‘Sunny Prestatyn’ by Philip Larkin

For fuck’s sake, I say, the second I arrive. Would you look at that? There, raked into the sand at my feet, a “tuberous cock and balls” welcomes me ashore. So this is Titch Thomas’s Island, is it? Perfect. It’s well signposted though, I’ll give him that. No sooner have I passed one set of directions than another graffitied dick arrows me the right way. Where to, I can’t say. I just hope there’s a cosy cave around here where – wait, is that a St. George’s flag?

I first read ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ as an impressionable undergraduate, and it instantly appealed to me. Or the little bastard in me, I should say. The same little bastard who religiously defaced his dad’s Daily Mail. The same who taped over the first lesson of a GCSE French cassette with Derek and Clive’s You Stupid Cunt. Who scribbled a bewhiskered knob and bollocks in the corners of a Geography textbook. And when he got caught, pleaded his innocence: “It’s just a bush, Miss.” To be fair, I was half-right.

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Clearly, I could’ve been one of the young defacers in Larkin’s poem. Angry, eager to offend, trying to make my mark on the world in the only way I could think of at the time. But let’s be fair to them – and me. For all the many misfires of my youth, once in a while I aimed true. My protest at dad’s choice of news outlet, for example. Something honked here, and I could smell it, just as Titch & Co. knew what the advertisers were insinuating with their pure, kneeling poster girl, their hotel with palm trees which “Seemed to expand from her thighs and / Spread breast-lifting arms.” So I picked up a Biro and got to work. And in doing so, asked the unfortunate onlooker: What’s more grotesque – the Prime Minister’s new ‘666’ forehead tattoo, or the see-through spin of the headline?

There is another, not-so adolescent reason why ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ was so formative for me. Here was a poem full of permissions. It taught me that, yes, you can write poetry about stuff like this. Yes, you can get away with an overhanging rhyme or two: ‘poster’ / ‘coast, a’; ‘the sand’ / ‘thighs and’. Yes, there is such a thing as the right word – or at least a more interesting one: ‘tuberous’, ‘transverse’, ‘hunk’. And yes, you can cover a lot of ground in the space of only 24 lines. What starts off breezily …

​​Come To Sunny Prestatyn
Laughed the girl on the poster,
Kneeling up on the sand
In tautened white satin

… soon turns turbulent. Weeks after the girl is “slapped up” she’s “snaggle-toothed” and “boss-eyed”, with a “fissured crotch” that was “scored well in”,

[…] and the space
Between her legs held scrawls
That set her fairly astride
A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed Titch Thomas,

until eventually someone else had:

[…] used a knife
Or something to stab right through
The moustached lips of her smile.
She was too good for this life.

And then there’s that last line, swerving us into even darker territory. A reminder that many of us are heading for a fate far worse:

Very soon, a great transverse tear
Left only a hand and some blue.
Now Fight Cancer is there.

Read ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ by Philip Larkin on the Poetry Foundation website.

‘A Scattering’ by Christopher Reid

I was 21 when Christopher Reid won the Costa Book Award 2009 for A Scattering, a collection of elegies dedicated to his first wife, the actor Lucinda Gane. And by then in my third year of an English degree at the University of Hull, where Reid was coming to the end of his stint as Professor of Creative Writing.

At 18, I had no idea that I was about to fall arse-backwards into this community of poets and writers that also included David Wheatley, Cliff Forshaw, Simon Kerr and David Kennedy. These were the first people, aside from family and friends, who read my early efforts. They were generous with their time, and just the right blend of critical and encouraging. A rare and much-needed gift for a shy, spotty, college beard-sporting kid who listened to far too much Leonard Cohen. They saw something in me and my juvenilia. And they bit their tongues and helped me cultivate it. For that, I’ll always be thankful.

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Of course, I hugely admired Reid’s work. The fact that a former Faber Poetry Editor was at the helm at Hull was inspiring too, if a little intimidating at first. But it was only years later, just after my mum died from cancer in 2016, that I truly began to connect with A Scattering.

That book was an education for me. A lesson in how to navigate the early days of loss, and learn to live with never ending grief. It lived in my work bag for a time, always at hand when I needed it. Later, I would study two other benchmarks: Thomas Hardy’s Poems for Emma, and Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. But it was Reid’s use of the elegiac form that I turned to the most. My now worn and wrinkled copy bears the stress of those first few weeks and months after my mum died. More than a guide to grief though, it taught – and still teaches me – how to write elegy well. With subtlety and dignity, charging each poem with feeling and revelation, without being overly sentimental. Still more, it teaches me how to write verse in general.

Among other skills, Reid is a master of delayed rhyme. Rhymes that are far enough away from each other that they elude you on first reading. But go back over and your ear picks up on those distant, half-heard echoes that deftly hold the form together: ‘there’ / ’air’; ‘course’ / ‘place’; ‘necessary’ / ’anatomy’; ‘elephants’ / ’arrangements’. And look at the title. Like most people who read it for the first time, I instinctively thought: ashes. Or maybe the scattering of flowers on a coffin. But no:

I expect you’ve seen the footage: elephants,
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
decide to do something about it.

This sleight of hand demonstrates one of the many reasons we turn to poetry. Not just to nod along with a shared experience, but to be surprised, tripped up, humbled. And what do these elephants do? They:

hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them
this way and that way. […]

And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.

And so the metaphor that wrongfooted us now clicks. Then it galvanises us with the realisation that the elephants’ great, grey, immovable mass “makes them the very embodiment of grief.” They do what they can when faced with such a loss. And so do we:

[…]

may their spirit guide me as I place
my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.

My debut pamphlet, a collection of elegies for my mum, came out in January 2024 with Broken Sleep Books. I was proud, thankful, excited to see it in the flesh, yes. But it’s not the book I ever wanted to write, and for her to never read. The consolation is in knowing someone I’ve never met, who has gone through a similar experience, might read it and connect with it. That said, I hope there are plenty of turns in there, too, for those who prefer to be shaken rather than moved.

Listen to ‘A Scattering’ by Christopher Reid on Soundcloud.

‘Atlas’ by U.A. Fanthorpe

“Poetry,” U.A. Fanthorpe said, “has all the voices—wit, sincerity, pastiche, tragedy, delight.” By my reckoning, all five of those virtues are contained in one of her most famous poems. ‘Atlas’ is charming, astute, pithy and – dare I say it? – accessible. It’s accurate in its handling of what it truly means to live with and love someone from day to day. It’s a tribute; both to the titan who shares its title, and to the mundane but necessary upkeep of that love. It’s also cautionary, as Fanthorpe alluded to in one of her introductions to the poem: “It is a love poem. But I might remind you that Atlas was the chap who held up the world on his shoulders, and it was disastrous when he stopped.”

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There’s delight, too, in sounds and wordplay: “dryrotten jokes”, “suspect edifice”, “knows the way the money goes”. It’s easy to see why it’s such a favourite at weddings. When the declarations are made and the honeymoon is over, the quiet machinery of marriage kicks in. And never is that more apparent and vital if you have kids. Your team of two becomes three, four … Sometimes they’re on your side, other times they form a splinter group and fight against you. Despite your best efforts, things often slip. You put the wrong bin out. You miss a deadline. You forget to pay that bill. You fall asleep putting them to bed, leaving their sopping school uniform in the washing machine. And – shit! – there’s only a dribble of milk left in the fridge for breakfast. Not quite as drastic as having to sweep up the heavens from your kitchen floor, but just as annoying.

While I’m shipwrecked, I’ll need a poem like this to keep me sane. I’ll miss my wife and two boys desperately, but at least I won’t have to sort out the car insurance. Or key the skirting boards. Or bleed the radiators. Or feed the plants. Or scoop the neighbour’s cat turds. Or tour the house and garden with WD40, greasing every hinge and hasp. No, I’ll miss all that too. But new burdens will arrive to keep me busy. The sand could do with sweeping. The palm trees pruning. And that driftwood needs repainting …

I was late to this poem, and to Fanthorpe. Which is fitting since I see that, after publishing her first book in her late 40s, she went on to put out nine collections during her lifetime. I’m 35 now, so not far off. I regret those years I spent barely writing after university. But, well, life happened. The usual: landed a full-time job, got married, had kids. When my mum passed, I started writing again – and I couldn’t stop. Then the Covid-19 lockdowns kicked in, and I started taking it seriously again. Digging up the elegies from 2016 onwards and editing them, writing more of them, submitting them, shaping them into a chapbook. If I can just get this published for her, I thought, that would be enough. I could even retire from writing, and I’d be content. But, of course, you always want more. And I hope there’s more to come. I hope this isn’t the end.

Read ‘Atlas’ by U.A. Fanthorpe on Anthony Wilson’s website.

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 Books, 2024) was reviewed on TFP here. You can find him on Twitter @chrisarksey.

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 catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts here 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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with mewls and clicks,
bright icy whistles

and playful squawks.
They have no vocal cords

but still, they croak and caw
and squeak and trill as air passes

through special sacs
near their blowholes.

O melon-headed whales
with the gentlest of smiles,

your song is the great
creaking heart of the ocean.

Note: Beluga whales are known for the interesting range of sounds they make, both to communicate and for echolocation. The ‘melon’ on their heads changes shape as they sing and calves learn to communicate by mimicking their mothers.

‘Beluga Song’ is from Aardvark Day by Victoria Gatehouse, iIllustrated by Kate Lucy Foster (The Emma Press, 2026) — big thanks to The Emma Press for letting us reproduce it here.

For a small publishing house, The Emma Press punches well above its weight when it comes to quality children’s poetry and has a keen eye for new talent. Aardvark Day is Victoria Gatehouse’s first collection for children and I’m sure it won’t be her last.

Aimed at 7 – 11-year-olds, these 34 animal-themed poems are as informative as they are enjoyable. Gatehouse is a zoologist by training and shares her knowledge and enthusiasm for the natural world with a light, lively touch combined with confident technique and a well-tuned, musical ear.

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I was particularly impressed with the variety of poetic forms Gatehouse uses – from free verse and rhyming couplets to triolets, acrostics and kennings. There’s also a list poem celebrating the names of mushrooms; an interview with a leaf sheep sea slug (an actual creature as well as being really tricky to say!); and a ‘mirror poem’ which can be read either forwards or backwards to give an optimistic or pessimistic environmental message. Gatehouse pitches each one perfectly, with real respect for her young readers.

These are intelligent, carefully crafted poems that manage to combine the lightness and musicality children instinctively enjoy with a contemporary sensibility. The illustrations are similarly respectful of their audience – no reductive, cartoon cuteness, just accurate, natural drawings with child-appeal and warmth – I loved the perfection of the fairy armadillo and the sense of movement in drawings of otters floating on their backs in swirls of water.

I can imagine several of the poems working well as performance pieces for children, for example, ‘A Lizard Has Two Modes’, where a lizard gets to speak in two voices: first in Lightning Mode and then in Lounge Mode, with each mode reflected in the text layout. The delightful rhyme, rhythm, repetition and tongue-twists of ‘My Litter-Picker’ would also be fun to perform. These are the first three stanzas to give you the idea (try saying it fast with a partner and alternating lines!):

Empty cans, elastic bands, and silver foil aglitter.
With my litter-picker, I pick up all the litter.

Tangled strings and tin-can rings could trap a little critter.
With my litter-picker, I pick up all the litter.

Bottle tops and sodden socks; I really am no quitter.
With my litter-picker, I pick up all the litter.

There are useful ‘bonus bits’ at the back of the book, including an interview with the author plus some excellent ideas from publisher Emma Dai’an Wright for how children might write their own poems using Gatehouse’s work as inspiration. Any primary school teacher would get great mileage from this book regardless of their own confidence with poetry. It’s a joy.

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

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

Help support The Friday Poem

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

Support us on Ko-fi

His first was a Fender Squier made in Japan
which he part-ex’d at Mansons in Exeter for an Epiphone
which he traded for a pretty little Rickenbacker Jetglo
which he swapped for half a car and a Gibson Les Paul Studio
which he lost to the drummer in a late-night drunken bet
so had to sell his half car, at a loss, to buy the Gretsch
which he kept for decades until one night on Instagram
he saw, fell in love with, and bought the blue Dan Dunham
which he ditched last year for the blonde Tele here in his lap —
ash body, maple neck, just starting to open up
the way tone woods do, like sycamore, spruce, mahogany,
the grain settling in sweeter patterns the more you play
so with use and age comes depth and resonance
and I look at him and think, yes.

‘Used & Vintage’ is from Vox Wah-Wah (New Walk Editions, 2026) — buy Vox Wah-Wah from New Walk or if you are in the EU email Hilary for a copy.

Vox Wah-Wah will be launched online on Thursday 28th May at 7pm UK time (8pm French time) — here’s the link to click if you’d like to register.
The Professor of Transformation by Elaine Ewart will be launched at the same time.

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eBz7YjsFSKyqHPz8Uc6R4A

It all started with the Gretsch. A 1967 Gretsch Double Anniversary – Sunburst, to be precise. Beaten up, scratched, scarred, bare wood round the edges, empty holes where knobs had once been. Look at the picture. That guitar has lived.

Back in 2003 I was running poetry and music cabaret One Night Stanza in an upstairs room in the Kingsbridge Inn in Totnes with artist and comedian Stephen Park. Compèring was terrifying, but I wanted to get better at dealing with an audience. Stephen, on the other hand, was in his element. He liked nothing more than grating a cucumber and watching the male members of the audience squirm, or performing his absurd poems, one of which went something like this:

Lamb of God

Soup of the Day

Cream of Mushroom

To improve my microphone technique, I joined a stand-up comedy workshop with Tony Allen, the “godfather of alternative comedy”. There I met a funny guy called Jerri Hart. He played trumpet in jazzabilly showband The Rhythm Doctors. Jerri said it was the best band in Cornwall. So I booked them for One Night Stanza.

One Night Stanza had an audience of about fifty locals, and some very memorable performances. ONS co-founders Matt Harvey (‘Empath Man’) and Rose Cook (of the Dangerous Cardigans) were regulars, and ’Your Dad’, the late, great Ian Marchant, brought the house down on more than one occasion. None, however, were quite as memorable as The Rhythm Doctors.

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The band was booked to go on in the final slot at about ten pm. The four musicians looked pretty down-at-heel squatting in the corridor in their scruffy dinner suits. Jerri held his trumpet in one hand and a spliff in the other; the drummer had drumsticks poking out of his top pocket and a mad twinkle in his eye; the double bassist had decorated his instrument to look like a Mondrian painting and the guitarist had a guitar that looked … well, what can I say? My heart sank when I saw it. The state it was in. I had no idea what to expect. Was this even a proper band?

Five minutes later, as they launched into a fiercely fabulous version of ‘Minnie the Moocher’, I had no fears and no regrets. They were tight, professional, and eminently watchable. In minutes the audience was up on its feet. Soon all the customers drinking in the bar downstairs had joined us, cramming into the small room and craning their necks to see what was making the noise. Then someone tugged at my arm. It was the landlady. She had come up to complain, but she – and all the rest of bar staff – stayed for the rest of the set, and the encore, and congratulated us on a fabulous (and free) show. And the Gretsch? The Gretsch sounded awesome.

Which brings me to the blurb for Vox Wah-Wah:

When Hilary Menos got together with guitarist Andy Brodie she found herself sharing space with a 1967 Gretsch Double Anniversary, a 1962 Vox AC30 and an array of guitar pedals with names like Dr Scientist Reverberator, Nocturne Dyno Brain and Rozz Super Baby Flanger. Soon she could tell a Tele from a Strat and a humbucker from a P90; and in the eternal conversation about where rock’n’roll came from and who did it best, she got game!

Frank Sinatra said rock’n’roll was ‘the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.’ Frank is between these covers, as are Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Karen Carpenter and Etta James, among others. But this is not just a celebration of rock’n’roll greats. Menos explores the stories behind iconic moments in rock history, the impact of sound on the body and the joy of reckless abandon. The poems in Vox Wah-Wah suggest how to live, how to love and (with a bit of help from Elvis) how to leave this world.

The Gretsch – bless her pitted rosewood fingerboard – was also instrumental in the making of this pamphlet. Sound is generated by the interaction of instrument and player, and how can anyone not frame this as a kind of relationship. Most guitarists name their guitars and many call them by a woman’s name; B.B. King‘s was called Lucille, George Harrison’s and Albert King’s were both called Lucy, and Jimi Hendrix’s last guitar was called Izabella. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize. Andy calls the Gretsch ‘the old lady’, and over time I developed a feeling of kinship with her. But when she was supplanted in his affections, first by ‘the Blue’ and then by ‘the Blonde’, I chose to imagine myself, instead, as his 1964 Butterscotch Blonde Fender Telecaster.

I’m customisable, from headstock to chromed brass strap button.
For versatility and ruggedness I can’t (and won’t) be beaten.

I’m jazzy clean, but rock’n’roll when you add a little gain,
I can do a country twang and that mournful sustain;

in fact I can do anything, and still steer and paddle a canoe.
I’m the one that every single model on show comes second to.

(from ‘Self-Portrait’)

Andy is defiantly old school; he plays through valve amps (a 1962 Vox AC30 or a 1963 Ampeg Reverberocket) rather than newer solid-state amps, and he plays loud in order to feel the sound vibrate through his body. Turn one of these old amps up high and the valve-driven sound starts to take a kind of shape. “You need to feel the squish,” he says, “the sag.” That’s when the fun starts. Hence ‘Wall of Sound’:

For the gig tonight, at the audio guy’s insistence,
he’s using in-ears and a wireless guitar system.
I watch him play, his prosaic solos and fixed smile
indicative. I know what he needs to do: junk the in-ears,
plug in a foldback wedge and crank up the Fender Twin
until the tubes crunch and glow and the air moves
(physical, elastic) […]

Like most guitarists, Andy is obsessed by tone, which has led to many conversations about exactly what he’s searching for, and to poems in the pamphlet like ‘Roy and Nancy’, about Roy Buchanan, one of the finest guitarists of the blues rock genre. Roy’s Telecaster (‘Nancy’) had a tone all of her own which musicians have been trying to emulate (and explain) ever since. Trying to work out what it is about a pickup that creates a particular tone led me to write ‘The Queen of Tone’. It’s about Abigail Ybarra, the woman who hand-wound the pick-ups on Fender guitars at the Fullerton factory through the 1950s and ‘60s:

[…] winding in just enough air,
her hands shaping the resonance of every Fender guitar
with consistent inconsistency

Ybarra and her team (of mostly Latina women) were at least in part responsible for the awesome tone that Jimi Hendrix achieved with his Olympic White Fender Stratocaster.

I’ve long been fascinated by the role and status of women in rock’n’roll. Connie Francis once said, “A girl can’t sing rock’n’roll. It’s basically too savage for a girl singer to handle.” Thanks, Connie. But the music industry was – maybe still is – a pretty harsh place for women, as evidenced by so many tragic stories. Karen Carpenter, for instance, died aged 33 from anorexia (and the drugs she took to stay thin).

When they found her on the floor, her heart beat
once every ten seconds. Six times a minute.

(from ‘Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story’)

Of course Vox Wah-Wah couln’t have happened without New Walk Editions, and in particular my editor Nick. New Walk founders and editors Nick Everett and Rory Waterman are, in my opinion, among the best in the business. They have compiled (I’m trying to avoid saying ‘curated’, ugh) an varied and interesting list and have a solid commitment to finding new voices, as well as publishing good new work by established poets. They produce pamphlets (and occasionally books) that are beautiful to handle; TFP reviewed one of these, ‘Continuous Present’ by D.A. Prince, last year. Working with Nick was a delightful process; he’s everything one might want in an editor — precise, informed and exacting, as well as lots of fun.

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I could say more about how Vox Wah-Wah explores the things we do – to ourselves and to others – in the name of ‘Art’; how music is like poetry in that it’s all about tension and release; how guitars really are like people, and people really are like guitars (“with use and age comes depth and resonance”). But I’ll leave further comment to Steven Lovatt who will review Vox Wah-Wah on The Friday Poem in a few weeks time. Steven called Unexhausted Time by Emily Berry (then editor of Poetry Review) a “difficult book to admire”, and detected “an excess of Eliotesque riddling and intoning” in Leaves by Matthew Hollis (then poetry editor at Faber), so I don’t expect him to pull any punches.

If you’d like to hear me read some of the poems, come to the Zoom launch at 7pm on 28th May (next Thursday). If you want a sneak preview, we made a film-poem of ‘The King of Porthcawl’ – watch it below.

Oh, and there’s a Spotify playlist too, just flash the QR code with your phone camera. Enjoy!

Hilary Menos won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010 with Berg (Seren, 2009) and is a two-time winner of The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition with Human Tissue (2020) and Extra Maths (2004). Wheelbarrow Farm (Templar, 2010) was a winner in The Templar Book & Pamphlet Competition 2010. Her second collection is Red Devon (Seren, 2013), and in 2022 HappenStance published a pamphlet, Fear of Forks. She is Editor of The Friday Poem.

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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 catastrophic hack in late April we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts here 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

Of course, that isn’t to say there haven’t been valuable initiatives, be they events such as National Poetry Day or anthologies aimed at a broad readership (e.g. from Bloodaxe Books and Candlestick Press), but little headway has been made in general. What’s more, if the mass media is a barometer of a country’s interests (and whatever we may think of the owners, that’s undoubtedly the case), poetry is going backwards, losing much of its presence in broadsheets for instance, thus being denied the oxygen of wider coverage.

I’d like to pose some questions that are meant to stir debate rather than court controversy for its own sake. Are many of poetry’s protagonists just paying lip service to the idea of reaching out beyond the genre’s bubble? Are they actually more comfortable writing and publishing for other members of the clique? Is it valid for poets to state that the type of poetry they enjoy reading and writing will simply never have mass appeal and to wonder whether it even should? Is poetry destined only to be read by poets themselves? On a personal level, is the poets’ main aim to get and keep a job in academia or is it to find readers? Why do both tasks seem mutually exclusive? And on a commercial level, is the publishers’ business model built primarily around sales or funding?

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This leads me to consider much of the poetry that’s being published by big publishers, being shortlisted for awards and making it into major anthologies. I’m not knocking those who achieve these accolades, as the intrinsic literary value of this poetry isn’t to be queried. Rather, I’m pondering poetry stakeholders’ priorities when deciding which work to promote, boost and push towards non-poetry readers.

Let’s imagine a potential new reader of contemporary poetry in the U.K. They might well read novels on a regular basis, but have previously thought poetry’s not for them, or only for weddings and funerals. Their interest may have been piqued by something they’ve seen on social media, on the underground, etc, and so they decide to make baby steps and use major prize-winners as a guide for making their initial purchases of poetry collections. Will they find poems that connect with their own everyday lives and experiences? Will they come on board with contemporary poetry as a result? The sales figures for many such winning collections might indicate that the genre isn’t managing to connect with an extensive customer base via the publicity that’s generated by its prizes.

Just as certain elements of the poetry world tend to look down on those who seek a more general readership alongside fellow poets, so commercial acumen somehow seems to make a poet or publisher less of an artist. Those who actively chase new readers and audiences appear slightly soiled in the eyes of others, as if proper poets don’t need to do so. In fact, the opposite is true. What’s the point of writing and publishing if nobody reads us beyond our mates, mentors and mums? Moreover, why do poets look askance at others who push their own work? We don’t think any less of musicians who find new ways to offer their wares or actively plug their new albums at concerts, etc.

And what about the artificial division between so-called Instapoets and the rest of us? After all, we all work within the same genre. Just for a moment, let’s make an analogy with wine sales (my day job!). Unless people happen to have friends or family who immediately introduce them to more unusual wines from the start, most of them begin their journeys with widely-available commercial products. Many never venture any further, but others find their curiosity has been piqued and turned into a passion.

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Oh, and one key reminder before moving on to specific examples of how we might find our potential readers. In no way am I suggesting the concept of forcing people to write doggerel to order (and nor am I suggesting that all Instapoetry is doggerel either!). Poets should still feel able to write what feels necessary to them, never feeling guilty for doing so. Instead, this piece is aimed at those who wish to venture into different audiences. Moreover, in a similar way, there’s no absolute obligation to push the sales of a collection. Many poets hate the mere idea of doing so or struggle with the consequent social acrobatics. A whole host of people aren’t suited to flogging stuff, and it’s important to underline at this stage that there’s no intention of sending their anxiety levels soaring through the roof. No, I’m simply offering the following suggestions for people who might wish to work to promote their poetry in new ways but are wondering how to do so.

If Amazon are cutting margins to the bone and wholesalers / retail chains are either limiting access to shelves or not pushing books, tied to a sale-or-return model that cannot benefit the publisher or the poet, our genre has to go out and seek alternatives. It goes without saying, however, that all parties in the game have to commit fully to such ventures instead of blaming each other for a lack of sales.

Poets typically complain that publishers don’t provide enough promotional support, while publishers bemoan many poets’ apparent stance that their job is done once the collection is finished. Instead, we have to work with a shared outlook if we’re to find new markets that both circumvent and supplement the established ones. And this is where a traditional view of sales channels has to go out of the window.

Let’s take my own experience as a quick example: I shifted over 400 units of my pamphlet Tasting Notes, a thematic collection that allowed the wines I blend to tell their own stories. More than half of my copies were sold via tastings and tapas nights which doubled as readings. They ended up with people in the wine trade whose eyes were then opened to poetry, many of whom then went on to buy my other pamphlet and full collection. Their blinkered view of the genre had been jolted.

Our alternatives are numerous and often interlinked. In purely physical terms, one manifestation is the use of non-traditional retail outlets. Excellent work is being done by the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop’s Castle, a physical location where customers can find coffee, cake and poetry all under one room. People might come in for physical sustenance and leave a spiritual boost! This interesting venture has brought poetry on to the High Street.

And then there are concert halls, farm shops (cleverly done by Clare Best a few years back with her sell-out HappenStancePress pamphlet Treasure Ground), galleries, museums, pubs, visitors’ centres, even garages or service stations, and so on. The inevitable technique is micro-selling, pressing books into consumers’ sweaty palms. Easy to say, but tough to execute, so how may we make that connection?

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Well, no one’s going to walk in to a gift shop in Windermere, for instance, pick up a poetry collection with implicit or explicit references to the Lakes (which doesn’t have to be thematic or packed with chintzy rhymes, of course) and buy it of their own accord. We might manage to place a couple of copies on the shelves, but they’ll just sit there for months and years. No, we’ve first got to engage with the staff who deal with the public, be they the owner or the shop assistant, one by one, outlet by outlet. Sell them the story behind the book, make it personal so that they can then offer it and explain it themselves in turn. What’s more, one additional, complementary option is to offer (and then promote!) readings in these unusual locations. Two men and their dogs might turn up or gaggles of passers-by and casual browsers might be drawn in. Either way, such events provide an opportunity to engage with new audiences.

And it’s not just unusual, unexpected locations. It’s our participation in non-poetic occasions such as the wine tastings that I mentioned earlier or, for example, summer fêtes and fairs where the ground-breaking Poetry Pharmacy ambulance has often offered its wares and services. It’s all very well (and also important) for us to give readings at arts centres, in function rooms in pubs, and at poetry festivals, but there is also the chance to move outside those self-imposed boundaries. If everyone chips in, poetry will become far less of a closed shop, and its additional presence will take the edge off its exclusivity.

What’s more, these techniques for reaching out beyond the poetry bubble can also be applied to social media such as Twitter where we can tag non-poetry people, and share poems, news and virtual launches with communities whose interests might not immediately seem to coincide with ours. If the only people who read our Twitter feed are other poets, we might sell a few copies to them, but we’ll never explore the latent markets that are also available via the same platform.

This isn’t a romantic view. On the contrary, it’s based on more than twenty years’ experience in the wine trade. There are wines that sell themselves on reputation or brand, just like famous novels, but excellent wines from unknown regions will lie on shelves at big chains, collecting dust, while renowned labels fly. The only way to move less popular and populist wines is by word of mouth via small stores and restaurants. Merchant by merchant, I’ve had to sit down with my customers and their staff, over and over again, and explain my wines’ soul so that they can then defend them and encourage people to explore the unknown.

One final point. These lines aren’t meant to be a set of instructions or a provocation. My ideas are a point of departure with the aim of opening up a wider discussion among the poetry community. Where am I right? Where am I wrong? What other suggestions can we come up with? But most importantly of all, do we want poetry to find new readers and become relevant to peoples’ everyday experiences?

My own view is that poetry should attempt to broaden its reach because of the capacity it has to move human emotion and challenge outlooks. It can feed in to so many peoples’ lives and enrich them like no other genre. This is what we can achieve. Together.

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.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3600-odd subscribers with more than 25,000 views in the last 30 days. It’s run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

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

Help support The Friday Poem

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

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We chose ‘Book’ by Meg Peacocke to be our first Friday Poem ever, back in June 2021. This is what we said about it: “Peacocke writes with a beguiling mixture of wisdom, candour and playfulness. ‘Book’ is full of startling imagery, allusion, word play and dry humour. It’s a list poem, kind of, which links the formative and ritual moments in a life lived richly, and ends on a note of wry defiance: what’s done is done. Don’t mess with this old lady, she’s seen it all.” ‘Book’ is from The Long Habit of Living (HappenStance Press, 2021), reviewed here by Charlotte Gann.

Book

by M.R. Peacocke

The Book of the unknown foetus.
The Book of cats in bags, pigs in pokes,
Moses in baskets with all the eggs.
The Book of errors, terrors, accidents (happy),
accidents (unhappy, Vol. II).

The Book of rambling worms and moths,
half a page, half a page onward, coding
and ciphering in plainsong,
perishing under the rose.
The Book of random inclinations,

of keys, doors, entrances, exits
with bears, sniggering under sheets,
loves on the brink of hatreds, holy
alliances, barefoot dances,
losses, peregrine snatches.

The Book of direct and indirect speech,
The Book of lies hidden in plain sight
which omits what most matters, riddling
Lazarus gospel. Thumb through it if you must,
it’s written and can’t be amended, this book.

Meg Peacocke grew up in South Devon in a musical family and read English at Oxford. She taught, brought up four children, trained in counselling and worked in the children’s cancer unit of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, then moved to a small hill farm in Cumbria where she lived for 25 years. Peterloo Poets published four collections: Marginal Land (1988), Selves(1995), Speaking of the Dead (2003) and In Praise of Aunts (2007). Shoestring Press published Caliban Dancing (2013) and Finding the Planes: New and Selected Poems (2015), and HappenStance published The Long Habit of Living (2021). She has won several major prizes and in 2005 received a Cholmondeley Award.

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We chose ‘Everything You Always Wanted To Know’ by Mark Granier to be our Friday Poem on 26the May 2022 because it manages to be sexy and joyful and poignant all at once. The writing is arresting and assured, from the initial shocking possibility of finding the real Burt Reynolds in your mother’s bed through to that freighted and chilly hot water bottle. It’s a sonnet of sorts, broken into couplets but with the sonnet-y feel of a captured moment leading to new insight. It celebrates sensuality and resistance and empowerment, and we liked it a lot. (We still do!)

Everything You Always Wanted To Know

by Mark Granier

At 15, I found Burt Reynolds in my mother’s bed,
stowed under her pillow in a Cosmo centrefold.

Impossibly hairy, recumbent on a bearskin rug,
a chewed cigarillo between his lips —

He was grinning, happy to be discovered,
even as I slid him back

where I’d found him; like the miraculous medal
she’d hidden under my mattress,

like the legion of things that would never
be spoken; and what remains unsaid

about the convent girl who’d strayed
enough to give birth to two children; how she found

ways to widen a single bed, and kick
her cold, Catholic hot water bottle onto the floor.

Mark Granier is an Irish poet and photographer / filmmaker. His poems have been broadcast on RTE and have appeared in many outlets in Ireland and the UK over the years, including The New Statesman, The TLS, Poetry Review and Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Write Where We Are NOW’ pandemic project / archive. His sixth collection, Everything You Have Always Wanted to Know, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2025 and is reviewed here by Tim Murphy.

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We chose Kathy Pimlott’s darkly funny poem ‘The Baby in the Wardrobe’ as our Friday poem on 17/07/2021 because we love the way it takes an unlikely event and uses it as a point of departure to get wildly surreal. Is the baby real? What does the baby stand for? There are more questions than answers in this poem, but the gorgeous mix of horror and humour make it a splendid ride.

The Baby in the Wardrobe

by Kathy Pimlott

Do you remember the story of the baby in the wardrobe,
its desiccated body wrapped in newspaper? How the baby
was decades old but the newspaper was last week’s edition?

This is my story. The baby is dead but I bring it fresh news,
re-wrap it in editorials, ads, crosswords with undiminished
tenderness, newsprint smudging my attentive fingertips.

I’m not trying to reanimate the baby with another bomb
or preposterous scandal, I’m just not ready to dispose of it,
though it’s no use, something of a liability if truth be told

and it’s pure fortune there’s no odour, pure fortune.
Another thing about the wardrobe baby is how I was the baby
for a long time, until this body grew, enclosing baby-me.

How did the baby die? Was it stifled, done to death
because it cried and cried? I think it was abandoned
(though not quite, for here its brittle little body is) because

it wasn’t interesting. Some think all babies can be someone,
Jesus or Astaire say, that conviction of grace. But let’s be honest,
all that crying makes it nigh on impossible to get any work done.

Kathy Pimlott was born and raised in Nottingham but has lived for many years in Covent Garden, specifically Seven Dials, home of the broadsheet and the ballad. She has two pamphlets with The Emma Press, Elastic Glue (2019) and Goose Fair Night (2016). Her poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. ‘The Baby in the Wardrobe’ is from her first full collection, the small manoeuvres (Verve, 2022), reviewed here by Emma Simon.

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Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3600-odd subscribers with more than 25,000 views in the last 30 days. It’s run by four people – Hilary Menos (Editor), Helena Nelson (Consulting Editor), Bruno Cooke (Spoken Word Editor) and Andy Brodie (Web Editor), with contributions from a team of reviewers and writers.

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

Help support The Friday Poem

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

Support us on Ko-fi

Poem for John Clinging

Of you, John, there was nothing to go on –

nothing but your smithereen of skin and bone and plane.

You were one of the quick and the dead

and far too many of them to crowd into the dining-room.

You came alone, the chosen one

miscarried, made, laid out among them –

Gran, my mother and, in the blustering silence, Brodie Anderson.

And then you were no more alone, old navigator, party to

their incompletion.

So it was that when at last my mother helped me lay her down

I took you into my own heart’s pondering

and still she claimed and wouldn’t dream of claiming you her one and

only. ‘You’d have liked him,’ she said to me

often. I think I would have done.

(POEM) is from  lode by Gillian Allnutt (Bloodaxe Books, 2025) — big thanks to Bloodaxe for letting us reproduce it here.

I’m often overwhelmed by the verbosity of contemporary poetry. Gillian Allnutt is the antidote. Here’s one of hers from wake (2018):

          considering

          the dear improbability of cricket on the radio

          of you.

Ten words. One iambic line of sixteen syllables followed by another of only two. Simple, personal, heartfelt. No finite verb, so no time frame, no action completed. Just a cargo of feeling travelling towards ‘you’. Each line unit has its own particular, and particularly pleasing, rhythm. The emotional payload hinges on the gentle wittiness of “dear”.

The winning poems in this year’s National Poetry Competion averaged 399 words in length. So Gillian Allnutt isn’t typical of the age. Nor is she young. Still, she’s very much alive. Her 2025 collection, lode, was short-listed for the Eliot, her third appearance on that list. Oh, and the average poem-length in lode is 82 words. Those who praise Allnutt praise her highly. The rest may be forgiven for sometimes being nonplussed by her ways with and around words. Her spareness is striking; it can be hard to know how to approach her.

I first encountered this poet in 2007, the year of How the Bicycle Shone (New & Selected Poems). The Selected opens in the 1980s, when Allnutt favoured single-space text (though her default length was always modest). Back then, you could see her stanzaic shapes at a glance. By Wolf Light (2007), however, a preference for wider spacing characterised more than half the poems. Some (‘Magdalen, ‘Love’, ‘Tabitha’) have huge spaces between lines. ‘Tabitha’, for example, begins:

          In my sark lain.

          Let me now go to the field and glean

 
         Peter came.

I have mixed feelings about such spacing. To me, it can undermine aural connections, and make individual lines seem too momentous. I’ll come back to this later. And yes, the allusions are biblical, and yes, this is a poet immersed in the Christian tradition. You can’t go to a Catholic convent school and not be. But this frame of reference enriches her enquiry, which is spiritual, not evangelical.

All the same, it helps to know the biblical tales: Ruth in the alien corn, Mary Magdalen oiling Christ’s feet, Tabitha being raised from the dead by Peter. Because this poet comes back to the same stories many times. Her poems (and collections) are inter-connected to an extent I’ve not seen in any other poet, and not just in content. In the quotation from ‘Tabitha’ above, there’s a musical feature that links lines, texts and whole books. The last word in every line rings out with more than mere rhyme. The N-consonant at the end of “lain”, for example, strikes a note as clear as a gong at the start of meditation. “Lain” calls to “glean” (Ruth in the cornfield). “Field” and “glean” cradle the long E of “Peter”, before “came” switches back to the long A of “lain” . This is Allnutt music. There are such transitions in most of her work, as well as key words and key consonants – N, M, L, R and T in particular. Somewhere in every collection, and usually in several places, the plangent N in “stone” will call to its familiars. There are many of them (bone, alone, own, thorn, again, rain, gone, moon, and others). Equally, the soft L in world or soul may invoke bowl, still, all, small, well, whole or April. The R in “war” calls to … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s a poem from lode, the book I set out to review before I disappeared into earlier volumes. There are as many words in the title as the text:

          ‘Wouldst thou witten thy Lord’s meaning in this thing?’

          Unself-aware, un-

          witting as the flower of winter

          jasmine, listen −

That’s it. The whole poem. Some might be non-plussed by its brevity, or uneasy about “Lord” in the title. But the key’s in the final word. Listen and the meaning will come through. W drives the alliteration but N calls from the stressed syllable at the beginning and end of line one (“un”). This is intensified by breaking on a hyphen (something the poet rarely does). N sings on through “witting” and “winter” and “jasmine” (where M adds warmth). The cadence resolves with “listen”, an imperative in which S adds its gentle sibilance to the idea of sound. Meanwhile the ‘air’ sound in “aware” is whispering to ‘er’ in “flower” and “winter”. Every line has its own rhythm, although each runs into the next syntactically.

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This cryptic little number also has discoverable meaning. The title quotation is from Julian of Norwich (one of many references to her in Allnutt books). The medieval anchoress was trying to understand her visions when she posed the question. But that was then; this is now. What’s the meaning of this thing? Or any poem-thing? The poem is the answer. If you want to understand the communication, put your ‘self’ to one side, settle for not knowing, and just … listen. This is an ars poetica. The idea of listening is central to Allnutt’s practice, and it’s what reading her work requires. Otherwise, you won’t pick up the extraordinary intricacy of her sound structures. So what about the wide-spacing? Well, for a poem so short, it doesn’t matter. You can see the shape of the whole at a glance. You can read it backwards, forwards and sideways as many times as you need − while listening.

In some poems in lode, however, widely-spaced text seems to me more problematic. In ‘a place beyond belief’, for example, the spacious format makes it hard to see that the text is structured in three quatrains, each ending on a dash. Dramatically different line lengths exacerbate the issue. The second stanza opens with a line so long that its final word has to drop onto the line below. This makes the ensuing short line look like a new stanza, viz:

          rubbing the shine once more into the grain of table and sideboard
								                                                    drawer

          as if out of thin air

          knowing all shall be mended or amended here

          and she beyond fear –

There are more interesting issues than spacing, but I wonder whether the eye can grow used to a norm that isn’t always in the interests of the poem. The individual line is vital, but surely stanza units are important too? These days wide-spaced formats are increasingly common, and ordinary leading is more generous than of old. Still, when I hear Allnutt read aloud, her vocal pauses don’t seem to me as long as her formatting looks. The Eliot recording of ‘Poem for John Clinging’ illustrates this. This poem has eight stanzas, mostly two-liners, though at first you may not see that. The third stanza is one line alone. Yet in her reading, the poet run the enjambment from stanza three to four with only a fractional pause (“You came alone, the chosen one // miscarried, made, laid out among them”).

Apart from my spacing reservations, Poem for John Clinging is a fascinating poem. An endnote tells us that the dedicatee was a maternal uncle, an RAF navigator in the Second World War, blown up in mid-air with the rest of his crew. Those familiar with earlier work may recall him from ‘Poppa’ in Sojourner (2004) and ‘Near the Peace Garden’ in wake (2018). In some other collections, the word “war” is also key (it appears eight times in Sojourner). But here in lode, in the opening section (‘Postwar’), it’s everywhere. And not just as a single word – whole phrases: “before the war”, “after the war” “during the war” (in each, an R sounds twice).

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In reflecting on such repetitions, I realised why the ‘Postwar’ section of the book was affecting me so strongly. Allnutt was born in 1949, just after the Second World War; I am only four years behind her. Without knowing it, we post-war children absorbed the phrases that floated past us while adults talked − “before the war”, “during the war”, “after the war”. We were always hearing that. The sound was cemented into our brains. In two poems (‘refugee born London 1949’, and ‘Dunstanburgh’) the R of “war” growls through numerous words (“more”, “are” , “here”, “tower”, “far”, “story”, “parents”, “sorrow”, “endure”, “dour”, “before”, “where” etc). How can lived experience be communicated through sound alone? I don’t know. But it seems it can. This work is all about listening – and that includes listening to messages from the dead.

Three decades earlier in ‘Bone Note’ (Blackthorn 1994), Allnutt referred to the musical side of being a poet. She referred to “what, beyond the word, / begins in me and is bone-heard”. In a T.S. Eliot Youtube clip this year (2026), she talks about being “fed up with words because of the precise content that they carry and have to carry [ … ]. I have been, I hope, travelling from being head-based to heart-based, and music speaks of and to the heart.” But there’s plenty of evidence that she has always been attracted to heart-based elements in poetry, by which I mean intuitive aural connections between word-sounds, rhythm and meaning. She hearkens to specific patterns, involves them continuously, works via practised intuition.

In the five lines of ‘summertime’, one of my favourites in lode, there’s movement from M (in the title and first three words) towards the N in “rain” and thereafter all other line-end sounds. It’s both plangent and loving, a poem about absence. Again, the emotive charge depends on “dear” in the last line:

          mute or musical as morning rain

          and you as always gone

          how I listen to your absence to my own

          to the now and then of wood pigeon

          its dear inconsequential circumlocution

A reader might note this as a rhyming piece – but it’s not metrically regular. (Allnutt doesn’t do metrical stanzas.) All the same ‘Summertime’ starts almost like a formal lyric, nearly iambic pentameter (slip in an extra ‘as’ before “mute” and you’re there). The second line, too, could be three iambs. But line three is different: it runs in little spurts – “how I listen” … “to your absence” ... “to my own”. In line four, “to the now and then” swings by slowly and spaciously, and so does “of wood pigeon”. As for the concluding line – what an astonishing performance! By all rights, it ought to be clumsy with those five-syllable giants, but it trips past like a dancer, the syllabic stress of “circumlocution” mirroring “inconsequential”. Surely this is a contender for a ‘neon line’ nomination in Ian MacMillan’s The Verb?

Having said which, there are many ‘neon lines’ in Allnutt. Often a stand-out phrase depends on an unexpected adjective/noun conjunction followed by possessive attribution. For example in lode’s ‘for only then can’, there’s “the common-law procedure of a poem”. Simple but elegant. In ‘Corbridge’, who could resist “involved in the recitation of the rain”? Sometimes the magical phrase splits across a line, as in “the long-shared anonymity / of day” (‘Pink Jenkins’). Such patterns have been popping up for decades. In Blackthorn (1994), there were “the unprepared cathedrals of my heart”. In Nantucket and the Angel (1997): “There is the special anonymity of rain”. In Lintel (2001):“Think of the unexpected helpfulness of water.” In Wolf Light (2007) – perhaps my favourite – “we listen to the worn asseverations of the wind”.

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But back to ‘summertime’ in lode where so many sounds lead securely to its neon line. The dominant N is invoked by the teleutons (“rain”, “gone”, “own”, “pigeon”, “circumlocution”). “Rain”, “gone” and “own” are old favourites (“own” appears twenty times in lode). Might someone suggest that Gillian Allnutt is an unimaginative poet who keeps using the same rhymes? If so, they would be missing the point. It’s not about rhyme. It’s about the way certain resonant sounds invoke a mental (even spiritual) demesne.

Not every poem in lode fits this sort of reading. ‘Flame-thrower’ is a sestina, and as such depends on multiple repetitions. And yet none of its line-end words are old friends, and neither consonance nor assonance strike me as attractive as usual. The piece is single-spaced, with the sestets easily visible, but I’d say ‘Flame-Thrower’ is head-based rather than heart-based, its music less bone-deep than most. It links to familiar content – the poet’s father’s memory of the burning of Crystal Palace, his later war-time experience in a flame-throwing tank regiment − but does it work as a whole? Not entirely, I think. It’s complicated rather than complex. The finest Allnutt poems look simple.

I’ll conclude by discussing the opening poem of lode, not least because it shows this poet can also be funny, even in a collection focussing on inherited war-time trauma and Covid lockdown. An endnote to ‘Audience’ reminds us that Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal in 2016, and went to Buckingham Palace to receive it. So ‘Audience’ refers to that meeting with the Queen, though poems have their audience too. This seven-line piece (an opening stanza of three short lines followed by a quatrain) turns on L sounds. You might say each line rhymes (or half-rhymes). I prefer to note the way a soft L dominates. It’s a gentle sound for a gentle piece. The word “queen” is also an old friend and appears often in her work, as does “moon”, though this is the first appearance of The Queen. “Soul” is another Allnutt word, often appearing near “whole”, or “hole”, as it does here. The brief opening stanza invokes the poet’s feelings – or the Queen’s feelings – or both:

          Shyness, common and small,

          a shrew, a plimsoll

          and that’s all.

Shyness is common, and the poet is a commoner. A shrew is the shyest, tiniest of mammals. A plimsoll is the most un-royal of shoes. Perhaps that’s how it felt being in Buckingham Palace – small, unroyal. The repeated ‘sh’ sound suggests an awed hush. But don’t miss the ghost-rhyme joke (“shyness” rhymes with “Highness”). Then the tone changes with the second stanza:

          The Queen, majestic, merciful,

          the moon’s own soul. Poor soul

          must have acquainted herself with every holt and bolt-hole

          of it, every last hat (optional).

The Queen is compared to the moon in sixteenth-century mode, and the language is accordingly formal. But when “soul” is repeated, the thought and the register veer in a different direction. How often we say, compassionately, “poor soul” – though rarely of a queen. It seems that the “shyness” perhaps did belong to the monarch too, and also the smallness. Suddenly the Palace conceals many hiding-places, all of which the Queen as potential escapee must know. The long line scurries and hurries like the shrew making a dash for it. The T consonants stutter anxiously. Slipping “of it” over a line-end is surely mischievous. And where did “hat” come from? Well – there’s a rhyme connection to “that’s all” earlier, as well as a consonantal link to all the T sounds. The whole poem could easily have ended with “every last hat”, making it a final ta-dah! I hear it being said with a regional accent and I visualise the acres of stylish headgear that our late Queen certainly possessed.

But that phrase is not the end. There’s another word in brackets. At first reading, you wonder what “optional” is doing there. The sound just about fits the rhyme pattern, if not exactly gracefully – but why is the adjective appropriate? Think about it. A formal invitation to Buck House will include guidance on dress. It will not suggest wearing plimsolls. It will, however, say “hats optional”. When you speak the word “optional” aloud, you hear the “sh” inside it, harking back to “shyness” earlier. But the voice that says “optional” is not the voice that says “every last hat”. No, “optional” is the Queen’s voice inserting a correction, a point of order. This is a gently witty piece about a solemn occasion. There are innumerable places to hide in a palace, and thankfully not a few in a poem. Wouldst thou witten where they are? Gather thy wits. Listen.

Helena Nelson is Consulting Editor of The Friday Poem.

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 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

Stewart has been patient – it’s been six years since his debut collection, The Knives of Villalejo, came out. This patience – along with a finely honed craft and remarkable sensibility to cadence – also runs through these accomplished, graceful and at times deceptively simple poems. It’s there in the lugubrious opening poem, ‘Los Domingos’, where the poet sips coffee one long Sunday afternoon with his wife and his Spanish in-laws:

You’ve taught me to relish silence
in the slow, shared sliding by of minutes

This is a superbly crafted line that works on both a micro and macro level. It describes a moment in time, but it could just as well be a philosophy for life.

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Humility and self-awareness is characteristic of Stewart’s thoughtful and slightly rueful poetic voice. He is adept at recognising the significance of the fleeting thought, or the seemingly innocuous detail. In ‘Numbers’ he’s woken by the “combinations for bike locks” or “the reg on Mum’s old Escort”. At first glance these look like the misfiring of an idle mind. But in this poet’s hands, these details take on significance. They become codes to the past, unlocking personal memories. We each have our own versions of these numbers – we’re reminded of our childhood landline number, perhaps, and even our parent’s voice answering the phone – and it is this that makes the poem so relatable. Numbers can take on an incantatory power and meaning beyond themselves; they can evoke a whole life that is now lost to us. Here, Stewart uses them to slow time and tide:

I whisper them to myself,

let their echoes flow through my head,
holding on against the ebb.

One of my favourite poems here is the memorably named: ‘The Aristocrat of Pipe Tobacco,’ the slogan emblazoned across an old Gold Block tobacco tin. It speaks to familiar themes of ageing and the passing-on of cherished items from one generation to the next. The poet’s grandfather used it for his tobacco, his father used it to store “discarded Allen keys” and “dried-out biros”. In turn, the poet himself stores his “memory sticks” (the choice of object is not accidental, you feel) but has already spotted his son David “eyeing it up”. The tin becomes a link between past and future; a time capsule loaded with emotional freight.

‘Heading for the Airport’ is one of the collection’s most potent pieces. It’s a sonnet in disguise, and covers plenty of ground in its 14 short lines. It begins in a whirl, with the poet flustered and distracted, his cab to the airport “twenty-seven minutes late / after my ten frantic calls”. What he misses, caught up in the minutiae of clock watching and phone checking, is the “dressing-gowned silhouette” of his mother (or grandmother?) “hovering on the balcony with a halo of wispy hair”. The clue’s there: she’s already nearly angel, or ghost. In his haste he forgets “our goodbye wave”. All of Stewart’s poetic gifts are at work here: the filmic scene setting which throws us immediately into the drama, the vivid specificity, the lurch from prosaic specificity into lyricism, and the dramatic shift of emotional tone. The percussive sound effects are also brilliantly composed:

My suitcase thrown in the boot,
doors slammed, the driver crunching gears

You hear those three distinct sounds in quick succession. It’s brilliantly evocative. Then there’s Stewart’s trademark pay-off, the slide into focus that knocks you sideways: “No way to know / I’d never see you alive again.”

‘Touch Typing’ is a moving portrait of his mother, and a pitch perfect study of what time does to our dignity, and our ability to keep up with a world that insists on moving forward, whether we can keep up or not. It contains this joyful, musical line: “Her fingers danced to rhythms / of rattles and pings”. There’s a grace and an empathy at work here that make these poems slip deep into the heart, the mind and the memory.

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Stewart thinks as carefully about form as language. ‘Paper Clip’ is as neatly ordered on the page as is its subject matter: how a paperclip appears to tidy up the vital parts of a life – the “birth and marriage certificates”. The key word is hidden in plain sight: “How neatly, temporarily / it brings them together.” That prosaic ‘temporarily’ is devastating. It is an acute emotional understatement, a reflection on how we maintain the illusion of order and permanence in the face of our mortality. A counterpoint to ‘Paper Clip’ is ‘Drinks Cabinet’ which is arranged as haphazardly as the dusty bottles it contains. Piecing together the chronology, we realise that the cabinet is an unwanted family bequest following the death of a family member. It contains family history, as well as the cocktail ingredients, cold remedies and “inappropriate leaving presents”. Stewart injects a note of sadness and regret; the bottles are “queuing up / for landmark-laden toasts / we never made. // Never will.” It’s a skilful dismount.

Whatever You Do, Just Don’t is a poetic memory box, as evocative as a rediscovered childhood football sticker album. And Stewart, clever-headed fellow that he is, even gives us one of those. The eleven poems in the second section, Starting Eleven, are a football team’s worth of adroit, slightly bathetic, pencil sketches of Aldershot FC footballers from the 1980s. They constitute an unexpected interlude in the collection, rather like a team mascot wandering on at half time in the middle of an emotionally charged cup-tie. These are lighter fare than the other poems in the book – it’s arguably a pamphlet that’s snuck into a collection – but the poems are no less well constructed. ‘Dale Banton’ opens with a Roy of the Rovers-style vignette:

The first season I went,
he scored hat-tricks for fun,
less running than dancing

The poem is arranged into three five-line stanzas, mirroring Dale’s hat-trick, each stanza a single fluid sentence, weaving skilfully to the goal of its full stop. Each stanza ends on a back-of-the-net rhyme: ‘aplomb,’ ‘song’ and ’gone’. It charts the decline of a career, and speaks, like ‘Touch Typing’, to themes of ageing, the loss of youth, and the waning of the bright lights in our lives.

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A significant portion of the book is, like The Knives of Villalejo, dedicated to the tribulations of a life lived between England and Spain. Stewart is blender and export manager for the Spanish wine co-operative Viñaoliva, selling their Zaleo vintages globally, and Brexit presented him with both emotional and logistical challenges. ‘Carnet de Conducir’ recounts a simple (but unwanted) transaction – exchanging a UK driving licence for a Spanish one. This provokes a visceral reaction in the poet, tipping him off balance; he “tilted and swayed”. The layout of the poem illustrates the break:

Two lives
poised for decades
between two countries
now reduced to one.

These poems convey sadness, barely concealed anger, and, occasionally, guilt. In ‘David’ Stewart confesses, “I agonised for months over your name”, searching for something that could work in both languages. In fact, he admits, this resulted in “neither of us belonging anywhere”, “Me by choice. You by my choice.”

Throughout Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, Stewart is consistently sure-footed while navigating rocky emotional landscapes

The final section of the book, Retracing Steps, is a meditation on the past, the brevity of our lives, and how quickly our place in the world will be filled. ‘Aveley Lane’ is postcard from suburbia in “the dusk that lingers over hedges / and scrubland bordering Langhams Rec.” Its opening line, “Lights turned on but the curtains not yet drawn”, surely carries another meaning: how long before the curtain draws across our own lives? The poet walks the streets of his childhood, thinking of friends long since grown up, seeing the past and the present side by side in his mind’s eye: “Here’s another father / parking his car in Adrian’s driveway.” The final two lines really hit home: “They go about their family routines / as if they’ll never be replaced.”

There’s much to savour in Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, not least the conversations between the poems themselves, which reflect and respond to each other, casting each other in different lights. There is a lively energy generated by this interplay. Each poem works as a star striker or defender, but together they’re a formidable team and more than the sum of their parts. Stewart is consistently sure-footed while navigating rocky emotional landscapes. He shows a craftsman’s touch for form, deft handling of syntax, and an ear for half-heard rhythms and cadence. You cannot help but be moved by the honesty and emotion of these poems, and you cannot fail to admire the craft. And the stitching is always invisible.

Christopher James won the National Poetry Competition in 2008. His latest pamphlet is The Storm in the Piano (Maytree Press, 2022).

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 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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The colours of Senegal are everywhere. Green stars wink out of yellow-painted concrete. Flags wave in the breeze, hung from wires between telegraph poles. Kids in T-shirts bearing the tricolour giggle over keepy-uppies. Green, spiny soursops mix with yellow bananas in the market stalls while red cashew apples dangle overhead like Christmas baubles. Boys race tyres along the pavement, running helter-skelter past stacks of papayas and lampposts painted green-yellow-red, green-yellow-red. They see you as you pass by and shout, ‘toubab!’ a Wolof word for outsiders.

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Then comes Fadiouth, two islands built up over hundreds of years by fisherfolk discarding clam, cockle and/or oyster shells (different sources say different things). Oysters love Senegal’s mangroves, and the Senegalese love oysters. Or cockles, or clams. There are no motorised vehicles in Fadiouth, whose islands are reachable only by long wooden bridges, or by pirogue. (You get a better view of the oysters that way.)

Fishing is controlled. There are catch limits, and periods when fisherfolk are forbidden from catching certain types of molluscs. When Fadiouth became a zone protégée in 2004, the area’s artisanal fishing population argued for more restrictions than the central government had proposed. They understood the ecosystem’s fragility.

Why am I talking about Joal-Fadiouth? Partly because, having recently bicycled through it, I can shoehorn some travel writing into a piece ostensibly about poetry. Partly because it is the birthplace of one of the most important people in modern West African history, a poet whose poetry you may never have read. No, sorry, this isn’t a story about Senegalese footballer Sadio Mané. I’m talking about Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, and co-theoretician of négritude.

Senghor was a big deal. Born in 1908, he was one of the key figures (along with Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and French Guianese poet Léon Damas) behind the anti-colonial négritude movement, which aimed to define, legitimise and celebrate black consciousness. In so doing, he pivoted Senegal towards independence. He designed its flag and wrote its national anthem. He helped collectivise black identity – in a way that Europeans could understand – received knighthoods from Spain, Italy and the Vatican, and was the first African elected to the illustrious Académie Française, the main authority on French language and publisher of the official French dictionary. With just 40 seats, and lifetime membership (members are known as ‘Immortals’), it is a very exclusive club. Senghor also helped write France’s current constitution.

This is a man whose political and diplomatic achievements cannot be overstated, who went from climbing baobabs in his garden, to studying at a seminary in Dakar, to teaching Latin and Ancient Greek in a French grammar school, to defining Eurafrica in speeches to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as the president of independent Senegal.

So, well done Leo. But the funny thing is that if you Google him, you’ll see that the first word attached to him tends to be … poet.

“Poet and former president of Senegal”, “Senegalese poet and statesman”, “Leading poet and intellectual”. Poet this, poet that. This seems like a rare thing. Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell and Jimmy Carter all wrote and published poems, but we don’t call them “Poet and…”. Maybe they wrote bad poetry.

Senghor’s preoccupation with poetry was genuine, and refreshing. Example: he was a prisoner of war for two years during WWII and spent most of his time learning enough German to read Goethe in the original and writing poems he later published as Hosties Noires (1948). He was a fan of Langston Hughes, calling him “the greatest poet of the Negro Renaissance” and the “greatest black American poet”, and of the French poets Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Sartre wrote an introduction to Senghor’s 1948 anthology of black poetry.

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On a bicycle trip through Senegal, I visited Senghor’s childhood home. I learned that he was child number 24 … of 41. Dad was a peanut merchant whose middle name, Diogoye, means ‘lion’ in the Serer language. Mum was dad’s third of five wives. My guide referred to the conjugal bedroom, with a big smile, as “the factory”. In the garden at the back of the house is a 500-year-old baobab tree, which Senghor would climb to think. (There are a great many baobabs in Senegal, and a great many goats that feed on them.) In the middle of the hallway ceiling is a six-pointed star. But Senegal is mostly Muslim, has been for a long time. Senghor liked to describe his country as “90% Muslim, 10% Christian, and 100% animist”, his point being that organised religion can only penetrate so far. Anyway, no one in the family was Jewish. So, why the star? Our guide didn’t know.

Senegal’s national football team are the Lions of Teranga – ‘Teranga’ is a Wolof word for the warmth of spirit on which Senegalese people pride themselves. “No animal can better represent the Senegalese people [than the lion], whose cardinal virtues are courage and loyalty”, according to the presidency’s website. And the name of Senegal’s national anthem (lyrics by Senghor) translates to “The Red Lion”. Lions, lions, everywhere.

(Point of interest: ‘Red Lion’ also happens to be the most common pub name in the UK. There are 517 Red Lion pubs in the United Kingdom, as of last summer.)

Question: Why did Senghor write a red lion into his country’s anthem?

The night before we arrived in Joal-Fadiouth, a Senegalese man who had lived in Germany for 22 years – eight years in Munich, 14 years in Stuttgart – told me what a shame it was that so many Senegalese move abroad. “People move to Morocco, Spain, France, Germany from Senegal, live there and then die there, and for what? To die far away from home. Underground, nationality means nothing,” he added. “In the earth, everyone is the same. Blood is always red.”

I’ll be honest, I find Senghor’s poems hard to get into. One or two at a time is enough for me. But I love their boldness, and I can appreciate the impact it must have had on European and African readers of his time. His work is sensual, vibrant and heavily symbolic. It did the necessary work of constructing an African mythos for post-war French-speaking audiences. Its metaphors are vivid and clear. To a contemporary reader they may read as a little overused, or heavy-handed. But in their time, rather than being cheap callbacks to obvious symbols, they were the first building blocks of a poetic tradition that celebrated African-ness rather than denigrating or exoticising it, as outsiders had tended to do. He’s just saying it like it is.

Naked woman, dark woman

Oil that no breath ruffles, calm oil on the
athlete’s flanks, on the flanks of the Princes of Mali
Gazelle limbed in Paradise, pearls are stars on the
night of your skin

Delights of the mind, the glinting of red
gold against your watered skin

Under the shadow of your hair, my care
is lightened by the neighbouring suns of your eyes.

From ‘Black Woman’ at All Poetry

Looking for examples of Senghor’s poetry, I was struck by how hard it is to find – especially (weirdly) in Senegal, even in the original French. From Saint-Louis to Banjul, in The Gambia, it was Senghor’s cultural theory texts that always seemed to pop up. Nonfiction sells better than poetry, I guess. Most poetry websites have the same four or five of his poems. The Internet Archive has a digital copy of Poems of a Black Orpheus (1981, translations by William Oxley), which is worth borrowing for a deeper dive.

A final point about language. Senghor wrote in French, which is complicated. Of course, his early education had been in French – it was a colonial education. At school, he learned about French geography and French politics. The administrators of his lycée in Dakar were French. The literature he studied was French.

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But… most Senegalese don’t speak French. It may be the official colonial language, but even now, only one in four are proficient, and most of them only use it when they have to. Most speak Wolof, and there are many Wolof speakers in The Gambia and Mauritania. But Senghor wasn’t writing for West Africans as readers. He was writing on their behalf, for a French, or European, readership. He wanted France, Europe and the world to understand what it meant to be African, to think and breathe and live like an African. And when he started writing poetry, his ability to do so in French meant he could address himself to European audiences. In his case, adopting the language of his oppressor was a necessary sacrifice. It enabled him to elevate his people’s status, and form a literary bridge between two continents.

So, is there a lesson? Maybe it’s that if you want to change the world with your ideas, writing poetry can be a good way to start. Maybe it’s that even if you change the world, your poems may not be remembered. Or maybe it’s simply this: if you want your poetry to endure, write what you need to write, in language your intended reader understands.

Masks! Masks!
Black masks, red masks, you masks black and white –
Masks at all four points from whence the spirit breathes –
In silence I salute you!
And not least of all you, my lion-headed ancestor,
You keeper of holy places forbidden to woman’s laughter and all profane joy.
Breathless air of eternity where I breathe the breath of my forefathers.
Masks of the faceless ones, stripped of each dimple and wrinkle –
You who have painted this picture of my face over an altar of white paper
In your own image … hear me!
Here dies the Africa of Empires – it is the agony of a ruined princess
And of Europe to whose navel we are bound.

From ‘Prayer to the Masks’ (1981, Oxley’s translation)

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

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem 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 here 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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YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE
I had known for a long time that I must change my life; but how, and when?

It’s a wonderful book, small almost short-story reflections and recollections of her “more or less solitary existence on a smallholding” in Cumbria from her late fifties until her eighties. Unsurprisingly, the same spirit emerges through her poems. Published by HappenStance in July 2021, The Long Habit of Living, the poet’s eighth collection, finds her now aged 91. It’s a gift to read from her clear-sighted, hugely observant, detached perspective.

The poet writes with great intelligence, humour, lightness of touch, compassion. Her subjects encompass herself, her natural surroundings, the planet, and – from some distance – other people and relationships. This detachment was already there, of course, from that unusual choice to live apart for those nearly thirty years.

M.R. Peacocke also enjoys a wonderful dance with language. Often words new to me appear, though this is not in any way obtrusive. Words I feel I should already know, but somehow don’t: “glyphs”, “haddie”, “deckle-edged”. I relish this gentle education. Her poems come at subjects from unexpected angles, like good poems can. ‘Candling Eggs’ (which introduced me to the idea of ‘candling’) is a poem written with absolute authority, from that experience as poet-farmer, but its end seems to broaden its canvas: “May those / who know how to be get on with it.”

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Some of my favourite poems are the shortest. ‘Moth’, only nine lines long, addresses a “snap” in an album. I get such a clear picture, taken “from an upstairs window”, of:

a woman
down on a tidy lawn, pale, dumpy,
hunched on a garden chair.

And then, the most beautiful small twists as the poem wends to its close. I’m reminded, somehow, of the final line of Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem ‘Filling Station’: “Somebody loves us all.”

I admire these quiet, careful poems. But this poet won’t be typecast. The poem that opens the book, itself called ‘Book’ (and which featured as the first ever poem on The Friday Poem) – makes a much more obvious splash: “The Book of errors, terrors, accidents (happy), / accidents (unhappy, Vol. II).” So much that’s real in here, hard-hitting, packaged with her touch of brilliant humour (for me, in that “Vol. II”, for instance, capturing our all-too-human negative bias). And here we also see, as in every poem, this poet’s unique footprint in language. The gathering together of sounds and images, disparate, and delicious, as she sends her reader’s mind darting:

loves on the brink of hatreds, holy
alliances, barefoot dances,
losses, peregrine snatches.

She does this, creates this magic, repeatedly. In ’Winter Festival’, she turns her gaze on “the maiden aunties, / the grandmothers” gathered complacently by a family:

it’s time to fold them away fold them away
as before, follow the comfortable creases.

‘Put’ is another wonderful poem, and example:

At last my door, and putting everything down
to fumble for the key before life to come

and becoming aware of Put: these bags, weight
of potatoes, a couple of jars, all the stuff

settling into a sideways loll

I’m reminded faintly of Tony Hoagland’s poem ‘There Is No Word’ – “There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store / with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack” – but of course Peacocke’s play with the word ‘Put’ is entirely her own – “settling into a sideways loll” – and utterly unpredictable in where it travels. I don’t think she ever loses me on her journeyings, so beautifully constructed are these poems. Every one reinforces my impression: here is a writer I can trust. This poet / mind at work here, behind the scenes. I relax into receiving her communications.

I didn’t learn an instrument as a child but so many stories have I heard of the curious toll these lessons can take (a mother’s wishes for her daughter, however well intentioned). In ‘Practice’, something called “effort” seems passed on in posture, strain. ‘Leaving’ also distills a central facet of family relationships. Is this a daughter leaving her mother’s home (or, conceivably, a mother leaving her daughter’s)? Either way, it evokes a strong response in me – “a figure in the lane with hands lifted awkwardly” saying goodbye, when you wish she’d just go back into the house now: “although I think / she wasn’t watching but seeing.” (Who’s watching over whom here?)

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‘Air Letters’ describes the burning of a trove of letters. Peacocke’s perfect observation of literal detail merges seamlessly with her metaphor:

The decayed elastic band wouldn’t hold anything
together now. Writhed briefly. First the fire caressed, then
was abruptly angry

The collection encompasses almost every life stage: that’s one of its gifts. And early memories and senses are as clearly evoked as later-life experiences.

The second poem in the book is called ‘Syllabary’ (yes, I had to look that up). For me, it captures the birth of a poetic impulse. The poem starts with a child’s dry reading lesson indoors with her “formal father”: “She sat (mat, pat) on an upright chair”. Then, when lessons were done for the day, the great escape outdoors, the passions of that world of excitement and injury: “the wall / never bothered with warnings (tall, fall)”. And then, my favourite line of the poem: “Later, a phone rhymed and rhymed.” Death calls. How can we shoehorn all of human experience into conventional forms and language? We can’t. (Hence, poems.)

And of course, this poet writes of old age. Beautifully. Sometimes she writes humorously. Take the picture of her “brandishing” her stick and yelling, in ‘Exercise’; to the typographical delight of ‘Theend’:

I am odl an don seee towell
i can no longre TYPe Whic
his a nisence. Pety I’m a Pot.

As often she is serious. This is from ‘Flies’:

I’m old, I’m like Roman glass,
no more use, carefully kept, fragile and cloudy.
Everything about me is a long time ago.

Or this, from ‘Dust’. (There’s a book here too: the same ‘Book’ of the opening poem? That’s “written and can’t be amended”.) It’s hard to imagine a fitter guide:

Till now I had not understood my vocation
to be other, disparate as snow, no longer
bone, water, blood, but some multiple of dust caught
in the beam of your lamp. It’s late. You turn the page,
not quite finished, the ending still speculative.
A swirl of the air. Fleck by fleck, the dust floats on.

Charlotte Gann is an editor from Sussex. She has an English degree from UCL, and an MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development from the University of Sussex. She lived in London for years, working as Editor of Health Which?, among other roles, then moved to Brighton and had two sons. Her pamphlet, The Long Woman (Pighog Press, 2011), was shortlisted for the 2012 Michael Marks Award and her two full collections, Noir (2016) and The Girl Who Cried (2020) are published by HappenStance. Her pamphlet Cargo was published in September 2023 by Mariscat Press. She convenes The Understory Conversation.

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Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by 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 here on Substack in the future. (Like this one).

Help support The Friday Poem

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

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Anyway, following that thought, I saw the cartoon as about two parts of one self in conflict. And Carl Rogers is all about congruence, as I understand him: the closer we can get to a congruent life – i.e. living as we are on the inside, on the outside – the more fully functioning he’d describe us. This feels relevant to me when I think about The Understory Conversation. It’s really come about from having felt I’d led two parallel lives.

Apprehension

We do not want to know about the rocks.
Of course, occasionally someone disappears
but it’s better, safer, to keep things

as they are. Imagine what would happen
if we lit up this stretch of water? The dark
would come alive with shapes and creatures.

The rocks would rear up jagged. We’d see
how deep the water really is: those
lonely fathoms. Besides, just think,

what might we glimpse below the surface?
lost faces – imagine? The fright! Don’t fret.
People drown silently most of the time.

(from The Girl Who Cried)

That was a poem I wrote between my two books. The spark for it was noticing that the word ‘apprehension’ meant both to fear something, and to grasp or understand it. The poem came in quite a burst and with a lot of energy. I sent it off to The North, and they accepted it. It felt an important poem to me. HappenStance publisher Helena Nelson later chose it as the poem she put on the back cover of The Girl Who Cried. And it has felt a bit of a manifesto poem, since, for me.

I know it’s dark, and bleak. It has this strange ‘We’ voice in it that isn’t the poet’s voice or perspective but some kind of collective, societal-even, ‘we’. The poem emerged very strongly with, or in, that voice. It was the kind of poem where I wrote what I didn’t want to believe is true as a way of pushing back. And what I’m pushing back against, I think, is our collective tendency to leave difficult things un-talked about, hidden, cloaked in shame.

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I first used the term ‘The Understory‘ in a blogpost after publication in 2020 of The Girl Who Cried. I talked about how, all my life, I’d felt I was living a double life: the one visible and talked about; and the private suffering, behind the scenes. I’d had a pretty stable life, on the outside. Coming from a white middle-class (big family) background, I grew up in the South East, moved to London as a student, then worked as an editor in magazines. Things were fine – I got on seemingly well, getting (modestly) promoted etc as I went.

But.

There was a big but.

Behind the scenes, and internally, was a very different story. One that rarely got spoken about.

My first collection, Noir, emanated from years of exploitation during my late teens and early adulthood. I called the book Noir because the secrecy and shame bound up in that whole experience was so fundamentally a part of it and was, I think, at least as damaging as the abuse itself. The Girl Who Cried came second. This was a book I couldn’t really even describe, but it came straight out of my Understory. How all my life, really, I’d nursed a small child desperately searching for something she needed behind the scenes. In both, I feel I went inside and gave bruised and silenced parts of myself permission to ‘speak’ (however surreal that might sound). My favourite books had paved the way, and when I felt uncertain I would read Patrick Hamilton’s work, especially Hangover Square, and feel reassured that I needed to write precisely what I needed to write.

So, after all this – and partly at least in support of the (lockdown) publication of The Girl Who Cried – I found myself writing that blogpost, about me and the Understory, and posting it on Facebook. I think I had the tag something like ‘Am I the only one with an Understory?’ Some others responded; or they responded to shares of the post. Already, I got that sensation: less aloneness.

I’ve had this before, of course, at times. With my closest friends; or in therapy or personal development settings (there’ve been a few – a fire walk in the Welsh hills one night back in 2000 springs to mind). And I felt it when people responded personally (amidst all the silence) to my poetry collections. But rarely had I felt able to speak so openly publicly, and feel heard.

Excited, and curious, I invited a small group of poets to a one-off online ‘conversation’ about the Understory. I barely knew some of them; geographically, we were widely spread. We met, we talked. We all found it stimulating. We ‘brainstormed’ how a group of writers meeting around the theme of the Understory might work. We were all interested, and we formed the first guinea pig group.

That group is still going strong fifteen months on. We meet roughly every three weeks; and are now in the throes of planning our first in-person residential, in the Peaks this June. Over the last year, I’ve formed a couple more regular groups, and been working with a handful of individuals in one-to-one ‘Understory Conversations’. It all feels rich, and strong; and seems to be evolving organically.

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In the midst of all this, I was going for regular walks and talks with poet pal and local ally Sarah Barnsley. And she was – is – also in the founding group. Sarah works full time as an academic, so I’m the main lead on The Understory Conversation, but she’s formally joined me, as Contributing Editor. And my two sons have kindly helped by creating our website.

It almost immediately became apparent to me that the Understory intuitively meant different things to different people, and that that was no barrier. Indeed, it was an enrichment. One person talked of bringing her ‘share of chaos’ to one meeting: I loved that image, and still do. It manages to capture both the ‘chaos’ and the containment, which form the heart of The Understory Conversation.

Someone recently suggested in a group, that the Understory is simply ‘the place or space we write from’, and that absolutely gels, too, for me. The space from which we write, filled as it may be, too, with all our personal reasons why. As Carl Rogers also says: “As no-one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves.”

For years now, I’ve thought of my own writing as a developmental as well as creative practice: that I write in a ‘potential space’, and that that is inherently beneficial. This is one central framing I took away from my MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development at the University of Sussex more than a decade ago, where I read Carole Satyamurti’s essay ‘First time ever: writing the poem in potential space’. It’s an idea that comes directly from Winnicott’s work in child development: that the child (or adult poet) needs a safe space in which to ‘play’, overseen by a holding mother who doesn’t interfere. The poet, in writing, provides both the holding space and the play for herself.

Again and again in my work, I’m drawn to the image of rooms and ideas of there being, or not being, ‘room’ for us. Here’s one poem where the ‘I’ can’t get ‘inside’ at all:

The house with no door looks welcoming,
with its wisteria and robins. I can see,

through the kitchen window, a bowl
of cherries. They’re the brightest, darkest,

shiniest cherries. But that window’s shut
and bolted. I move on round. I know

I shouldn’t walk on flowerbeds.
I keep thinking the door must be around

the next corner. I’ve lost count now
how many times I’ve circumnavigated.

(from The Girl Who Cried)

(I also love the fact poems themselves are like tiny rooms on the page.)

Well, The Understory Conversation, in its way, sets out to provide exactly that: small safe rooms (hopefully abundant with bowls of cherries!) where like-minded creatives can come and play. And by play here, I mainly mean connect. Make connections. That, I think, is the key. Connection – authentic, imperfect, committed connection – is making a world of difference to me. In simply being, and trying in good faith to write, to meet as whole people, to listen, and to talk – that, in itself, is what is making such a difference to my personal internal experience. It’s subtly so, but it’s real.

At times, when the connection’s going well, when I feel open, and that others are open too, and we’re in a working group or system, I feel something shift in my chest. Like a rusty old door creak open. A physical sensation. I want more of this!

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We plan to go on experimenting, and developing. We hope to form new, fixed, ongoing, small groups periodically, so do get in touch if you’re reading this and you’re interested, and we’d love those to include as much diversity as possible, including different kinds of artists … anyone with a committed creative practice and a genuine interest in engaging. We’ve also started publishing what we’re calling ‘sample conversations’ on the website, in our Understory Common Room. Again, please feel free to have a browse, to get a flavour.

Increasingly, I feel like my life on the inside is closer to my life on the outside (to return to Carl Rogers and that ‘self at war’ at the start). For me, this feels vital and, perhaps, the very heart of The Understory Conversation.

Charlotte Gann is an editor from Sussex. She has an English degree from UCL, and an MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development from the University of Sussex. She lived in London for years, working as Editor of Health Which?, among other roles, then moved to Brighton and had two sons. Her pamphlet, The Long Woman (Pighog Press, 2011), was shortlisted for the 2012 Michael Marks Award and her two full collections, Noir (2016) and The Girl Who Cried (2020) are published by HappenStance. Her pamphlet Cargo was published in September 2023 by Mariscat Press. She convenes The Understory Conversation.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by 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 2026 we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts here on Substack in the future. (Like this one.)

Help support The Friday Poem

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

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The first poem is a clever scene-setter for the collection, in terms of both theme and style. ‘Overlooked’ invites us to rummage around the second floor of a record shop. Its opening is engaging, with its second person address, so we feel as if the poet is leading us, step by step, into the poem, and directing our view. The details paint a vivid scene which plays subtly to our emotions: “those niche recordings, zydeco, hi-life / which you might in this empty moment / be revisiting like a lost love or trawling / for novelty to spike your jaded heart”. Well, we have all been there, haven’t we, one way or another?

But this isn’t a poem about a record shop, of course. Pimlott is a master of the engaging digression and her poems are full of unexpected turns. Here, she guides the gaze of that record browser (and us readers) out of the upstairs window and into the kitchen window opposite. I really admire the way Pimlott uses the imperative voice to frame this scene. The description again is wonderfully precise, the detail of those graded sieves, which, with the pans and colander, hang “like a half-curtain”. The poem invites us to imagine what lies beyond:

one ripe banana balanced on a hand
of greener fruits, lending encouragement
by way of ethylene. And look, a woman,
older, white haired is dancing alone
her still-lithe wrists held high and snaky.

Pimlott is playing a neat trick here because, of course, once she’s conjured up this image in our minds, the woman is as real as the pots and pans and record shop memorabilia. But the author hasn’t stopped yet. The final lines of the poem switch this gaze around in a rather disarming fashion. It is this dancing woman, the poet herself we are led to believe, who “instead of ducking quickly out of sight / looks right back, smiling, stares you down”. What, or who, we end up wondering, is the ‘Overlooked’ of the title? The city apartment nestled in among the shops and buildings? Or the older woman? There is something very defiant in that stare. This is a voice that seems intent on marking out its own space, who is now speaking back (not ducking out of sight), daring us to to look, to listen.

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The title of this poem alludes to many of the themes that run through this book. On one hand it is a factual description of a City flat – and many of the poems in the book map out the physical environs at the heart of London – exploring what it means to live somewhere that has changed around you. But it also speaks to other ideas: the small things in life it’s easy to miss and not regard properly. These poems never do that. Instead they take a careful and considered look at both places and people, and always find surprising and unexpected things – an intention perhaps summed up in the touching poem ‘Five Unusual Things’.

Womens’ lives are one of the central themes of this book. There are poems addressed to daughters and mothers, and many that celebrate the quiet joys of female friendship. There are poems that look backwards, towards girlhood and young adulthood, but also explore ageing in a way that is both unsentimental but remarkably affecting.

One thing that struck me reading this book, and then re-reading it (it’s that sort of collection) is the artistry of many of these poems. These are not showy or flouncy poems, and the craft is so deftly done you barely notice it at times. The poems seem to fit their forms perfectly; nothing seems out of place, jarring, or unnecessarily drawing attention to itself. It all reads so effortlessly that you can easily miss what’s going on in a technical sense. ’Pests’ for example – a poem about poisoning mice – is a perfectly crafted sonnet with some brilliantly unobtrusive rhymes that just lurk at the periphery of your senses when reading the poem (perhaps like those mice).

There’s an enjoyable tension too, in many of these poems, between the desire to tell the unvarnished and plain truth and the demands of a poem to shape the material, to allude or elaborate, and move towards revelation and transformation. In the poem ‘The Grand Union Canal Adventure’, for example, Pimlott describes a trip by three longstanding friends, with an interesting image in the opening stanza:

We three old girls, fractured
by the usual losses, aren’t mended
Japanese-style with precious seams
that make each fissure sing,
but rivetted: serviceable, not art

The poet might profess herself to be more rivet than gold, but the poems themselves perform a Kintsugi-like art, taking these nuts and bolts of everyday life, be it Rice Krispie packets, defrosting fridges, Magic Radio, manhole covers or egg sandwiches, and transforming them into something gleaming and precious. This poem itself, which contains the line from which the collection gets its title, performs its own transformation, moving from the industrial canal-scape to a more surprising ‘golden’ vision, which is then nicely undercut by the humorous last line. But this doesn’t detract from its beauty. It just serves to underline the point which I think Pimlott makes in many of these poems: how art and beauty can be found everywhere, provided you are paying proper attention. It strikes me as an almost Romantic view, and I’m not surprised to see both Keats and Byron referenced in the book.

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The imagery in ‘The Grand Union Canal Adventure’ is echoed in another poem towards the end of the collection: ‘Downstairs at the LRB bookshop with the older women poets’. Here, older female friendships are again centred. The detail is vivid and the language used is fresh and surprising. I loved the description of these women round a table: “Below, our feet in comfy shoes, above, the ta-ran-ta-ra // of scarves and witty jewellery.” But here again is that association of art with gold. Pimlott says: “We’re here / to hear our poet spin gold”, a beautiful description of the poet Mimi Khalvati, to whom this poem is dedicated.

Pimlott’s voice is amusingly self-deprecating at times, but also celebratory and fully aware of its power. She notes: “Books surround us. Perhaps we’re dry but dry as kindling, / ready to catch light.” These ideas are further explored in ‘What Matters’, one of my favourites of many favourites in this collection. Again this starts with the poet observing what seems like an everyday scene – three women “in rational shoes” sitting opposite her on the tube – before moving towards an ending that invokes music and Mozart. This, Pimlott seems to be saying, is what is art is about, what it’s for – to celebrate the lives we live.

I was struck by Pimlott’s apparently frank observation in this poem “I’ve little passion to speak of, at least not one that burns / so other might catch alight, embrace a glamorous fire / but here I want to praise the quiet joy of old friendships”. I am not sure about that initial assertion; the evidence of these poems is quite the reverse – we have poems bubbling with passion, joy and a playful sense of artfulness, albeit under a veneer of sensible restraint.

Throughout this collection I was struck by Pimlott’s diction, her mix of the plain everyday speech alongside more exacting and unusual words, that bring the reader’s attention up sharp. ‘Calligraphy Blues’ is a splendid example of this. The poet describes wanting to write in a script whose “gestures waft sentiment with the insouciance / of a silk peignoir or the scarf that did for Isadora / redolent of bergamot rather than wet English Setter.” These are poems that lean into language, revel in it. And as well as conjuring vivid images for the readers, this attention to detail at a linguistic level creates words and lines that are wonderful to say and reflect what a good ear Pimlott has for a line.

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This collection really showcases Pimlott’s skills, her knack of taking you on the scenic route to the heart of the poem, her formal craft, her conversational tone, her intelligence and wit, and delicious mix of humour and nostalgia. I think the experience of reading this book is best summarised by Pimlott herself, on a night time bus ride across London in ‘Return to the Terminus’. “It’s late, so join me, / grip the pole, lean out into those bright, melancholy lights”.

Emma Simon has published two pamphlets, The Odds (Smith|Doorstop, 2020) and Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017), and one full collection, Shapeshifting for Beginners (Salt, 2023). The Odds was a winner in The Poetry Business International Pamphlet & Book Competition. Emma has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and has won both the Ver Poets and Prole Laureate prizes. She works in London as a part-time journalist and copywriter and has just completed an MA via the The Poetry School and Newcastle University.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem is run by 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 April 2026 we made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts here on Substack in the future. (Like this one.)

Help support The Friday Poem

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

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War. Lindsey Hilsum’s subject. Poetry’s subject. Everybody’s subject.

Parisot is a small village in the Quercy-Rouergue region, at the crossroads of Tarn-et-Garonne, Lot and Aveyron. Every year since 2013 a dozen or so French- and English-speaking writers come to talk about their latest books. It’s free, and there’s tea and home-made cake on offer (though their sound guy could do with some training). A mix of English, French, and other Europeans come from near and (occasionally) far to participate. On this particular warm and sunny afternoon about a hundred of us crowded into a large airy room, keen to hear some poetry and listen to Lindsey Hilsum’s stories about life as a war correspondent.

Lindsey Hilsum — well, you’ve probably seen her on the telly. She’s the International Editor for Channel 4 News and has covered conflicts and refugee movements all over the world, including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Kosovo. In 1994, she was the only English-speaking foreign journalist in Rwanda when the genocide started. In 2021, she was in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine when she was woken by loud explosions – Russian artillery attacks on military targets around the town signalling the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine War. She was a close friend of Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times correspondent killed in Syria in 2012, and wrote about her life – In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin. So she knows a bit about war.

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She knows a bit about poetry, too. In nearly four decades of war coverage she has always carried a book of poetry with her. While covering the war in Ukraine she started tweeting a poem a day. People began to engage with her online, share the poems, and ask for more. So she wrote this book. In further explanation, she writes:

In September 2022, a few days after Russian forces retreated from the Ukrainian town of Ilium, I was standing outside an apartment block that had been split apart by a missile. Fifty-four residents had been killed in the Russian attack, which had taken place six months earlier. Purple and yellow wild flowers were growing in the rubble that filled the chasm between the two parts of the block.

‘It’s not the houses. It’s the space between the houses,’ I thought. ‘It’s not the streets that exist. It’s the streets that no longer exist.’ The words of James Fenton’s 1981 poem ‘A German Requiem’, about selective memory in the Second World War, came to me when I could no longer find my own.

Back at my hotel in Kharkiv, I looked it up.

It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.

The idea that the spaces between the houses symbolised gaps in memory, and that forgetting might be essential if people were to live together in peace, encapsulated the future facing the Ukrainians I had met that day. […] My TV news report reflected some of this, but it did not have the allusive power of the poem.”

She’s clear about the limitations of journalism and news reporting:

“While the images we show have great impact, I feel that journalistic language sometimes fails to convey the intensity of the experience. Maybe James Fenton’s poetry resonates with me because he was a war correspondent as well as a poet – he sees what I see but has found a more compelling way of expressing it, as if he is working in three dimensions while I am stuck in two.”

Her aim, in this book, then, is to “marry reporting with poetry,” the ‘telling it straight’ with the ‘telling it slant’. Each one of fifty stories from conflicts she has covered, between 1986 and 2024, is twinned with a poem that sheds light on it, one way or another. The title is from ‘War Poem’ by Warsan Shire:

What do I do? I think I brought the war with me
unknowingly, perhaps on my skin, plumes
of it in my hair, under my nails.

Hilsum twins Shire’s poem with a story about her own experiences in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she first met Farzana Kochi, a 26-year-old member of the Afghan parliament. Under Taliban rule, Kochi’s life became increasingly difficult. From 2021, when the Taliban retook Afghanistan, Afghan women and girls were gradually deprived of their freedom of movement, the right to control their bodies, and the right to education. Resistance to the Taliban was brutally suppressed. Kochi received death threats. Her office was raided. Eventually, she fled Afghanistan, disguised in a black niqab, for asylum in Norway. Hilsum writes, “Like all stories, Farina’s is unique, but it is recognisable to thousands of other women forced into exile. Warsan Shire writes of a refugee who also feels responsible for her mother, and who cannot shake off the nightmares or rid herself of the stench of war.”

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The poems Hilsum quotes are from a variety of writers, including soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, thirteen-year-old Amineh Abou Kerech who fled Syria with her family at the age of eight, Kevin Powers, an American soldier who fought in the Iraq war in 2004/5, and Xi Chuan, one of China’s most celebrated contemporary poets, essayists and literary translators. Hilsum includes an extract from ‘The Exaltation of Inana’ by Enheduana, a Babylonian high priestess and princess from Ur (in what is now Iraq) and the earliest author whose name has been passed down in history. There’s an extract from Paradise Regained from John Milton. And there are poems from Christina Rosetti and Shelley, two from A.E. Housman, and one from Stephen Crane (also a war correspondent). The rest are from twentieth-century poets, including old favourites Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, W.H. Auden and Eavan Boland, and younger poets such as Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer, scholar and librarian from the Gaza Strip, and Halyna Kruk, a Ukrainian poet and Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Lviv.

One poem I found particularly moving is ‘Now the City has Fallen’ written by Andrew Waterhouse in 2000:

Women are shackled and painted red
the men given false beards and new names;
I am He Who Looks Nervously Behind,
my friend is He Who Looks Nervously Above.
They want us all to be very nervous.

Hilsum links this with a story about her time in al-Hol camp in Syria, where Kurdish fighters held some of the 70,000 women they had captured while trying to liberate Syria from the Islamic State Caliphate. The women didn’t feel liberated; many remained fanatical supporters of IS. One woman, Yasmina, aged nineteen, had been married six times to six different fighters. Each time a husband was ‘martyred’ – killed in battle – she was passed on to another one. Hilsum asks her, “How do you feel about that?” She replies, “It was fine because I was following the word of the Prophet. […] All of this is for the glory of God.” Yasmina had gynaecological problems and couldn’t have children. For this, she blamed the Americans.

Yasmina may have been a prisoner of the Kurds, says Hilsum, but her real gaolers were the jihadis who had captured her mind and destroyed her body, as Waterhouse’s poem makes clear:

Our children are taken from us and reared
in darkness. It is unclean to wash the body,
only the soul can be touched and scoured bright.
It must be left out on the roof tops for the sun and moon.
This is the law.

Hilsum says, “Some women in al-Hol had absorbed the jihadi vision, but others just kept their heads down, trying to survive the imposition of a brutal, alien ideology, looking nervously behind and above.”

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Another key poem is Wislawa Szymborska’s ‘The End and the Beginning’, written in 1993 to warn against the seemingly inevitable forgetting of the true horrors of war:

After every war
someone has to clean up.

[…]

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearly
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

Hilsum pairs this poem with details of the hearings of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, where Jean-Paul Akayesu, and others, stood charged with genocide and crimes against humanity for their actions in Rwanda. Hilsum herself testified at the hearings. She calls the Rwandan genocide, where more than half a million members of the Tutsi ethnic group were systematically killed by Hutu militia, one of the most brutal mass crimes of the twentieth century. By testifying, she says she was trying to put history to rest, hoping that the testimony of those who had seen with their own eyes would count for something in the battle between remembering and forgetting.

So, what about Hilsum’s aim – to “marry reporting with poetry,” the ‘telling it straight’ with the ‘telling it slant’. Does this work? Yes, well enough. Certainly, each vignette is a fascinating glimpse into the horror of war. She writes well and empathically, and the poems are carefully chosen; they often flesh out or offer a different perspective to her experiences. I was pleased to discover new voices in poetry from all around the globe.

But fifty different stories of war can start to feel like atrocity heaped upon atrocity, and one can be overwhelmed by it. Also, at times I yearned for a longer, more in-depth treatment of the people and places Hilsum had visited, rather than just a couple of pages with a brief character sketch. I recently read War by American journalist Sebastian Junger about his time embedded with second platoon of Battle Company in the Korengal Valley, a transit corridor for Taliban fighters coming into Afghanistan from Pakistan. It’s shocking, and compelling, and by the end you feel you know the soldiers Junger was living alongside, intimately. To me, the deep dive feels more satisfying than the whirlwind tour. Maybe Hilsum’s book should be served in small portions.

Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has more than 3600 subscribers with 27,000 views in the last 30 days. 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 we have made the difficult decision to take this down. We’ll be republishing some of these posts here 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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n. — the environment beneath the surface of the sea

A chance remark, something of nothing,
a car slowing on the road at my door,
the way you think it’s in the past and then
and then away I go on a cormorant dive
down through the foam of an afternoon,
through whatever current slaps dabberlock,
bladderwrack or a mermaid’s purse of words,
unwords and stingy silence any-which-way
against my foolish skin. Down past questions
with flotsam answers I can’t quite get a hand
to. Down past wave upon wave of longing,
through the deeps of what there’s no time for,
past sunlight suturing its own every last gape.
Down through the roar an ocean clenches tight
as a stiletto. Down to a blackness so entire
I think I’m standing, eyes closed, in the yard
in August, held tilted back to the Pleiades
so every firing Yes drops in my mouth
and I rise to it, cormorant hell-bent on sky
with a little fish tucked by me in its beak.

‘Inner Space‘ is from Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke (Gallery Press, 2025) — big thanks to Gallery Press for letting us reproduce it here.

Is there an affinity between poetry and swimming? “I swim in poems / but breathlessly”: in these opening lines of ‘Short Poem About Self-Consciousness’ Vona Groarke combines the underlying subjects explored in Infinity Pool. Water is in the title – although the title poem moves quickly away from what the reader might expect – so let’s start with the obvious water poems. You can’t miss them. Their titles share a common format: ‘Imagine the Atlantic as a …’, eight of them, presented in pairs, carefully placed at turning points within the 35 poems that make up the collection. They act like anchors, or moorings. (Apologies: water imagery is infectious.)

Groarke instructs her readers directly with these titles. ‘Imagine …’. It’s what she has done herself, creating and expanding the comparisons, but you, reader, must join in. Now it’s your job to envisage, to bring these images into your own consciousness. The Atlantic appears, variously, as an actor, mechanic, journalist, chambermaid, film-maker, bartender, artist, and poet. Groarke encounters her own Atlantic on Ireland’s west coast where she can stare out across over two thousand uninterrupted miles, observing its moods, movements, rhythms, patterns. It’s a vast space brought down to the familiar and individual, in poems that are playfully metaphysical, the wit embedded in language and imagery. ‘Imagine the Atlantic as an Actor’ –

running lines. He tries out emphasis
as if dropping stones in a rockpool
(I sink. I sink. I sink.), and plays along
with a smoky grin or countermanding fist.

That shift in inflection echoes the tiny variations in water sounds, mirrors water movements – different stones, different splashes – while the actor hopes for “ripples of applause.” The ‘Mechanic’, meanwhile, knows where every tool hangs in his workshop, the outlines painted on the wall

just as each wreck on the ocean floor sits intact in its mould of water
and every boat drags with it an anchor of shadow, and every vessel,
including the body, slits into the surface a shape it already makes.

That was the second ‘Atlantic’ poem, varying the format by letting longer, looser lines suggest all that huge expanse while also moving the poem into the reader’s space. “Wouldn’t you like to live this way too, every move foreshadowed / by a course determined way back and designed especially for you?” She avoids the word ‘tide’ here – as she does throughout the whole collection – but that’s the shaping force driving the water, and the poem. On the surface sits the mechanic in his orderly workshop, with that pre-planned space for pliers etc. Underneath is the existential question of pre-destination. Not that Groarke would interrupt her poems with such an abstract term: Atlantic and workshop tug against each other like waves, sharing the poem’s space equally. It looks effortless. That’s one of Groarke’s strengths, the way she shifts gear from metaphor into direct engagement with the reader.

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The ‘Chambermaid’ shakes a clean sheet “like a breaker spotted out to sea / pulling the thread of itself” while the ‘Bartender’ with “hands like cormorants skeeting and huzzing / over the polished counter or the taps” is a different, calmer sea:

Her job this evening to keep it all smooth
no matter the undertow; to balance
they frisky hen-do in the corner
with the regulars like boulders
on their high stools at the bar.

There’s real water, too, beyond the metaphysical conceits. ‘An Poll Gorm / The Blue Hole’ is a naturally-formed tidal swimming pool on the Sligo coast; the Atlantic “gets to roughhouse and tousle it” before it turns gentler and “I quiet to its quiet”. Salt water swimming, and “licking salt from my forearm”: her words let you share her sensuous pleasure. In ‘The Low Road’ the water is a flooded road in which the poet’s car stalls, leaving her unsure whether to “reverse or plough through”. Then, the lines that are key to the collection:

Here’s my opt-out. Here’s how
I write myself clear.

Writing, and how to write – that’s Groarke’s central subject. It’s the current moving through the whole collection, a poet’s constant negotiation with language as medium: how best to transform the physical world into words on the page, words drawing the reader into the poet’s creative sphere. Of the 35 poems, there are 17 – nearly half – which include “word/s” along with “page”, “line”, “write”. There’s even a poem called ‘My Own Fourth Wall’ where Groarke steps from the stage of the poem to talk to – who, exactly? A friend? A reader? “Dive in, says one of us, who cares who, / and something occurs on foot of the saying / so the page, this page, / is speckled with affect.”

It’s not only poets who are influenced by individual words but readers too: the word ‘affect’ struck me because it’s the specific term used by an art critic (Vernon Lee), writing on how her current concerns influenced / affected the way she looked at art works. I’d picked up that book a month ago purely by chance: now it’s a part of my reading of Groarke. The ‘fourth wall’ has already appeared, in ‘Infinity Pool’, a multi-layered poem that defies the reader’s expectations:

I had it in the night, the image,
but lacked the energy or will
to magic my body through
my own fourth wall and lower
myself, spit-spot, into the page.

Not a real pool but the image of one, an image which she attempts to carry into the day – “And I am folding it now, this pool” – with the difficulty of keeping it pristine, able to be worked on, shaped into a poem. If you write – and I suspect that most readers of poetry reviews are also writers – you will recognise this: something visualised in the small hours, absolutely clear, stretching out into layers of meaning supported by language, something you will carry into the day, your best-ever poem. You will also know how the experience ends:

But carrying folded water
isn’t feasible. You know that.

It’s rare in the theatre for an actor to step out of role, turn to the audience, and speak directly. It takes a confident poet to step out and address the reader – but Groarke has earned this right. After all, this is her ninth poetry collection, alongside which runs a substantial public academic career. Yet she can still share her doubts, tussles and uncertainties around finding and placing the right words, and make poems from that thinking. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work: ‘The Future of the Poem’ felt to me a little too close to an outline for a creative writing workshop. Does that matter though? It still fits into the collection’s wide, fluid space of ideas about writing.

The outer space of the Atlantic and the inner space of the creative mind come together in ‘Inner Space’, the poem heading up this review. A “chance remark” sets off a dive into thoughts, “questions / with flotsam answers I can’t quite get a hand / to.” until she’s scooting up to the surface, with a poem. Did you notice her “words / unwords”?

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The final poem, an eight-page sequence, ‘Reading Chinese Love Poems in a Borrowed English House’, moves into a new dimension, geographically, as well as a different poetic form: water that’s never at rest, more space to swim.

This is a collection to read backwards and forwards, tracking allusions, deliberate repetitions, play of images, and the author’s fascination with the way the creative mind tugs and worries at how to achieve its end — or catch its fish. Hunt down her books, even if they are hard to locate. Gallery Books don’t feature prominently in UK bookshops, although Groarke’s inclusion on the last T.S. Eliot shortlist might change that. This is a book to hold and scribble in, to relish and, above all, to enjoy.

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).

As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

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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I think it is possible to articulate a reasonable (and reasoned) middle ground. But you can only defend it intelligently with regard to the particular. Particular poems, that is. And someone will always disagree. One can generalise about what makes a good poem, but there’s always one that breaks whatever rules you lay down. It’s easier to say what makes a bad poem (usually it’s using a poetry technique self-evidently badly, or mistakenly). And you can generalise about what makes a good poem for you. But when I do this, I end up using terms like ‘ambition’, ‘technique, ‘connection’, ‘a little machine for remembering itself’ – others might disagree. And, again, there’s always one that breaks the rules.

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Say ten poems are agreed to be pretty good. What makes one the ‘best’? Would ten readers agree? Probably not. The same goes for collections. In 2010, when Anne Stevenson chaired the T S Eliot panel (the other two judges were Bernadine Evaristo and Michael Symmons Roberts), the three unanimously agreed that Derek Walcott’s collection White Egrets was far and away the best. Not everyone thought they were right. Arguably, there’s no single outstanding poetry collection most years. Perhaps every decade?

Victoria: Yes, for collections the more interesting judgements are generally retrospective. Almost no-one ever gets these things right at the time and it’s all a bit arbitrary – plenty of years, as you say, have no really outstanding collections and then you get years in which several appeared together but only one of those (at best) will get that year’s prize.

Honestly, I think a lot of this is common sense. Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool. I’ve sat on loads of committees professionally, and probably you have too, and anyone who has knows that the larger the committee the less chance of appointing or giving the prize to someone genuinely interesting – there’s always a convergence to the mean as everyone exercises their personal veto over a colleague’s eccentric favourite. And the typical appointment committee begins with some agreement about what they’re looking for – a person to do X or fill role Y. It’s not obvious that the average poetry competition begins even with that.

Personally, I think the more interesting competitions are the ones with a single judge. Then at least you know you are getting one person’s honest opinion and not the result of a series of grumpy compromises. If you rate that poet or critic, you will take their choices seriously, and if you don’t, you won’t. It also makes more sense for those considering entering, as you have a much clearer steer.

This year’s National Poetry Competition, moreover, had three very different poets as judges. I know Ian Duhig’s work (which I think is excellent, and which I’ve read and loved for a long time) much better than that of Denise Saul or Susannah Dickey but whichever individual judge you happen to know best it’s obvious that they write very differently. Such a diverse cast of judges is, I suspect, always likely to produce an unsatisfactory outcome, unless they did something mechanical like, for instance, each choosing a single favourite poem and agreeing that those three would have one of the top three spots regardless of the discussion, and then just arguing about the final order.

When I think about the committees I’ve been on in which my favourite candidate missed out, or there was a strong runner-up, in all those cases I made a point of doing what I could to support that person’s career afterwards – recommending them for other jobs, acting as a back-up referee, and in a couple of cases contributing to other projects of theirs. I had the same experience myself early in my own career, for which I was grateful. For an early career academic, getting onto shortlists, even if you don’t get the prize or the job or the grant, is one of the main ways of people finding out what you are doing, and I’m sure there are similar scenarios in many other sectors. I think ideally that’s how we should think about competitions – hopefully they are a mechanism by which readers and editors and publishers might encounter some interesting new voices and go on to do something with that by publishing them and reading them and writing about them. The most interesting poems are generally unlikely to be the winning one, and much more likely to be somewhere down the shortlist, but that’s OK.

So I don’t think anyone realistically expects competitions, especially very big competitions with several judges, to work well. Of course it’s a different matter if you feel that the winning poem is actively bad as I did feel this year – that’s a bit like if someone incompetent gets the job and it does create bad feeling and undermines faith in the whole process. But even so, there were several poems I liked better farther down, and I know there were for you too.

Hilary: Let’s talk briefly about the stated criteria of the three National Poetry Competition judges this year. Denise Saul said: “I am looking for ambitious and memorable poems that carry a degree of vocal authority.” Did ‘The Gathering’ carry vocal authority?

Victoria: Ah now that’s an interesting clause because perhaps the only thing I could say about ‘The Gathering’ is that, yes, perhaps it does have something like ‘vocal authority’. I don’t think you can deny that it does have a distinctive voice. It’s a voice I find pretentious, cynical and sloppy but it is a voice : I mean, I feel like I’d recognise another poem if not precisely by the same author, at least in the same mode. I think the other two winners had something like vocal authority too, in their way. I liked both the runner-up poems better, without loving either. The third poem was perhaps the least distinctive voice-wise. I thought it was well done, but quite like a lot of other poems at the moment.

Hilary: Susannah Dickey said: “I’ll be looking for poems that sit uneasily with the very language they’re crafted from, poems that are frisson-ridden and dynamic. I want to read poems that feel like a collaboration between the poet’s intent and their acquiescence to that which remains uncontrollable. Poetry can do things other forms of literature can’t, for various reasons, and I’m always drawn to writing that leans into that complicated freedom.” What does she mean by this?

Victoria: Well it’s rather a pretentious way of putting it, isn’t it, but she’s saying either just that she wants poems that do things that prose doesn’t (reasonable, but a rather minimum requirement) or that she’s interested in poems about poetry: what poetry distinctively can do, and the limits of what it can do. On the one hand, this is something that younger poets often fall into writing about, sometimes one feels out of a kind of faute de mieux – it’s tempting to write grandly about the limits of language if you haven’t had much life experience yet and don’t have much else to write about. That sounds mean but I think anyone who reads a lot of, say, first collections knows what I’m getting at: this is default ‘clever young person’ stuff. On the other hand, pretty much all the greatest poems are indeed, at least in part, about the power of art and its limits: Keats’s Grecian Urn, Horace Odes 3.13, many of the hymns in the Rig Veda, multiple passages in Homer, pretty much all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Malherbe’s ode to Bellegarde, etc etc. So fair enough, in a way. Let’s aim high.

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The problem is that poems explicitly about poetry (or art/language more generally) are hard to pull off, and also – and I think this is important – they are, aside from the rare, famous exceptions, generally more interesting to professional poets than they are to ordinary readers of poetry. I think the National Poetry Competition, which is run by the Poetry Society with its mission of poetry for all, should ideally try to keep the non-expert punter, the ‘reads a few new poems a year’ sort of reader, in mind.

Hilary: Ian Duhig didn’t lay out what he was looking for, but after the event he did say that each of the winning poems is “good in its own particular way”, adding that a judge has to work out how the poem achieves what it sets out to do. So I think he’s saying that the measure of a ‘good’ poem is how well it succeeds in what it sets out to do. But how do you know what a poem sets out to do, unless the poet tells you (and does so before it wins a competition and has had a pile of judges crawling all over it)? Perhaps what the author of ‘The Gathering’ set out to do was to write in a muddled way about feeling muddled. In which case it has succeeded, in a way. But is this a project worthy of pursuit?

Victoria: Ian Duhig’s comment sounds bland, but I think it’s wise, and probably all you can really say in the face of such a vast open competition. (No doubt he has judged a few competitions in his time!) I think he just means that different poems will have been written within, as it were, different traditions and ought to be judged accordingly. That sounds meaningless but it’s not if you assume broad and generous expertise in the one doing the judging. You wouldn’t assess an imagist epigram by the criteria of a decent sonnet, that sort of thing. You read the poem and you think about what sort of broad school or tradition it’s coming from and you judge it in that context. If I’m asked to assess a grant application from a theologian, I don’t criticise it for not adopting a linguist’s methodology.

The long lines and conversational structure of ‘The Gathering,’ for instance, draw on a particularly American (though now quite widely diffused) tradition. The combination of the long lines, complex syntax, conversational style and abrupt transitions in diction between high and low remind me of someone like C.K. Williams. As we discussed last week, I don’t think ‘The Gathering’ works as a poem, I don’t think it’s a success, but that’s not the same thing as saying that you can’t write excellent poetry in this style, as Williams did. Obviously it would be unfair to criticise ‘The Gathering’ for being unlike, say, the poetry of Gillian Allnutt, or Wendy Cope, or of Fiona Larkin who won the prize last year – all poets writing in distinct (and themselves different) traditions.

Similarly, a large number of the poems in the prizes-and-commended list contain some surreal elements without being thorough-going surrealist poems. This ‘hint of the surreal’ or ‘surrealism-lite’ is almost ubiquitous in « serious » Anglophone poems at the moment, and I wrote about it a while ago in this piece. To be honest I wish everyone would stop doing it because it is now so incredibly conventional as to be practically obligatory and as a result (in my view) pretty tedious. It’s become just a rhetorical shorthand for « This is a Poem ». But obviously it would be unfair to rule out all the poems that are, unsurprisingly, making use of this dominant contemporary convention just as it would be unfair to criticise a poet in 1645 for writing a sonnet, even if you were sick to the back teeth of the things. The serious judge, whatever they feel about that convention itself, will be on the look-out for the poet who can still do something interesting with it.

So I think Duhig is articulating just what you’d want in a judge, really: I will do my best to understand where your poem is coming from and judge it accordingly. Obviously no single judge is going to be equally experienced in absolutely every possible sub-type of contemporary poetry, but the judges for a large, open competition probably should have as broad an ‘ear’ as possible. I think this does mean that they should have significant editorial experience and, practically speaking, be probably on the older side.

Hilary: If you don’t like what the current judges decide, who else takes on that role? She who chooses the judges wields an enormous amount of power. If it was up to you, who might you appoint to judge the next National Poetry Competition, Victoria?

Victoria: I think it would be fun to have a public vote, to be honest. Let actual readers decide. The practicalities are against it, of course, because someone would still have to draw up some sort of manageable short-list. But I think it would be interesting to see what the British (not American!) public would go for.

Hilary: Though that does run the risk of the person with the most friends, or the largest campaign funds, taking the prize.

Victoria: Good point. Alternatively, I would also like to see a competition like this judged by experienced poets who are paid well for the very significant volume of work and who remain anonymous. That would remove the suspicion that such stints are as much about career-development for the judges as for the entrants.

Failing that, I think it would be interesting to see a competition judged at least in part by people who are keen readers of poetry but aren’t poets themselves. If you look back at, say, the first judges of the Forward Prize for poetry in 1992, they were Stephen Spender (chairing), John Bayley, Margaret Drabble, Mick Imlah and Roger McGough, so a mixture of poets and high-profile non-poets in the form of a prestigious critic (Bayley) and a novelist (Drabble). Perhaps this is less important when judging individual poems, but I think for the collection prizes especially it’s healthy and helpful to have some judges who aren’t part of the immediate and, let’s be honest, pretty tiny and circular economy of poets-teachers-judges-editors.

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For the national competition, I think it would also probably be fairer on entrants and readers to have a few different categories each with an appropriate judge, like in swimming: best prose poem, best traditional poem, best ‘freestyle’ poem, best comic poem. You could still choose an overall ‘best’ if you wanted from the collection of winning ones, but then at least you’d have a range of things in the running.

Hilary: Why isn’t the National Poet Laureate judging the National Poetry Competition? Peter and Ann Sansom of The Poetry Business have ideas about what makes a good poem; any magazine editor has such ideas and they are demonstrated in the content of their magazines. They put their money where their mouths are. Literally. Why are they not judging the National Poetry Competition?

In Strictly Come Dancing or Masterchef or the equivalent, the judges have demonstrated universally acclaimed expertise in their area before they are appointed. In the highly competitive area of music, both singing and any kind of instrumentation, nobody could fail to acknowledge the extraordinary skill of certain performers, nor to see that a few of them excel in such a degree as to set them apart. It’s hard to demonstrate equivalent expertise in poetry. This is one of the key issues.

In fact, we can’t define a single thing called ‘poetry’. There are poetries, plural, as university curricula increasingly acknowledge.

There may be some connection with the visual arts, where the idea of what art is has been equally tested since the early twentieth century if not before. But art schools, though they do talk about the visual arts, don’t talk about sculptures as in totally different phenomena. Generally we know what is sculpture, what is painting and what is illustrative work.

Victoria: Well I don’t really agree that there’s no such thing as poetry, I think most readers have a pretty clear intuitive sense of what is and isn’t a poem, though of course there will be edge cases and disagreement around the margins. Arguing about the definition and the role of various defining elements of historical and cultural context is fun for students and academics but I don’t think most people who love reading or saying poems are really that interested in that. But I take your point of course about the different traditions (or « poetries ») and I would be in favour of separate categories with expert judges for each, as I mentioned above, just because I think that would boost confidence and would also much better reflect what is actually read and written. People love reading and writing comic poems, for instance, and to do it well is highly skilled and quite rightly highly valued by readers, but they never win a big prize.

Hilary: Apart from this, the logistics of running a poetry competition that generates over 20,000 entries are challenging.

Victoria: On the whole I feel a lot of sympathy for the judges, despite my irritation with their top choice this year. The National Poetry Competition received over 21,000 entries and apparently does not use any kind of initial sifting system, so the three of them must, I suppose, have read a minimum of 7,000 poems each. (Assuming that they started by just dividing the pile into three in this way, and only all read some sort of longlist or shortlist.) That’s a big ask even for a very experienced reader – say, someone who’s edited a major magazine for many years. I hope they are paid pretty well for it, but even so, it’s a sacrifice – I think it must be difficult to write much poetry of your own while doing that, for example. So while I think they screwed up here and the whole thing is rather embarrassing, I don’t envy them the task at all.

Hilary: Why IS the National Poetry Competition open to poets of any nationality?

Victoria: This is the first time that none of the top three poems have been by a British poet: two are American and one is from Australia. I do think this is worth noting. I don’t know if the entrance rules actually changed at some point, but if you look at the list of past winners they were all British between the start of the prize in 1978 and 2005 when an international entrant (Melanie Drane from North Carolina) won it for the first time. And even after that, the majority of winners have been British poets.

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As you say, it’s the ‘National’ Poetry Competition, not an international one, and it’s run by the UK Poetry Society, a charitable foundation which receives government funding in the form of a substantial Arts Council England grant (£361,083 in 2025). That’s not huge money in most sectors, but for UK arts funding it is substantial. The published accounts don’t break the elements down that much so it’s hard to tell but you have to pay to enter the competition, and I think it’s fair to assume that keeping it open to international entrants makes the Society a fair amount of money.

Hilary: Do you think it should be limited to British poets, then?

Victoria: If we were having this discussion 100 years ago, when British poetry was by far the dominant voice in worldwide Anglophone poetry, then it would probably be a good thing for the flagship national competition to be open to anyone writing in English anywhere in the world. But that is very far from the situation today. The US tradition and characteristically American forms and styles have become very dominant in UK poetry, especially in magazines like Poetry Review, and especially so over the last couple of decades. It’s getting harder and harder for new readers, looking at the most fashionable magazines, to have any sense of the quite distinct British and Irish tradition in poetry – as exemplified, in fact, by someone like Ian Duhig himself. Increasingly, for instance, you see young British poets and critics repeating platitudes that only apply to American poetry (about a sharp and politicised distinction between “formal” and “free” verse for instance, a distinction which has never been a meaningful one in the same way in the British or Irish traditions as it is in the States). Equally, I see a lot of British poets making a rather half-hearted stab at forms and cadences downstream from American poets like Whitman or O’Hara, which don’t sound convincing because they don’t have any feel for or roots in the tradition from which it emerges.

In literary matters as in others, America is, we might say, a rather dominant and aggressive colonial power. I don’t know why we can’t be honest about that and react accordingly. I would like to see the National Poetry Competition restrict its entry criteria to British citizens and/or those living in the UK and make a serious attempt to help readers see and appreciate what is distinctive about British poetry.

Note on the title: “O Sport, you are Honour” (“Ô Sport, tu es l’Honneur !”) is from ‘Ode to Sport’ by Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympic Games.

Victoria Moul is a scholar, poet and translator living in Paris. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her substack, Horace & friends.

Hilary Menos is Editor of The Friday Poem.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has 3500-plus subscribers with over 23,500 views in the last 30 days. 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. As well as exploring our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

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Here’s the poem, for those who have missed it.

THE GATHERING

by Partridge Boswell

Above my meditating head, a record herd of god’s tiny cows
grazes on the blank page of ceiling. How they slipped in via
crevices, god only knows. Yet another testament to a seamed
world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole.

A thousand or so volunteering for the next lower case i,
period, ellipsis or umlaut… interrogating the bare expanse
upside-down, a pair here and there posing as colons—
brave pacifists of summer’s coda, ensuring exclamation

and question won’t end in pointless machete and scythe.
Losing count of gaunt warmer days, all placidly repair
to a colorless gulag of ceiling pristine as the sky after 9/11
or Gandhi’s mind, banished of muddy boots. Foraging air,

do they miss their dirt and grass? Diapaused in stark sterile
contrast to the fermenting carnival of sweet decay coloring
autumn’s kaleidoscope a glass pane away… did they cross
the border with families and dreams intact ahead of a killing

frost? How we continue to innocently decimate each other
and blame gravity, god knows. God who drifts now nowhere
and everywhere again, sleeping in the churches of our cars,
insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t

are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul
on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore
of Gaza. The honey water you set on a sill last year, they
drowned in. No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention

yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers
and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.
Their bright robes shine incarnadine, a congregation reciting

in unison psalms and proverbs of limbo. You whistle a living
wake as tacit prayer gestates to hunger-strike. Exploring safe,
prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.
Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace

the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.

Victoria: I’ll be blunt and say I think it’s a terrible poem. I don’t know what the judges were thinking. It seems to me to have almost all the vices of the typical ‘poetry magazine’ poem and no redeeming features. It’s pretentious, it’s too long, and it’s hard to follow in a clever-clever kind of way. A genuinely clever, complex poem becomes clearer with close attention, and this one doesn’t. In fact, the more carefully you read it, the less sense it makes. Despite being too long, it’s also trying to do too much. The political elements seem lazy and stuck on. Most shockingly, it’s full of cliché and redundancy: “stark sterile”; “fermenting carnival of sweet decay”; “heinous crime” (hello lazy newspaper headline); “hovers aloft” (where else do you hover?); “love’s last light”. It’s overwritten in the way that you’d expect (and be kind about) in a school or undergraduate poetry competition.

Hilary: Should we go into what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ poem? How does one assign value / perceive fault these days? Don Paterson says a ‘good poem’ once meant a poem which demonstrated something like “the skilful manipulation of symbols within a word-game whose rules were broadly agreed”. If these rules no longer apply (this is a moot point but let’s run with it) then what do we do? We have no common agreement, no agreed criteria on what makes a ‘good’ poem. (In which case, one wonders why we are having competitions at all, or whether competitions should publish their criteria for winning in advance – and something more specific than the usual “a poem that surprises me”). Perhaps the concept of ‘good’ is no longer useful. Perhaps we should be looking at asking whether a poem is … what? Interesting? Memorable? Well-made? Moving? Succeeds on its own terms? (What set of requirements can we put on a poem that doesn’t allow Instapoetry to steal the game?)

Perhaps the best way in is to talk truthfully about how the text affects us. So perhaps you and I could start by doing that. A sort of close reading stanza by stanza. Someone is meditating, maybe looking up at the ceiling … and so on.

Victoria: Well, I have quite strong feelings about this question which I’ve written about elsewhere. I believe that aesthetic judgement, like moral judgement, is possible, valid and indeed necessary, and anyone seriously arguing that it’s not is just saying that art doesn’t matter at all. But rather than getting bogged down in philosophy, yes, let’s stick to a close reading. We begin with the “record herd of god’s tiny cows” which are grazing “on the blank page of ceiling”. So we’ve got an image that combines the page – the “blank” is redundant, most ceilings do not have writing on them – and the slightly surreal “cows” (in which case the ceiling is like a field, not a page) and then the question of what these “tiny cows” actually are. It’s obvious as you read on that they are insects of some kind: “The honey water you set on a sill last year, they / drowned in”. The poem is set in late summer or early autumn and they’ve come in from outside.

Hilary: Okay, good. But I get hung up on the “crevices”. One minute those crevices are letting insects in, the next they’re swallowing our hungers. In then out. Anyway, what does it mean, to “swallow our hungers whole”? I’m also assuming the dots on the ceiling are insects, in fact I think they’re ladybirds (the Irish for ladybird is bóín Dé, ‘god’s little cow’, and Partridge Boswell is part-Irish). Vermont was invaded by swarms of Asian ladybirds in 2022, so is this an invasive species poem? A climate change poem? I quite like the idea of ladybirds performing punctuation, but what on earth is “summer’s coda”? A fancy way of saying autumn? And why are they “pacifists”? Ladybirds are voracious – at least where aphids are concerned.

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Victoria: I stumbled on “swallow our hungers whole” as well. It sounds like paradox for the sake of it. I think you’re right about the ladybirds, but even this basic fact is quite hard to extract from the poem. At one point the insects have “bright robes” that “shine incarnadine” (that is, scarlet) but by the end of the poem they are “black iotas”. This is confusing. I took them to be small flies – black, but with wings that sometimes catch the light – but you’re right about bóín Dé, ‘god’s little cows’ in Irish, so I think you must be right that they are ladybirds. This is anything but clear at the outset, though.

The second stanza introduces a new image, comparing the flies / cows / ladybirds to dots that function as punctuation: full-stops, ellipses, umlauts and so on. I think this would work better if we imagine small black flies, since ladybirds all have at least two dots, don’t they? So the line where “a pair here and there” are “posing as colons” doesn’t really make sense. You wouldn’t need a pair of ladybirds for a colon. But OK, these insects are like points of ink, punctuation in search of a text. Like you, I rather liked that; it’s a good conceit on its own, but then Boswell abandons it. When he brings it back at the end of the poem, it doesn’t quite work: he ends with the image “punctuation alone hovers aloft”. But three lines earlier the “black iotas” were “cluster[ing] in corners” – iotas are Greek ‘i’s written without the dot. That is, letters without punctuation, not punctuation without letters. The poem is full of this kind of impressionistic sloppiness.

At the end of the second stanza our insects / punctuation marks become “brave pacifists of summer’s coda”. Like you, I found this a bit obscure (and definitely overwritten) but I think the point is that by functioning as punctuation marks they are contributing to effective communication: “ensuring exclamation / and question won’t end in pointless machete and scythe”. Good, clear communication avoids violence is the idea, I think. Except he can’t resist these constant sort of semi-puns that break down into meaninglessness – “pointless” as in to no purpose (though we might think that violence and persecution does have a pretty clear purpose after all, just not one that we approve of) but “pointless” also means “without a [sharp] point” and/or “without a [punctuation] point”, like an exclamation mark (an exclamation ‘point’ in the US).

Hilary: Yes, he’s suggesting the ladybirds (well known for the spots on their wings) are the dots underneath question / exclamation marks. The question mark without a point is a scythe and the exclamation mark without a dot is a machete. But why are the warmer days “gaunt”? And he compares the ceiling to the post-9/11 sky, which feels like borrowed ballast. As for the Gandhi quote, what Gandhi is alleged to have said is: “I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet” – not a boot in sight.

In stanza four – well – “diapaused” is a lovely word but I’m not sure it applies to these particular insects. It means they’re in a state of developmental suspension. Are they? Is he saying they’re sterile? OK, he’s comparing them to autumn decay. Then he’s comparing them to refugees with “families and dreams” – where did that come from? And I wonder what he thinks “decimate” means? I’m not sure people can decimate “each other”. The “churches of our cars” has some weight, but on reflection I can’t see it makes sense. What’s he suggesting? That we worship our cars? Worship in our cars?

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Victoria: To be fair I think you can use ‘diapause’ to describe the suspension of development during hibernation, and I suppose the ladybirds are coming indoors because they are looking for somewhere to hibernate. But I agree that it is confusing. The insects stop being pacifist-punctuation-marks and become fully personified as persecuted people who “all placidly repair / to a colorless gulag [the ceiling, I suppose]” or “cross / the border”. A bit later on he gets in references to the Irish famine and “the salted shore / of Gaza”, to tick a few more politically-correct boxes.

Hilary: I don’t like “famished flight from an Gorta mór” because an Gorta mór is the Irish Famine and “famished” borders on tautological. Besides, as you say, it’s virtue signalling. No real attention paid to the Famine, nor to Gaza – just name dropping.

Victoria: Starving is a theme of the poem, but it’s not clear what that has to do with ladybirds preparing to hibernate: because hibernating is all about not starving isn’t it? It’s a way to see out a period of shortage by just shutting down. At this point the poet ropes in two recent suicides (I think) in one of the most obscure passages of all:

and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending

genocide of life, truth, hope or love

What does “it seems an illicit ill- / timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive” mean? Maybe that in the context of suicide it seems tasteless to ‘reckon’ (weigh up? measure? use as an image?) the urge to kill things (like insects on your ceiling, or yourself) against the drive to survive exhibited in even the most terrible circumstances – such as yet another genocide. But he can’t finish that thought either. The genocide becomes one of a whole string of lazy abstractions:

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.

Hilary: I’m still a bit confused by the seasons – we had “summer’s coda” at the start, then autumn and now apparently “summer’s still putting up high numbers”. But this is a minor inconsistency compared to the convoluted syntax in those seventh and eighth stanzas where one sentence starts in the last line of the sixth stanza (“No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention”) and only ends seven lines, two stanza-breaks and eighty-seven words later with “news” (stanza nine). I think your interpretation is convincing, but I’m afraid it lost me at “genocide”.

Victoria: Finally we are back (I think) with the insects in their “bright robes” which “shine incarnadine”. It takes some courage to use ‘incarnadine’, since many readers will immediately hear Macbeth, trying and failing to wash the blood off his hands. Such an allusion might have had something to say on the theme of genocide and collective culpability but it’s hard to see what it has to do with our probably-ladybirds.

Hilary: Also, what about his tone? It’s weirdly flat. Lots of big league references, but so little feeling.

Victoria: Yes, a good point about the tone. I suppose you could make a case that the strange flatness of affect is intentional, a way of pointing towards a sort of structural anomie. But that’s a big risk to take as a poet and is rather at odds with the over-the-top diction which generally seems instead to be straining to elicit our emotions.

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Meanwhile “robes” hints at yet another transition, as the insects / cows / refugees become “a congregation reciting / in unison psalms and proverbs of limbo”. Why? Because they are buzzing? That would work for flies but ladybirds do not buzz. Why use “in unison” when we’ve already got “a congregation reciting”? What might “psalms and proverbs of limbo” be? I have lost confidence at this point that the poet has really thought about his references. If we are feeling generous we might think it’s a reference to Dante, who visits limbo, the home of virtuous pagans, unbaptised babies and most of the cast of the Old Testament at the beginning of the Divine Comedy. The people in Dante’s limbo are doomed to yearn forever for the presence of the divine, and there’s lots of vague god-language in this poem. But if so, the hit-and-run reference is neither clear nor sufficiently developed.

Hilary: Besides, he’s lobbed in “hunger-strike” a propos of nothing (a hunger strike during a famine is rare). More borrowed ballast, I feel.

Victoria: The religious context is then transferred to “you” – “You whistle a living / wake as tacit prayer gestates to hunger-strike”. Obviously those conducting a wake are always alive, so I suppose “a living / wake” must mean a wake for the living. But how whistling can be a “tacit” prayer I’m not sure.

Next we’re back with our insect protagonists. “Exploring safe, / prosaic pages of snow [that is, I assume, still the ceiling], they procrastinate then power down”. “Power down” (like a computer) is quite a clever image for the way a group of disturbed insects settle but it adds yet another metaphor to what is already a confusing medley.

This is the final stanza and the point at which they become “black iotas” for a final flurry of bluster:

Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace

the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.

It’s tempting to remark that this poem really does show us what’s left “when language fails and meaning’s / odometer is broken”.

Hilary: In this final stanza the famine motif is strong – “starving”, “ravenous” – could this be a reference to the language insufficiency hypothesis? Oh that last line – “once love’s last light is spoken”. Pretty, and no missing the rhyme with “broken” in the line before, a neat trick. If only the poem had earned it.

Victoria: You can’t speak a light. And of course you don’t speak punctuation anyway, it’s only written. Perhaps Boswell means that when speech (direct communication) fails, written language is all we have. But this seems an oddly low-key moral to draw.

We’ve spent a lot of time on the incoherence and overwriting, but we should say something about the poem’s form too: four-line stanzas with lines of 12 to 21 syllables and no particular stress pattern. Lineated prose of this kind can be made to work well but I don’t think it does here, and the lack of background music only puts more pressure upon the syntax and diction.

The poet is obviously attracted by alliteration (“ravenous reticence”; “famished flight”; “prosaic pages […] procrastinate then power down”) but it is randomly applied. Occasionally we have brief, disorienting glimpses of the kind of incantatory, rhymed and alliterated word-play driven as much by sound as meaning that you hear in some kinds of performance poetry. For example, “to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive / while conducting a threnody for yet another ending/impending // genocide”. I admire this style when it’s done well but only the best poets can make it work on the page as well as in performance. In any case, we only get very brief glimpses of it in this poem, which contributes to the impression that the poet is not fully in control of his techniques. I think we do hear, though, the influence of the weaker kind of performance poetry in his repeated tendency to opt for a striking phrase without much regard for sense or coherence.

Hilary: I want to love the poem that wins the National, or at least to respect it and perhaps learn something useful from it. But this one leaves me bewildered. It’s convoluted and confusing. There’s much virtue signalling, but strangely little actual feeling. There’s lots of show, but no technique that I can point to and say, “That’s original”. Clearly, if you or I had been judging this competition, ‘The Gathering’ would have fallen at the first reading. But it wasn’t up to us of course. The judges – Ian Duhig, Denise Saul and Susannah Dickey – thought that out of the 21,000-odd poems submitted, this was the best one. They called it a “richly layered work that meditates on language, love and suffering on a personal and global scale” and added:

“From my [sic] first reading, we were blown away by this poem, and we couldn’t resist returning to it again and again, each reading yielding more insights into its ambition, the emotional stakes and philosophical perspicacity of its ideas. With its striking opening image of cows on a “blank page of ceiling”, the poem slowly unfurls, becoming an ever more expansive interrogation of language and morality. The blurring of the ontological boundaries between these “tiny cows” and the punctuation marks they resemble from a distance pushes the reader to think about the lives we only learn about through signifiers, the marks on the page that make those lives known to us, all too often after they have been lost. The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere – how do we maintain language’s potency amidst the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories? This poem both diagnoses the failures of our collective conscience and proposes through its logophilia the potential of language to challenge those failures.”

Did they read the same poem that we did?

Victoria Moul is a scholar, poet and translator living in Paris. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her substack, Horace & friends.

Hilary Menos is Editor of The Friday Poem.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has just over 3400 subscribers with nearly 17,000 views in the last 30 days. 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. As well as exploring our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

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Eventually you can’t bear looking at the little bastards any longer and decide to send it out. But where to? How do you know whether your collection of perfect darlings will please the pamphlet publisher of your choice. Poetry is a broad church, but it’s made up of many niches (pardon the mixed metaphor). Which is right for you?

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Competitions

One possible pathway is to enter a poetry pamphlet competition. Here’s a list.

The Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition runs annually. Now in its fourth decade, this is the UK’s most prestigious pamphlet competition and has launched the careers of many poets. Submit 20 poems. Two winners receive £500 each plus publication and support to extend their pamphlet to 24 or 28 pages; two runners up get £100 and publication in The North.

The Poetry Business also runs The New Poets Prize for writers between the ages of 17 and 24. Submit 12 pages of poetry. Two winners get support to extend this to 20 or 24; two runners up get mentoring.

Deadlines for both these competitions are usually around the end of October.

Poetry London Pamphlet Prize
Submit up to 24 pages of poetry. The winner gets £250, publication of their pamphlet with Poetry London Editions, and ten author copies.

Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition
This competition is for women who haven’t previously had a full collection published. Submit up to 20 poems, over 20-24 pages. The winner gets £500 plus publication by Bloodaxe Books (bloody good deal, this).

Templar IOTA SHOT Pamphlet Awards
Submit 16-25 pages of poetry. Up to four manuscripts are chosen for publication, and each poet is offered the option to submit a further full collection for publication.

Magma Open Poetry Pamphlet Competition
Submit 18-20 pages of poems. Judge Marjorie Lotfi will read 50 entries selected by Magma board members. The winning pamphlet will be published and a launch reading hosted by Magma. Poets on the shortlist of ten will each get a paragraph of feedback from the judge.

Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize
One of the Wigtown Poetry Prizes, the Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize is supported by The Dark Horse Magazine. The winner gets publication of a pamphlet set by Gerry Cambridge and 30 author copies. Prize-giving happens at the Wigtown Book Festival in the autumn.

The William Bonar Poetry Prize 2025
This is run by Red Squirrel Press in partnership with St Mungo’s Mirrorball. Entrants must be over 18 years old and based in Scotland, and they should not have previously had a pamphlet or collection published. The winner gets publication by Red Squirrel with editorial support from Gerry Cambridge, plus 30 free copies and 50% discount on unlimited further copies. Watch the page on Red Squirrel’s site for info.

Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Award
Submit 15-25 poems of up to 50 lines each. Two winners get a publishing contract plus 30 copies of their pamphlet.

Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition
Run by the Munster Literature Society. Submit 16-24 pages of poetry. First prize is €1000, second prize is €500, and both winners get publication and 25 complimentary copies, plus readings at the Cork International Poetry Festival (with three-night hotel stay and full board, hoowah).

Coast to Coast to Coast
Run by Maria Isakova Bennet, Coast to Coast to Coast publishes poetry between unique handmade covers via the Individual Poet Journals Competition. Launched in 2017, more than 1400 hand-stitched journals across seven issues have featured work by almost 100 different poets. They are beautiful. Watch the competitions page for submissions info.

East Midlands Pamphlet Prize
Bad Betty Press has partnered up with Writing East Midlands and Nottingham Poetry Festival to offer publication to anyone living, working, studying or born in the East Midlands, via the Little Betty imprint. Submissions open between 1st – 31st June 2026. Winners will be selected by Little Betty editors and the winning pamphlets will be launched at Nottingham Poetry Festival 2027.

Three Pillars Press Poetry Pamphlet Awards
This competition is for poets resident or born on the Island of Ireland who have not previously had a full collection published. Submit ten pages of poetry initially; 30 long-listed poets will be invited to submit their final pamphlet of 20-25 pages. The winner gets €250, the runner up gets €150, both get ten author copies.

Grey Hen Press
Grey Hen is a small independent press which publishes poetry by older women, often themed anthologies but also occasional pamphlets. As they say, “Older women have a lot to say, and they say it with style!” The press ran a poetry pamphlet competition in 2025 – results page here – keep an eye on their site for details of further competitions.

The Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Competition
Run by Vole Books (previously Dempsey & Windle), this is a biennial competition which last ran in 2025. Top prize includes publication of a 46-page perfect-bound pamphlet and 70 author copies.

Nine Arches Press Primers Scheme
Not exactly a competition but worth a mention here is the Nine Arches Primers scheme – a biannual mentoring and publication scheme now in its eighth edition. Three finalists get mentoring, editorial support and publication. Keep an eye on the Nine Arches submissions page for calls and info. You can buy Primers Volumes six and seven in the shop.

Courage and bonne chance to everyone!

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Pamphlet Publishers

Prefer to go directly to a publisher? There are plenty to choose from these days. But how do you work out who best to send to? Some publishers like formal poetry, while some are more oriented towards experimental work, performance poetry or Spoken Word. If your writing is radically different – in style or in layout – from the kind that the press publishes, it is unlikely that you will be accepted for publication. Some publishers prioritise high production values, while others look a bit more hand made. Is it important that your pamphlet has a spine? It sits much better on a shelf that way. Do you want to have input into the cover artwork? Some publishers welcome this; others have a house style or an in-house designer who dictates the look.

Size matters

The Poetry Business pamphlets are A5 (210 x 148 mm) – this is pretty common, as is the standard B format (197 x 130mm). A few pamphlets are larger than A5, and the mini-pamphlets can be as small as A6. How will your work sit on the pages of your preferred publisher? Do you have lots of long poems, or poems with very long lines, or poems that require a certain page format to work? If your chosen publisher uses an A5 format, and some of your poems are 35-40 lines long, a few lines will run onto a second page and look a bit lost. There’s no substitute for buying a pamphlet or two, and laying out your work to suit the format.

A word about editors

Do editors edit these days? Some do, some don’t. One of the best things about being published by a good press is the opportunity to be edited by someone who really knows what they are doing. If an editor is a poet it's worth checking out their poetry to see if you like it or not. You can even contact the poets he or she has published to ask about their experience of working with individual editors or presses.

And then there’s the politics. Some publishers select poetry based on literary merit, others seem more interested in the characteristics of the poet. How do you work out which one will be a good fit for you? Our advice: read the text on a publisher’s website carefully before you submit.

Here’s a list. It’s probably not exhaustive, but it includes all publishers who have produced pamphlets recently and regularly and who include pamphlet submissions info on their websites.

Arc Publications
Tony Ward founded Arc in 1969 and now co-runs it, with fellow director Angela Jarman, from a converted textile mill on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border. Other co-editors have included Michael Hulse, David Morley and Jo Shapcott; current International Editor is James Byrne. Arc is a serious outfit, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation. Read Arc’s submissions guidance here and buy their chapbooks here.

Arenig Press
Arenig is based in Mid Wales​ and promises “bijou independent publishing”. Look at the author page (scroll down) to see who it publishes. Arenig commits to a “proper print run” which is refreshing, if vague – see the list of publications and shop here.

The Artel Press
Artel was established in 2013 and is based in Liverpool. (Artel refers to the Russian collective term for a group of artists.) The press specialises in short-run poetry, artists’ editions and experimental writing, generally from unpublished authors. Submissions info is here, and the shop is here.

Bad Betty Press
Bad Betty was set up in London 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall, and later moved to Nottingham. They publish pamphlets, now under the imprint Little Betty, and also Bad Betty Shots which are limited-edition mini pamphlets. Bad Betty won the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award in 2022. Submissions details are here and you can buy their pamphlets here. Most pamphlet covers are monochrome; it’s a look.

Black Sunflowers Poetry Press
Launched in 2020 by Amanda Holiday, Black Sunflowers is an art-orientated, small poetry press which publishes the work of poets from around the world, with a focus on women and black poets. Read their submissions info here and buy their pamphlets here. Lovely website, great book cover art.

Blue Diode Publishing
Blue Diode is based in Leith, Scotland, and run by Scottish poet Rob A. Mackenzie. It aims to publish “terrific books, especially poetry”, mostly full collections, some pamphlets – buy one here. Keep an eye on Rob’s blog for submissions calls.

Broken Sleep Books
Broken Sleep is “a working-class indie publisher” run by Aaron Kent. “Politically we are left wing, and have no interest in misogynists, racist, sexists, the alt-right, or dickheads in general”. The press gives free PDFs to anybody who asks, and raises money for various charitable causes. Broken Sleep won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award in 2020. Read their submissions guide here (the next submissions window for poetry pamphlets is October – November 2026) and shop here.

Burning Eye Books
Burning Eye Books, run by Clive Birnie and Jenn / Bridget Hart (they/them), is a small independent publisher in the South West predominately specialising in promoting spoken word artists who are actively gigging. They promise to be ‘Never Knowingly Mainstream’. Read their submissions policy here and buy a pamphlet here.

Cinnamon Press
Run by Jan Fortune-Woods, Cinnamon gets most of its new authors via its pamphlet competition, see above. Read its submissions policy here. It also publishes under the imprint Leaf by Leaf which is described as “an adventure in hybrid publishing” (but sounds a little bit like vanity publishing to us). Buy a book from their shop here (probably this one, by Martin Figura).

Clutag Press
Clutag was founded by Andrew McNeillie and began by issuing hand-printed poetry leaflets in 2000, followed by pamphlets by Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney and Anne Stevenson, among others. The press has a “marked but not exclusive interest in the margins and the marginal, in nature and place, in the British and Irish Archipelago”. See the new series of poetry pamphlets here

Critical Documents
Publishes “contemporary poetry”, says the website, which seems to be rocking a last-century aesthetic. The press publishes a number of pamphlets by J.H. Prynne, and also hosts a list of links to likeminded publishers (many of which don’t work). There are no obvious submissions guidelines.

Dare-Gale Press
Dare-Gale is based in Brighton and run by Paul O'Prey and Pilar Garcia. Their author list includes David Harsent, Sean O’Brien and Fran Lock. Lovely website, high production values. Dare-Gale won the Michael Marks Publisher of the Year Award in 2024; the judges said “All the pamphlets we saw from this press were striking and elegant in their design, including some stunning cover images arising from themes in the poetry. The choices of font, setting, and quality of paper are exemplary, and there’s a strong sense of environmental responsibility.” Buy from their bookshop here.

Dithering Chaps
Set up by David and Gena Herring, Dithering Chaps publishes three poetry chapbooks each year, at least one of which will be by a poet who has not previously had a full poetry collection published. You can submit all year round. Read the submissions guidelines here and buy a pamphlet here.

The Emma Press
Set up by Emma Dai’an Wright in 2012, The Emma Press publishes three types of poetry pamphlet; ‘Art Squares’ with full-colour illustrations; pamphlets of 20 poems; and ‘Picks’, which are illustrated in black-and-white. Buy a pamphlet here. There are regular calls for submissions, see here. The Emma Press also publishes lots of children’s books. Covers are often brightly coloured and playful.

Fawn Press
Fawn Press was set up by Scarlett Ward in August 2021. You can get a sense of the sort of work the press publishes from its online magazine, The Thicket. Submission details are here and the shop is here. Lots of pronouns.

Five Leaves Publications
Five Leaves is based in Nottingham, run by Ross Bradshaw, and publishes 10-15 books a year. “Our roots are radical and literary.” Its main areas of interest are social history, politics, poetry, Nottingham, London and cityscape, but it also publishes pamphlets from new and emerging poets, see the new poetry list / shop here.

flipped eye publishing
Founded in 2001 by Nii Ayikwei Parkes, flipped eye has helped develop poets such as Inua Ellams, Malika Booker and Warsan Shire. A significant percentage of its authors are female and/or of Black and minority ethnic heritage. Its ongoing series of pamphlets is published under the ‘flap’ tag. Buy one of their pamphlets here.

Fourteen Poems
fourteen poems is a London-based poetry press publishing LGBTQ+ poets. They put out several pamphlets a year, buy one here, and read their submissions guidelines here (they will want to know how you identify). They claim to be like “Sylvia Plath reading Butt Magazine”. Gosh.

Guillemot Press
Guillemot books look beautiful. The covers are designed by professional illustrators, the books feel lovely, and the paper is gorgeous, often printed on paper made from stuff like the skin waste of cocoa beans, spent beer grain or ocean plastics. It’s based in Cornwall and run by Luke Thompson; you can email him directly. Shop here.

Green Bottle Press
Set up by Jennifer Grigg and based in London, Green Bottle publishes work by poets who have not yet published a pamphlet or full collection. The press works with poets to produce books that suit both the form and the length of their poetry – there’s no standard page size or book length. The submission window for publication in 2027 is the month of June 2026; read the guidelines here. The shop is here.

Hazel Press
Launched in 2020 by Daphne Warburg Astor, Hazel Press focuses on the environment, the climate crisis, feminism and the arts. Astor sought to engage with ecological issues in a “collaborative and provocative way”. Following her death, the press is now run by her friend and collaborator Sara Hudston. Bookshop is here.

Headless Poet
This is a new venture by Jeremy Wikeley – a small press “specialising in the art of the introduction” which hopes to (re)introduce readers to poets of the past, and also to the best new poetry. Wikeley plans to publish five pamphlets per year and send them to subscribers. Subscribe here, and buy their first pamphlet here, Poems Beautiful & Useful, an anthology of popular early modern verse compiled by Victoria Moul.

Hearing Eye
Hearing Eye is a small press established in 1987 by John Rety. It evolved out of Sunday night poetry readings at Torriano Meeting House, and still has its base at Torriano. It has published over 200 books and pamphlets by both new and established poets, from selections of haiku to translations of epic works. See all pamphlets here

Hercules Editions
Hercules Editions was founded by poet Tamar Yoseloff and designer and art editor Vici MacDonald in 2012 with the aim of bringing together new poems with visual imagery. The pamphlets come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but are always stunning, both to hold and to read. The guide to submitting is here (they are very selective) and the shop is here.

If a Leaf Falls Press
If a Leaf Falls is the publishing baby of Faber poet Sam Rivière, with design by O. Tong. It publishes limited-edition titles “with an emphasis on appropriative and procedural writing processes”. Fascinatingly, you can see on the website how many of each pamphlet have been printed – in the low tens for earlier pamphlets; more recently print runs have hit 100. Open submissions policy. The shop is here.

ignition press
Established in 2017 by Niall Munro, Les Robinson, Clare Cox and Alan Buckley, ignition press is based at Oxford Brookes University. Isabelle Baafi is currently guest editor. The press has produced thirty pamphlets so far – buy one here. It won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award in 2021; the judges said: “Whether it’s down to the iconic design which lends a seriousness to the pamphlet as a form, or the high level of dedication to developing and mentoring the emerging poets it publishes, the result is a press that publishes tight, well-worked and vital early collections that sit together as well as they stand apart”. Submissions details are here.

Indigo Dreams Publishing
Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling formed Indigo Dreams in 2009. The press is based in Cookworthy, Devon. Both have been around the world of poetry for a while; Ronnie also ran his own celebrity management company handling projects for Uri Geller, Ian Botham and Mike Read. Buy pamphlets here, and read submissions guidelines here.

Knives Forks and Spoons Press
KFS is an independent publishing house based on Merseyside. It was established by Alec Newman in April 2010. The press publishes avant-garde and experimental poetry, some of which is in pamphlet form, by new and established poets and artists. Submissions info is here, shop is here.

The Lifeboat Press
Lifeboat was established in 2012 in Belfast and is edited and run by Stephen Connolly and Manuela Moser, both graduates from the Heaney Centre. Authors include Paul Muldoon, Leontia Flynn and (one of our favourites) Dane Holt. Lifeboat readings have become a fixture of the Belfast poetry scene. Submissions info is here, shop is here.

Longbarrow Press
Longbarrow is a Sheffield-based independent poetry publisher with a reputation for work that explores the intersections of landscape, history and memory. It was established in 2006 and is run by Brian Lewis; he doesn’t accept unsolicited submissions, but there is an email if you want to make a pitch. The online shop is here. The Longbarrow Press blog is really worth a read.

Mariscat
Mariscat, run by Hamish Whyte, is now one of the longest-running self-funded small presses in Scotland, and is a two-time winner of the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, in 2023 and 2015. In 2023 the judges said: “We were impressed by the consistently high standard of the poetry, and the individuality that shone through the presentation of each pamphlet even while it retained a Mariscat ‘feel’ (partly literally, as Mariscat pamphlets are very tactile objects).” Mariscat is also known for its quality backlist which includes work by Douglas Dunn, Jackie Kay and Michael Longley, as well as Edwin Morgan, Whyte’s friend for over 30 years. Submissions details are here, and the shop is here.

Mica Press
Mica “aims not to be contemptuous of the comprehensible or suspicious of scansion, but to listen to formal or free verse poems that have their own inherent discipline, and are not runaway sprawl”. Submissions of poems are welcome during the submissions window from anyone who buys or has bought a Mica Press book or pamphlet; guidelines are here (scroll down) and the shop is here.

Muscaliat Press
Muscaliet was set up in 2017 and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award in 2022. Editor-in-Chief is Simon Everett; he is looking for “creative writing which crosses boundaries, working across different disciplines, genres, forms, subject matter, and imagery”. Pamphlets are gorgeous. Submissions info is here, shop is here.

New Walk Editions
Founded by academics Nick Everett and Rory Waterman in 2017, New Walk has a reputation for producing consistently high quality pamphlets from both new and established poets. They publish four pamphlets a year, two in spring and two in autumn, send them to subscribers and sell online. The shop is here, and submission guidelines are here (scroll down). Subs are open, send 12-24 pages of poems, no more, as “ridiculously over-long submissions of poetry incite groans as a matter of course, and will not be read”.

Nine Pens Press
Nine Pens is a poetry press based in the North Pennines in the UK, founded and edited by Colin Bancroft. It was formed in 2020 through a crowd funding campaign. The press publishes nine tor ten titles per year. Pamphlet submission guidelines are here and the shop is here. Cover designs are often geometric patterns.

Outspoken Press
Out-Spoken Press was founded in 2015 by British-born Cypriot poet Anthony Anaxagorou with the aim of providing a platform for people that are under-represented in mainstream publishing. Past guest editors have included Joelle Taylor and Wayne Holloway-Smith. Buy a pamphlet here, and read submissions info here.

Palewell Press
Palewell was founded by Camilla Reeve to help people who would otherwise be unable to share their stories by improving access to book publication. The press is based in South West London. Manuscript submission is free for refugees, asylum seekers and exiled writers. Submissions guidelines are here, and the shop is here.

Poetry Salzburg
Poetry Salzburg is based at the University of (you guessed it) Salzburg, Austria, and run by Dr. Wolfgang Görtschacher. Info about the Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series is here; you can submit a manuscript of 36-48 pages any time but you need to have been published in the Poetry Salzburg Review (English language, biannual) first.

Poetry Space
Established in 2010 by Susan Jane Sims, Poetry Space (“a platform for contemporary poetry from around the world, widening participation in poetry, empowering people”) runs occasional pamphlet competitions and publishes pamphlets. See their submissions page or competition page for calls and info, and buy a pamphlet here.

Rack Press
Rack Press Poetry was founded in 2005, is run by Nicholas Murray, and is based in Wales. After nearly twenty years Rack is currently having a “short breather” from pamphlets, but has recently launched a new series of “broadsides” by poets engaging with contemporary issues (they look like pamphlets but shorter, and pink). Watch the website for submissions calls.

The Red Ceilings Press
Established in 2010, Red Ceilings has published more than 60 eBook titles and 100 limited edition A6 chapbooks. All eBooks are available to download for free, because Red Ceilings is “nice like that”. Submissions guidelines are here; the press says please consider the small format of the chapbooks when sending poems of longer line length “as it probably won't work and we really hate disappointing people”. The shop is here. (Red Ceilings publishes Charlie Bayliss’s legendary pamphlet fuck poetry.)

Red Squirrel Press
​Red Squirrel Press is a Scotland-based independent self-funded small press. It was founded in 2006 by Sheila Wakefield and has published over 300 titles to date, most designed and typeset by Gerry Cambridge of Dark Horse fame (they look and feel lovely). It has published poetry in Gaelic, Scots, Doric, Shaetlan, Orcadian, Irish, Danish, Italian, German, Flemish, Romanian and Kannada, as well as English. Submissions details here and shop here.

Seren Books
Seren is Wales’ leading independent literary publisher. The poetry list is edited by Zoë Brigley and Rhian Edwards. Submissions information includes the commitment to “help create a literary culture which represents an entire spectrum of lived experience”. The press encourages submissions from “all communities, faiths, backgrounds, and from anyone who experiences racism, ableism, poverty, homo- and trans-phobia, those under 30 years old, and from everyone else”. Browse pamphlets in the Seren shop here.

Stewed Rhubarb Press
Stewed Rhubarb is the pamphlet imprint of Tapsalterie – it’s a small Scottish publishing house with its roots in Edinburgh. It champions “new and diverse poetry written across a wide range of styles”, with an interest in spoken word performance. It’s run by Duncan Lockerbie and Charlie Roy. Submissions info here, shop here. Covers are bright and text-heavy. Pronouns.

SurVision Books
SurVision Books is a publishing house established in Ireland in March 2017 as a platform for new Irish and international Surrealist and Irrealist poetry in English. The editors are Tony Kitt and Anatoly Kudryavitsky, and their tastes are “eclectic”; they aim to publish the “best, most exciting innovative poetry of different trends and schools being written now”. Submissions guidelines are here, and you can find chapbooks from the New Poetics series here.

Tangerine Press
Tangerine has been publishing “misfits, mavericks and misanthropes” since 2006, championing work by authors who “often exist on the fringes of society”. Based in New Malden, it has published Charles Bukowski and Billy Childish. Very pretty books. Shop is here, submissions info is here.

V. Press
V. Press is an independent publisher of poetry and flash fiction founded and run by Sarah Leavesley. Originally established with a ‘one-off’ collaborative anthology launch at Ledbury Poetry Festival 2013, the press published its first solo-poet pamphlets in 2015. Submissions info is here, bookshop is here.

Verve Poetry Press
Verve is a Birmingham based publisher dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and Midlands poetic talent. It was co-founded by Stuart Bartholomew and Amerah Saleh; they look for “colour, energy and open-heartedness,” “poetry that works in performance and performances that work on the page”. Verve pamphlets are bright and funky with fabulous, grabby covers. Verve Poetry Bookshop is here.

Vole Press (previously Dempsey & Windle)
Janice Dempsey & Dónall Dempsey set up Dempsey & Windle in 2016, and now publish as VOLE Books (an anagram of LOVE – ahhh). The main route to pamphlet publication is though their biannual competition, The Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Competition, see above. Shop here.

Wayleave Press
Poet and visual artist Mike Barlow started Wayleave Press in 2014 and publishes between six and eight poetry pamphlets a year. See and buy Wayleave pamphlets here. No unsolicited submissions, but Mike keeps an eye out.

Yaffle Press
Yaffle is run by Mark and Gill Connors, and they guarantee publication of your pamphlet via a system of editing workshops – a block of six workshops costs £100 and if you cough up for five blocks Yaffle commits to publish your pamphlet within a year. Well. Buy a Yaffle pamphlet here, and find out more about the workshops here.

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NOTE: When I told Nell I was compiling a list of poetry pamphlet publishers she said “What a thing to START DOING!! Are you crazy?” I didn’t know what she meant at first, but I do now. I‘m bound to have pissed somebody off, left somebody out, and/or included someone that doesn’t actually still publish. Corrections are welcome, opinions are my own, apologies to anyone who feels misrepresented or shortchanged.

Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem. Full disclosure: she’s had pamphlets published by The Poetry Business (two), Templar Poetry and HappenStance Press, and has one coming out with New Walk Editions this spring. She’s reviewed poetry pamphlets for various outlets for more years than she cares to remember.

Vital Statistics: The Friday Poem has just over 3300 subscribers with more than 14,000 views in the last 30 days. 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. As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

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.

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We had the hall to ourselves as I sat fingering
the trinkets of firelight trembling on her skin.
I told her I ached from my journey
and other things. When she smiled
the night went berserk

with footsteps and shouting, the steel shriek of a drawn sword.
I knew the sounds of an encroaching husband
and fled, searching the crannies of shadow
for the outline of a door.
Here it was at last.

I squeezed into a cupboard of feathery scuffles.
The place was spitting with geese that grabbed at me
with the toothless pliers of their beaks
like so much angry bedding.
Husbands are gentler.

‘Geese’ is from The Green Month by Matthew Francis (Faber, 2025) — big thanks to Faber for letting us reproduce it here.

Among this collection’s unusual features is that it begins with an interesting, breezy ‘Introduction’ by the author, which serves as both a brief primer on the medieval Welsh poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym and a defence of Francis’s strategies in producing these 40 poems. We learn that ap Gwilym’s main themes include “male heterosexual desire” and “comic sexual failure”. We learn about ap Gwilym’s affairs, one with a married woman, Morfudd, and how he used the natural world as source of images for his poems to her, perhaps in part because the wooded glade was their bedroom, for in his time, “if you wanted to make love in secret, it was necessary to go outside”. We learn that ap Gwilym’s poetry is playful, self-effacing and humorous and that Francis can well mirror these aspects in his own writing.

Looking at the poem ‘Geese’, we immediately see two distinctive features that are shared by all of Francis’s poems in this collection. It is titled by a single noun and it is arranged in three stanzas of what Francis calls “tapered syllabics” – lines of 13, 11, 9, 7 and 5 syllables. This makes a poem of 135 syllables in total, which is just 5 syllables short of classic sonnet length, lending some familiarity to this unusual form.

I’ll return to the syllabic form, but more important, I would argue, is the liveliness and compression that characterise this poem, and all the poems collected here. There’s a very high density of poetic effects – images, metaphors – but despite this, a wittiness and a lightness of touch that makes the work easy to appreciate and relish.

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In the first stanza, there’s the risqué use of “fingering” and its lyrical completion after the line-break. There’s the ribaldry, again, of “and other things” and, again, this is emphasised by the line-break before it. There’s the doubled meaning of the night going berserk, first with desire then, after the enjambed stanza-break, with the noisy arrival of the husband. In the last stanza there’s the quick-mixing of metaphors for the violent geese, the “toothless pliers of their beaks” and the marvellously displaced “angry bedding”.

If we compare ‘Geese’ with the poem on which it was based, we uncover more of Francis’s strategy. (To my shame, I’m not a Welsh speaker, and in making these comparisons I’m relying on the texts and literal English translations of dafyddapgwillym.net, which Francis himself has leaned on.) ‘Y Cwt Gwyddau’ (‘The Goose Shed’) is 44 lines of old Welsh (most lines are 7 syllables) and end-rhymed in couplets, with additional internal rhymes. Obviously, much is omitted from Francis’s abridged version. More surprisingly, perhaps, many of the most inventive and pleasing figures in ‘Geese’ are Francis’s own. This is true of most, perhaps all, of these versions. What is preserved is, primarily, plot, setting and, I think, tone (if I can assume tone is preserved in the literal translation I’m looking at). Even ‘version’ might overstate the relation with the original: ‘Geese’ is certainly after ‘The Goose Shed’, but I might almost think of it as an ekphrastic piece, in which the inspirational artwork happens itself to be a poem.

Returning to the Introduction, it’s now clear why Francis would wish to be so explicit about his method. He’s keen to admit the distance between his poems and those on which they are based. As well as remarks about translation, he makes some very particular points about form, and about how important he felt it to work in some form, even if one “not nearly as demanding as traditional Welsh prosody”.

It seems to me that unrhymed syllabic forms, including Francis’s tapered stanza, are more salient for the writer than they are for the reader. Syllabic patterns aren’t as perceptible in English as stress-based metres. I doubt if I would have noticed if any of the longer lines had slipped or gained a couple of syllables. Of course, one notices the shape on the page. Francis says that, for him, the tapered stanza would “squeeze the verse, forcing me to be more economical as I go on”, but this effect wasn’t apparent to me as a reader, and I would have thought it would depend on sentence-length, which is not at all constrained to reduce in correlation with line-length through the stanza. I do agree, though, that making each poem the same shape and length is “a more severe constraint than the stanza itself”, and I very much admire the economy and inventiveness this has evidently provoked.

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I could find phrases, sentences and stanzas to pick out and celebrate in any of these poems. As a second example, consider ‘Crow’, Francis’s version of ‘Y Fran’. The first stanza is characteristically image-rich, and introduces the crow as widely disliked and persecuted, preparing us for the contrary admiration that the poem espouses:

Bird made of shadow, you fly across the sun
as your other self is darkening the grass,
and people shiver at your passing.
We frighten you in return
with a man of sticks.

Neither the shadow nor the scarecrow appears in ‘Y Fran’. The poem moves on to praise the crow: “But I bless the grindstone of your voice”. (Ad Gywillym’s blessing mentions instead that the crow announces the coming of day, among other qualities.)

And if I’m allowed to quote one more whole stanza by way of advertisement, I will choose ‘Heart’, perhaps ap Gwilym’s second favourite body part. The middle stanza goes like this, expressing the irresistible idea that the heart has “no head for drink”, and allowing this review to close on an exclamation mark:

I’m tired of carrying you. You have no head for drink
and the smile of a girl sets you off again,
a foxhound scrabbling to be let out.
They say you’re made for loving —
you’re addled enough!

Stephen Payne is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bath, where until September 2020 he taught and conducted research in Cognitive Science. He lives in Penarth in the Vale of Glamorgan. His first full-length poetry collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, was published by HappenStance Press in 2015 and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. His second collection, The Windmill Proof (2021), and a pamphlet The Wax Argument & Other Thought Experiments (2022) were published by the same press. Stephen Payne’s website is here, and he blogs here.

As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

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.

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For the first time you proudly put up
your own tent next to ours –
flimsy offshoot, fairy-lit pod, canvas satellite.

At midnight you wriggle across the boundary
and answer our goodnight, then call again
to say the walls are damp with rain.

The best I can offer is to suggest you give it a go,
and if the storm moves in as forecast
come back to us; I clear a space to make it easy.

It’s your father who goes out
into the cold, dark field and sees
the inner fabric is touching the outer

and tightens all your ropes so you can sleep
at the distance from us you’ve chosen.

‘Tethers’ is from Intimate Architecture by Tess Jolly (Blue Diode Press, 2025) — thanks to Blue Diode for letting us reproduce it here.

Were I asked for one word to describe what Intimate Architecture is ‘about’, I’d probably settle for ‘anxiety’ – but with 800 words or so at my disposal, I can add how it’s also about more than that.

The book is in two sections: the first looking back to Tess Jolly’s own (and others’) childhood; the second moving forward in time as she cares for her children. (It’s her second collection; the first, Breakfast at the Origami Café, had a similar structure, looking back and then shifting forwards to her father’s illness.)

The first section takes us into anxieties like those in ‘The Mischief’ where “the mice / have lined up on the ledge / the crumbs you may eat / one every hour on the dot”. A long poem, ‘White Horse Drive’, moves from child to child at boarding school, naming their sufferings. “Cecily” tries to keep her mouth shut, but

[…] Sooner or later
she’ll have to breathe or eat and the words

will come gushing out in a shower of bile
and barbs from some kind of horrific
piñata

“Constance”, on the other hand, “scuttles to the library / hood up, head down” and “swaddles herself / in winding sheets / of paper, mildew, dust.”

Written in the first person, ‘An Angry Hatching of Closely Spaced Parallel Lines’ jauntily tracks negotiating anxiety with a therapist’s standard suggestion of snapping a rubber band on a wrist to deal with unwanted thoughts ... which ends up producing the “lines” of the title. By the end of the poem, the ghost who “prefers to think of himself as being / on a spectrum” and who is supposed to be banished, begins to sound more interesting than the therapist – though she, too, has some good lines, when she says the writer “need[s] to leave the ghost and enter the courtrooms // and Co-ops of the living”.

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The pieces I’ve mentioned above address more extreme, perhaps less common anxieties. Maybe it’s the act of tackling these that enables the poet to write so well (and in an understated way) about a concern many of us will recognise and at some stage have experienced (even while questioning whether anything really happened). In ‘The Bus’, the poet as a child is on her way to a new school. A boy offers his seat to her mother, who is with her “to show me what to do”. The boy chats to her mother –

[…] – he’s thinking of studying radiology

and holding his palm in front of my skirt,
not touching, nothing anyone could
accuse him of. He winks at his mates

and I focus on the streets I grew up in
now blurred on the other side of the glass

The poem doesn’t stay in that long paralysed moment; it goes on to speak from the writer’s present awareness (“When Mum reads this and asks why I didn’t tell her, / I’ll say there was nothing to tell”) before it strides across to the next generation and the daughter who “swears she’d shove his hand away, / she knows she’d confront him.”

By the time Tess Jolly has children of her own, she’s worked out a range of coping mechanisms. During ‘The Tunnel’ – a surprising sonnet’s tour of a football stadium – she tries to focus on the idea of players running through the tunnel, rather than on the “concertina walls” that enclose them, which the guide describes admitting ambulances in case of major accidents. But the thought of accidents sticks: later, when her children don’t answer their phones and the weather’s bad, she tries “to focus on folding their washing: / his favourite jeans, her new halterneck top.”

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‘Guitar’ describes a car knocking her small son from his bike. Tess Jolly is able to describe the driver as “a stranger / so distraught I found myself comforting her”. Her child was bruised and shaken – but she thinks of parents who are less lucky “standing forever at bedroom doors / unable to take down the posters”.

Perhaps her experience graces her with an ability to articulate subtle shifts which are hard to put a finger on in relationships. I admire her delicately understated moments of tension in ‘Daughter’: “I know I’ve asked / too much when she shrugs off my arm”, as well as the care she takes to give children space. ‘Tethers’ is a poem in which a child puts up their own tent next to their parents’, but the guy ropes have to be tightened by the father so the child “can sleep / at the distance from us you’ve chosen”. Giving space is not easy, as ‘Silk’ a couple of pages further on acknowledges. Here she writes of cleaning a child’s wound: “I remember the language of such small intimacies”.

This second section of the book seems to exemplify its title. The poem ‘Intimate Architecture’ (placed near the end) is a wish that the separation between parent and child, “the line I need to put between us”, is only a thin one. The poem steps carefully through memories, building them into similes that reveal how delicate she would wish that line to be:

Can it be as fragile as the airmail letters
we cut and bound into a library
of miniature books scribed
with elaborate stories

[…]

Can it be as light as the fibres we crushed
to make our doll’s house walls

(It must be this poem, surely, that lies behind the cover image of a disturbing doll’s house with bones as part of its construction.)

While not usually drawn to poetry that rests heavily on autobiography, I’ve gone back to re-read these well-written pieces several times, perhaps gaining some small sense of how very difficult the taken-for-granted everyday world can be when the spectre of anxiety dominates.

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.

As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

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.

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As a child, I lived inside my imagination, did a lot of drawing and staged a lot of dramas for my toys. We didn’t know about Literature, we watched television. We went to church for jumble sales, and Bagpuss was my religion. The otherworld was always just around the corner – the women in my family did the Ouija, and there were ghost cats in our house. I am the only member of my family not to have seen them and still feel massively short-changed about this. In Waiting for Bluebeard I wrote about these aspects of my childhood, but I do not think those poems spoke with a Luton accent, as such. I have no way of knowing how my work would have developed if I’d been born to a middle-class family and went up to Cambridge to study English. Or if I’d have known what to say at my interview for Theatre Design at Wimbledon School of Art. I’d done a Foundation Art and Design course at Barnfield College in Luton and got a Distinction, but I was hopelessly out of my depth at Wimbledon. It was a totally different other-world and I can only assume that they invited me for interview because they needed to fulfil some quota of other. In retrospect, maybe they did see promise in my portfolio and my imposter syndrome began there. Either way, I didn’t have the language or currency to operate in that environment and so I got a job in one of those olde-worlde video rental shops.

Some time ago George Szirtes asked a few of us on Facebook to talk about music that was important to them. I immediately turned to She Moves Through the Fair – the traditional Irish folk song/poem. The version I was first aware of is by ‘All About Eve’ from their 1988 album All About Eve. I was a teenage Goth, haunting the graveyards and Arndale Centre of Luton, and this is the first poem I was ever aware of. I didn’t know it was a poem, or that it was was first collected in Donegal by poet Padraic Colum (1881-1972) and musicologist Herbert Hughes (1882-1937), and published by Boosey & Hawkes in London in Irish Country Songs in 1909. Why would I? This kind of thing wasn’t A Thing for somebody from my background.

And it was before such information was searchable online. Before there was an ‘online’. I just knew that it felt somehow like solid earth; somewhere I could live, even though it sounds ethereal. And then she went homeward, just one star awake … you can use language like this?! Two others on the album are ‘In the Clouds’, and ‘Wild-Hearted Woman’, which of course spoke to me in my crimson velvet skirts and aura of patchouli. I was different, always a bit out-of-kilter, and this song, this album, made me feel part of something bigger, and that there was something else out there. Julieanne Regan’s voice is within my range too, so of course I’ll sing along with this song – with all of their songs – at the drop of a black velvet witch hat!

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I didn’t begin the proper search for the ‘something else out there’ until I was 24. I made a few disastrous relationship choices and lost the five years many poets these days would spend gaining their BA and MA. Then I did some stupid things, and some good things. I ended up in Norfolk in another disastrous relationship with a man twice my age, but happily found a place on a degree course at Norwich Art School where George Szirtes taught creative writing. And then I met someone I’ve come to call Bluebeard, who was even older than twice my age. I stayed with him for eleven years in what turned out to be an abusive relationship.

The whole notion of ‘finding a voice’ is tied into the many ways I have either not had the words because of my class and my background, or have been bullied into holding my tongue. The otherwise eloquent Bluebeard would use his own silence as a weapon and sometimes wouldn’t talk to me for days. We lived in the middle of a field and he had successfully made sure I had no friends and had lost touch with my family, so apart from some chickens and the cows in the next field, I had nobody to talk to. Thankfully, I had begun to write poems so could talk to the page. Not like you might a diary, but in a slanted, fractured way, in case Bluebeard saw it. It was a bit like living under siege, and I scarcely recognise the voiceless person I was then. In the second part of Waiting for Bluebeard the ‘I’ becomes a ‘she’ – a disembodied, observed person. I was only able to write about this experience seven years after I left him.

After Waiting for Bluebeard appeared in 2013, so many women approached me with their own Bluebeard stories of abusive relationships in which they were made to believe that there was something wrong with them. I started to consider the universal story of the othering and silencing of women. My research took me to texts such as the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), The Ladies Dictionary (1684) and The Complete Servant (1824), and into the Norfolk Record Office where I looked at female inmate records from St Andrews Asylum from the 19th Century. These notes included photographs of the inmates on entry to, and on leaving the asylum as part of the analysis of the time. Photography was new then, as was psychiatry, so men (women were not allowed to be doctors) were using it as a tool to carefully study female patients in particular to see if the shapes of their heads or the expressions on their faces gave anything away about the nature of their insanity. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology, was one of the most famous exponents of this method. I first came across photographs of hysterical women at his clinic in Salpêtrière in Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady.

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I found the images of the women in the asylum records so moving. The photographs, taken at times of great stress, and the notes about them written by doctors, were probably the only record that these women had ever walked about in the county I live in. The women in the asylum were poor and working class. Their occupations were listed as domestic servants; wife of somebody; daughter of somebody. As a working-class woman, I would have been a servant or maid of some variety. One woman was put into the asylum for singing hymns loudly in the street. I have stood up with a microphone saying poems in public places to unwilling audiences, so there’s another parallel. Each time I walked toward the Norfolk Record Office I felt an uncanny draw towards the women in the photographs. It would be arrogant to say that the poems in The Anatomical Venus speak for the voiceless, but it was my intention to acknowledge the sisters who have gone before me; to reach out my hand to them.

A great number of them had post-natal depression, couldn’t have children, had so many children they didn’t know what to do, or had children ‘out of wedlock’, so were sent away. I am not saying that none of the women in the asylum were psychotic, but often women were put away because they were troublesome. Much is made in the notes of how much fuss women were making, and how they could be stilled. More brazen in its control of behaviour, and a chilling metaphor, is the Scold’s Bridle or Witch’s Bridle, the use of which was first recorded in 1567 and last recorded in 1856. An iron muzzle in an iron framework enclosed the head and a bit slid into the mouth and pressed down on top of the tongue, often with a spike. This humiliated and silenced any loud and awkward women who were forced to wear them through the streets.

This piece has been more confessional than I intended it to be. At times I almost drew back and began the whole thing again from more of an academic viewpoint, but I talked myself out of that. I told myself that this is about voice and to stop censoring myself. Looking back, for I am now half a century old, I can see influences which have been collaged into my voice from things I’ve read and seen and connected with. I nod to Angela Carter, to Oliver Postgate, to Jan Svankmajer, Vasko Popa and Leonora Carrington to name but a few. I nod to all those anonymous tellers of the tales collected by Perrault and Grimm.

Going back to confessions, a little anecdote for you. Like many creative people, I was picked on as a child for being different, and so at school I became introverted. Year after year, my school report would say “Helen is rather shy, hopefully next year she will come out of her shell”. My life’s work has been to try to ditch the shell, it seems. It’s happened in fits and starts. Now I have the image of Botticelli’s Venus using her shell as a surfboard. I am doing my wobbly best to stay upright, but the metaphor has got itself into a pickle. Thank you for listening.

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist who makes shadowboxes and collage. She was awarded a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors in 2024. She edits Ink Sweat & Tears and teaches for The Poetry School and Arvon. A poem from her surrealist chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City (SurVision 2019) is one of the Poems on the Underground. She has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, Spanish and Greek as part of the Versopolis European poetry platform. Her Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems appeared from MadHat in the US in 2023. Constructing a Witch (October 2024) her sixth collection with Bloodaxe Books, was a PBS Winter Recommendation. In summer 2025 Constructing a Witch was translated into Greek by Nikolas Koutsodontis and Katerina Iliopoulou and published in Greece by Thraka.

As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

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.

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What should a poem title do?

A good title piques a reader’s interest. It should offer a glimpse into the poem. It might evoke a mood, set up a conflict, be intriguing, quirky or funny. It can be short; one word titles are great, see Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’. It can be long, see below. But above all, it has a job of work to do, and it needs to do it. It needs to set your poem aside from all the others, and suggest to a reader that it will reward them spending a bit of time with it.

Long Titles

What is the longest poem title in the English language? Is it ‘The Auld Farmer’s New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie, on giving her the Accustomed Ripp of Corn to Hansel in the New-Year’ by Robert Burns? No it is not. Is it ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree Which Stands Near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a Desolate Part of the Shore, Yet Commanding a Beautiful Prospect’ by William Wordsworth? Again, no. Nor is it ‘Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles’ by Billy Collins.

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It is, in fact, ‘On the Great Encouragement Given by the English Nobility & Gentry to Correggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Catalani, Du Crowe, & Dilbury Doodle’ by William Blake. Though one of our own Friday Poems – ‘I’ll Know I’ve Made It When Going to a LongHorn Steakhouse on a Sunday Evening in the Dead of Winter Doesn’t Depress the Hell Out of Me‘ by Christine Naprava – gives it a good run for its money.

(Photo by Andy Kennedy on Unsplash)

But do long titles make good titles? Well, when they are funny, or smart – and Billy Collins’s is both funny and smart – they do. But long titles risk doing too much. A poem that tells you exactly what’s going to happen in the poem – that gives the game away – isn’t going to tempt anyone to read further.

‘Poem’

Historically, many poems didn’t have titles. The titles was often the same as the first line, or ‘Poem’, or a number, e.g. Sonnet 115. Frank O’Hara, wrote 56 poems titled ‘Poem’. There are freedoms associated with such a broad title. It’s inherently humble, unassuming. But a ‘Poem’ can also function as a sort of ars poetica – you can go wherever you want under its banner. Poets.org says “A poem called ‘Poem’ shows its reader that there is a poet at work – and also that there is a reader. It points to nothing in particular, and to itself at the same time.”

‘Untitled’

Emily Dickinson didn’t title most of her poems. John Mulvihill, in Why Dickinson Didn’t Title, on Modern American Poetry, argues that in fact that there are only four genuine Dickinson titles. Various people have suggested why this is – because she didn’t publish, or seek publication; that titles are associated with authority, an authority that Dickinson, as a nineteenth-century woman in a patriarchal culture, could not claim; that not titling was one aspect of her radical modernism; that she was temperamentally uninterested in finishing a poem. Mulvihill thinks Dickinson’s non-titling arises out of her linguistic scepticism.

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Can you get away with not titling poems? Short answer: no. Long answer: maybe, if it’s good enough, or there’s a point to it. Here’s the first stanza of ‘Untitled’ by Etel Adnan, translated by Sarah Riggs from the French. If you can do it as well as Etel Adnan, go ahead, the world is your lobster.

Untitled

trapped in our imagination
the angels appear in our
desires; the first light of day
makes them vanish

All title, no poem

One of our favourites is ‘In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems’ by James Wright, a poem which is all title and no poem – listen to James Wright talking about it here. And there’s Don Paterson’s ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’, where again the title is followed by an otherwise empty page. One might say, as Rob Mackenzie does in his piece on The Blank Page and White Space in Poetry in Magma, that this succeeds due to the playful link with Zen, and the absurd juxtaposition of wordlessness with the incredibly long title. Or is it just a cheap joke? The poem is, apparently, one of Paterson’s most anthologised pieces. But returns on the all-title-no-poem poem are diminishing, and you try this at your own risk.

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The Dos and Don’ts

— Do choose a title that sheds some light on the project of the poem. The title and the poem can work together to add understanding to the reader’s experience. Don’t miss this opportunity to add another layer of meaning.

— Don’t use abstract nouns such as Beauty, Love, Hope. It sounds old fashioned. It’s been done before, countless times. Ditto Pastoral (we’ve all done it). These titles make vast claims for a poem, and your poem is going to have to work VERY hard to deliver them.

— Do make sure you’re not using the same title as another more famous poem – there’s only one ‘Howl‘ – or another, more famous, thing, for example ‘Summer Holiday’. Google your prospective title and see what comes up. Unless, of course, you’re making a point about that particular earlier poem.

— Don’t name your poem after seasons, months, weather. So no to Spring, Summer, Autumn, January, Rainfall, Snowy Day. OK, Paterson gets a let for his poem ‘Rain’. And obviously we are all happy with ‘To Autumn’ by John Keats.

— Do be specific, not general. As Emma Lee says on her blog, “‘Nature’ is too generic: it is a gentle pastoral poem or is its nature red in tooth and claw? Is it even about the natural world?”

— Don’t use a place name. William Blake bagged ‘London‘. Allen Ginsberg bagged ’America’. Oh, I suppose Edward Thomas also gets a let for ‘Adlestrop’.

— Do say your title out loud to yourself and to other people too. Emma Lee says, “Sound patterns can enhance a title. Sharp, abrupt monosyllablics create a different impression to meandering, long vowels.”

— And while we’re here, do check that your title isn’t unintentionally crude. Be careful with words with dual meanings. Ask your friends what they think of it, in fact ask the most raucous and lewd friend what they think of it, and if he or she titters then there may be something going on you’re not aware of.

(Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash)

But rules were made to be broken, and anyway these aren’t rules, more guidelines. If your poem is good enough, you can do what you like. Here are three of our favourite poem titles:

‘Yorkshire Pudding Rules’ by Ian McMillan is a parody of a religious text, with at least 18 commandments regarding the pudding-making ritual and its implements. Macmillan gives the word ‘Rules’ a noun / verb double meaning in the title, and it can be read as an factual instruction or a celebreratory holler.

‘Please Do Not Touch the Walrus or Sit on the Iceberg’ by Caleb Parkin is an intriguing title which illustrates Parkin’s ability to balance humour with passion for his subject. It signals Parkin’s stylistic playfulness while also promising to explore serious environmental issues and notions about crossing boundaries and challenging received wisdom.

‘Poor Britney Spears‘ from Tony Hoagland’s collection Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty is grabby, funny and clever – both the title and the entire poem. The title segues into the poem; the first lines are: “is not the beginning of a sentence / you hear often uttered in my household.” We all know Britney Spears, and we don’t often think of her as “poor”, and the title leads into lines that echo our own thoughts. In the poem Hoagland skewers late 20th century American celebrity culture, and his own ambivalence towards it, and the title readies us for this perfectly.

Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem.

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