw me he drew back, and no words would come to me.

I read this, rightly or wrongly, as Ian Seed coming face to face with his own inarticulateness. Each prose poem in Section 1 seems open to such allegorical interpretation, and the narrator is clearly Seed himself, even if events are fantasy. In one poem, the narrator sees (or imagines seeing) his late mother go by in a coach:

I ran after the coach, waving, and caught up with it at some traffic lights. I put my hands together in a begging gesture and the driver let me on. […] At the next stop, the door at the back opened, and stayed open even when we set off again. The driver must have forgotten to close it. I had to hold my mother tight when we went around a corner.

There is humour in these opening poems, as there can be (and often needs to be) in real life after someone has died. One narrative concerns the copious tea-drinking that marks the days and weeks following a death:

There are just a few of us on the bare, windy hill, standing around in scattered groups. […] I look across the slope at my brother. His cup’s now empty and he’s looking quite forlorn. I feel a drop of something on my cheek, and then another. I’m not the only one. All of us now are looking up at the sky – none of us had any plan for what to do if it rained today. A drop splashes into what must be my fifth cup of tea.

Seed’s skill is to maintain lightness whilst smuggling in the personal and profound. We don’t need to know how much literal truth there is in these tragicomic narratives, but certain lines are clearly heartfelt, as in the last line of this extract from ‘Scattering My Mother’s Ashes’:

Half a year on from my mother’s death, not knowing which way to turn, I rang a Christian helpline. A woman asked me my name, and then in a gentle, yet matter-of-fact tone told me I had ten minutes at most because someone else might be waiting on the line. […] I felt then that within the granted minutes I had infinite time, because love was infinite, and all I had to do was accept it.

It’s difficult to convey properly how these prose poems work without including the whole poem, but hopefully the four extracts above give something of a flavour. I found the whole opening section both readable and moving.

The second section comprises thirteen poems written in conventional stanzas and containing some beautifully lyric moments (“the slant sun’s silvering / dismantles our memories”). Several are fragmented and elusive, some frustratingly so, evoking a sense of disorientation and psychological confusion. Certain words recur – stone, shadow, cold, door, window – and serve to create a sort of visual stage-set. ‘Film’ is referenced more than once, and I found myself seeing images from black and white movies – particularly since cigarette-smoking figures in several poems.

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These are poems of loss and lostness; the narrator is like an insecure actor in a production which the rest of the cast insists on performing but for which they see no purpose. The poem, ‘Unscripted’ begins:

A heavy snow. The film eyes
of a stranger. This street is absent
from the story of the city

which I cannot recognise, though
my body’s memory can read
its twists and turns

In a similar vein, the poem, ‘The Jugglers’, opens with:

You walk down stone steps into a crowded square.
No-one turns at your approach. They stand in small groups,
chatting, laughing, waiting for a performance about to take place.
It turns out to be only a set of jugglers who throw their pins
over the nothingness of our lives, maiming the air with their cries.

I see and hear the word ‘miming’ within the unusual use of ‘maiming’ in that last line – as if language itself is being juggled and confused, yet at the same time freighted with double meanings.

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Section three of the collection finds us back on the more familiar Seedian territory of absurdist prose poetry (‘Seedian’ must have been coined before but if not, I hereby claim copyright!) These poems are lighter but with a darkish undercurrent; in many, we encounter a persona familiar from Seed’s previous books – an insecure, mildly paranoid figure trying to find their place in a fractured world. The anxiety-dream scenario at beginning of ‘January’ is typical:

My first day back, I couldn’t find my presentation on my laptop. I couldn’t even remember what it was I was supposed to be talking about. My colleagues, my boss and our potential customers watched my fumbling with growing impatience. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

The fourth and final section includes three collage-style poems. The longest of these, entitled ‘I Remember’, is inspired by Joe Brainard’s 1970 memoir of the same name. As a university lecturer in creative writing, Seed must have used Brainard’s poem with students many times. It is, put simply, a long string of reminiscences, each beginning ‘I remember’. Brainard’s book consists of 1,500 such sentences; Seed’s poem has 57. The effect of such a poem depends on the clarity and authenticity of each memory and on the haphazard ordering, which mimics how our minds recall the past. Seed’s poem, as with Bairnard’s, pulls us up short with its sudden changes of mood, made more powerful by the matter-of-fact tone:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I remember dancing on my own round the front room with the
          radio blasting out The Rolling Stones’ new single ‘Get Offa
          My Cloud.’ My mum yelled at me from the kitchen to turn
          it down.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I remember doing bob-a-job for the Cubs in my green uniform,
          then spending the money on sweets.

I remember my mum’s black eye and my uncle arriving in his van
          to take us away to live with him and my aunt.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

[…]

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I remember my dad barking back at an Alsatian dog behind a steel
          fence.

I remember travelling to Italy with him when I was eight. He was 
          happier on his own.

The whole of this, particularly the last line (which I won't spoil by quoting), must have been hard to write. Using a child’s voice allows Seed to speak directly, without self-indulgence or elaboration.

In Forgetfulness Seed has found a singularly inventive and creative way to write about one of life’s most challenging and personal subjects. It’s a strangely disarming collection which needs time to seep in – there’s lots to dwell on concerning the shifting, uncertain nature of memory and of the grieving process. I was reminded of Eliot’s lines in the Four Quartets about writing being a “fight to recover what has been lost / and found and lost again and again”. One can sense Seed struggling, as Eliot did, for a form of articulation, a struggle voiced beautifully in the poem ‘Transfigure’, where he offers this Zen-like thought:

If instead we stay inside the asking,
a fictional window opens, a prospect
emerges which is more than a reworking
of an old map. Each step is the first
on an unmade path towards a horizon
whose mystery remains unreached.
In the unwrinkled pages of the story
the end is uncertain, is forever
in the making, and only possibly true.

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.

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

This is my sister Amani and my brother Abdullah,
on New Year’s Eve, laughing at videos they captured
during the genocide. Amani started talking to us
about my father, about his love and his generosity.
These moments which may seem ordinary
are the most precious. They are the warmth
that shields from the life’s coldness.
You have taught me so much, dear sister.
You’ve shown me how to never let despair
find its way to my heart. Despite everything
you completed your master’s degree, volunteered
to teach children at a school, and cared for Aleen
amidst the horrors of this genocide. On your birthday
I celebrate the light you brought into my world.
I want you to know your presence is not just a blessing
it’s a sanctuary.

’THIS IS MY SISTER’ is from The Age of Olive Trees by Haia Mohammed (Out-Spoken Press, 2025) — thanks to Out-Spoken Press for letting us reproduce it here.

Haia Mohammed is a Palestinian poet and artist from Gaza. She was awarded a scholarship to study Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was evacuated to the UK in September 2025 to begin her studies. Her family remain in Gaza, and she has launched a gofundme fundraiser to support them and bring them to the UK. Please go to the fundraiser page, donate, and share the fundraiser with family and friends. Follow Haia on Instagram.

I have often felt that poets are wrought from fire, and Haia Mohammed’s debut collection confirms it. This slim pamphlet of fourteen poems and three short epigraphs was written when she was 23 years old and a student from Khan Younis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, now largely destroyed by the Israeli army. Her voice stays with me; she has seen the carnage of occupation and genocide and found language to describe the almost indescribable.

Hers is a poetry of witness. It is urgent, immediate, ongoing. Her collection opens with an epigraph, a call

        to all those with stubborn eyes
like the olive tree who refuses to uproot
            never stop your defiance

This is an entreaty to not look away, as the people of Gaza cannot look away from what is being done to them. The olive trees, ancient symbols of peace, refuse to be displaced, their roots anchored deep in the soil. The act of looking, of bearing witness, becomes an act against erasure.

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Mohammed’s writing turns bare statistics into people at a time when there are pressures to silence those who would speak. In 2025 UNICEF estimated that 50,000 children had been killed or injured in the Gaza strip. There are difficulties about writing, protesting or naming the atrocities occurring in Gaza, but there is reliable evidence of genocide given in Gaza Genocide: a collective crime, the report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (United Nations, October 2025). It is a key human rights issue of our time. Artists, journalists and writers are being actively targeted and attacked. This is a time and place where one can be killed for writing poetry. There is a struggle for accurate language, for truth, and for humanitarianism to prevail.

The Age of Olive Trees brims with emotions, soul, dreams. As the editor Sunnah Khan says in the Foreword, “the truest poems travel the shortest distance from the pen to the heart.” I can’t read this collection without the feeling that blood and ink are the same substance, pulsing defiantly. Surrounded by destruction, forced to renounce material objects and comforts, and constantly aware of the possibility of death, Mohammed’s writing soars into an almost transcendental appreciation of life.

Her poetry disturbs the peace. She shows us what it’s like to live through a calamity, one which makes the limits of freedom all too visible; to experience trauma; to have assumptions about the world and one’s future shattered. Despite this, she holds on to her dreams, yearning to live an ordinary life, wanting peace, even wanting moments of boredom. She practises gratitude, thankful for the physical and celestial world, the moon and stars. She writes of human connection, and the divine; of survival and community.

In ‘How do you find the way to my homeland’ she writes of how the Palestinian people choose kindness when there is nothing, retaining their humanity. In a heartbreaking image, she describes people showing restraint around a loaf of bread when everyone is starving – the idea that people who have nothing have chosen not to lose their humanity.

when there’s only one loaf of bread left for two days no one touches it / despite everyone starving / until my mother divides it among us.

A short poem, ‘نحن الباقون’ or ‘We are the ones who remain’, written in Arabic, shows us the visual beauty of the language. It’s about a beloved olive tree, tended through generations. The trees will remain, witnesses who “speak the truth” and “extend deeper into the soil than the traces of invaders”.

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In ‘I am Gaza, I am Haia’, the poet claims her own dignity, resistance, history and the fierce desire to live, concluding: “my voice is louder than any bomb / my spirit deeper than any wound.”

Sometimes, as in ‘I am in the era of daily genocides’, she questions why she should get up quickly in the morning, before demonstrating simple determination to carry on with the daily habits of study, work, and meeting friends. These are her reasons to live. The sobering final lines show the stark reality of her people’s plight:

My mind asked, ‘is the shedding of blood permissible
In this world?’ Bloodshed, home demolitions, displacement,
hunger, thirst – all internationally forbidden, of course,
outside the borders of Gaza. But in Gaza, everything is allowed
even the killing of children.

The poem confronts the devastation of raised hopes, the reality of returning to a home city after the Israeli army had withdrawn. She describes a hellish and unrecognisable place, everything reduced to rubble and ash, the survivors trying to identify bodies and body parts in the streets. The shock is visceral: “I didn’t cry. I couldn’t cry or even know what to cry for.”

In ‘Daughter of the Sea’, she vividly communicates the compulsion to survive. Her central metaphor compels instantly. She is swimming in hard, deep waters “while the world sat on the shore and watched.”

These moving and urgent poems are asking us not to look away, not to sit on the shore and watch. Haia Mohammed has an astonishing ability to articulate the terrible abuses around her. She does so with simplicity and strength, fiercely resisting the wider collapse of language and meaning that is now a such a threat to truth. She refuses to be silent. She defies the human erasure taking place, vividly evoking the humanity of ordinary people trying to survive in the most horrific circumstances. What is happening in her country could happen anywhere, to any of us. As the author, Omar El Akkad asks in his book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, “What good are words, severed from anything real?”. The Age of Olive Trees directly connects us with reality, the reality of what is being inflicted on ordinary Palestinian families. Not only should this concern us readers, poets, writers and citizens, it should encourage us to break the silence that allows such atrocity to continue.

The epigraph at the end brings us back to the emblematic olive trees. During a brief moment of peace, the poet returns to the children of Gaza. From underneath the soil, the voices of those who have been silenced call for justice:

Tonight I can hear the whispers of the wind through olive trees
  I strive to protect, the laughter of children mixed with sorrow,
            the murmurs of the earth urging me to persevere.

Khadija Rouf is a poet and writer with a passion for the arts and collective mental health. Her poetry has been published in Orbis, Six Seasons Review, and Sarasvati and included in the NHS poetry anthology These Are The Hands (2020). She won joint second prize in the health professional awards category of The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2021, and her pamphlet House Work was published on International Women’s Day 2022 by Fair Acre Press. She has poems included in the anthologies, Tabula Rasa and Look Away Now (both Linen Press). She is also a member of British South Asian writers collective The Whole Kahani and has work in the anthology Tongues and Bellies (Linen Press).

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.

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 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.

Support us on Ko-fi

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.

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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.

Support us on Ko-fi

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.

Support us on Ko-fi

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