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.

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 is it about your name
and the taking of it, that yet-to-be-tapped-out vein —

the way we fondle it
like a wedding ring in a pocket —

the way you star in a song, put a kick
in a joke or a story: ‘What Furniture Would Jesus Pick?’ —

the way you find yourself nailed in so many tats
on so many murderers’ backs —

the way, when we curse or cum,
those sibilants are Braille for the blind tongue —

the way you are still the flayed talisman, last cry
of the fallen, if also the fall guy —

the way your dashboard afterlife is set
against the roll of the road, our last wild bet —

‘Ah Jesus’ is from Everything You Always Wanted To Know by Mark Granier (Salmon Poetry, 2025) — big thanks to Salmon Poetry for letting us reproduce it here.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know, the title of the new Salmon Press collection by Mark Granier, flags not only the poet’s often-confessional narrative style but also the broad range of his chosen subjects. A reflection of this range comes less in the title poem (in which the poet finds Burt Reynolds “in my mother’s bed, / stowed under her pillow in a Cosmo centrefold”) than in the late-placed ‘The Themes’. How many times, the poet asks, can he work within “the modest elbow room a poem / makes for itself”. He wonders if poetry is, for him:

[…] the wrong
preoccupation, being more
daydreamer than thinker,
a tinkerer of thoughts
slipping their own knots,
a boy halfway up the stairs,
stopped by an odd cloud
in the landing window,
who has long since forgotten
what he was going down for.

Here are multifarious thoughts and memories that have been “tinkered” with as they have “slipped their own knots”. This imagery is clearly significant to Granier. He is an accomplished photographer and it comes as no surprise that the book’s cover image is a view of clouds out of a stairwell’s landing window.

In fact, the poet’s photographic background is apparent in the visual nature of much of his poetry, including a nod to an existentialist philosophical foundation in ‘“There Is No Loitering Permitted Till 7 a.m.”’:

My first taste of La Nausée:
I was nineteen, up late
in grandmother’s drawing room

when I saw — really saw — my hand
under the lamp

Many other poems are also drawn from the poet’s memories. ‘Newts’ recounts childhood play when he was “ten and a half” and his cousins were

eight, six and four. Nobody called us
and we never caught any newts. I open this door

to remember how it feels to be poured
outside time, into the fall of a moment
fulfilling itself without any need to know it.

The sense of positive but fleeting absorption in a moment appears in a different form in ‘Accosted’, a memory of the author at twenty-five on a sunny San Francisco day: “Happiness: it clasps your arm, stops you / in the street, then lets you go”. ‘Torremolinos, 1972’ is a less appealing memory of the fifteen-year-old poet’s fear on being unwittingly picked up and taken home by a man while on a family holiday:

Maybe he would have been startled by the images
strobing behind my eyes: nothing sexual,
but torture, dismemberment: panels from my favourite
horror comics, Creepy and Eerie.

Maybe it was this weird naivety
that protected me.

Granier’s skilful use of language in ‘Swathe’, with the interplay of s, i and l sounds, is particularly impressive in this passage:

Some still remember the Iliad
of insects, the soft flick
of mayflies — bodies too small
to be swatted — hitting the glass,
our summery slipstream dense
with flight paths ending in smears
of sticky ichor, the flailing
of impotent wipers

Other narrative poems about the past include ‘Dublin, 5.32pm, May 17, 1974’, which recounts how a cousin of the poet’s was lucky to survive the Dublin car bombings carried out by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and ‘Gastarbeiter’, which describes a rumour about vacancies in the Munich city morgue for washers of corpses in 1979. “The money, apparently, was good.”

Not all the poems are based on memories. The opening piece, ‘To The Pavement’, is a good example of the writer’s imagination at work in the here and now:

Great welcome mat
bled on, pissed on, dressed up
in the rain-slicked night’s lurid
dabble of lights, or midsummer’s
long-legged shadow-puppetry —
treadmill, hard mattress,
you take the daily weight of us
and our absence

‘Listening to Bray’, is a paean to Bray in County Wicklow in Ireland, where Granier lives. It describes the sound of skateboards “on the newly paved area around / the touched-up Victorian bandstand” and concludes with the laughter and coughing of the afternoon drinkers who gather every day at the same riverside bench, and the “smacking of wings as four swans / race for lift-off”. The choice of the onomatopoeic “smack” is perfect here, as is his description of the “luxuriant […] seedy, waist-high crop” of wild grass on Bray Head in ‘Grass’:

Bend closer, and each shivering tip rises,
tapestry-bright, distinct as a headdress
or a working quill, as if the field were breathlessly
inscribing its own epic.

Poems of the everyday are counterbalanced by pieces that address more serious concerns. ‘Anyway’ is a meditation on ageing and social connection in the context of both that “baffling contraption, the past” and also the “aimless” approach of “the great // nothing”. ‘Colonoscopy’ reflects on the poet’s arrival in “the lounge / of late middle age”, while ‘Post Op’ describes his feelings after having “a small / enigmatic part removed”. He watches images from Gaza on the hospital television which show Palestinian hospitals and schools being “smeared into ashy blurs”.

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The collection includes several composite and sequential poems. ‘Brevities’ comprises six titled three-line pieces on themes as diverse as what the rain says, hearing a pop song in Crete in 1999, and the heat death of the universe. The subjects of the six untitled four-line pieces in ‘Beds’ include what lies under beds, Rembrandt’s half-bed, and the way Auden’s face resembled “a rumpled bed, slept- / and loved-in”. ‘Customs’ is a particularly clever sequence. Each stanza begins with “Where I come from …”, and the poem lists customs in five seemingly different places. The reader is intrigued throughout and becomes even more so when they read the footnotes.

If this book’s thematic versatility is not apparent so far, consider also that ‘On Difficulty’ presents a philosophical reflection worthy of its title, ‘Workshop’ proposes a good writing exercise, and ‘The End, Etc.’ provides a historical overview of Seventh Day Adventism. ‘Crown Shyness’ is prefaced with a Wikipedia explanation of its title as “a phenomenon observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, forming channel-like gaps”. So, in Granier’s words, “If you want to see the pattern that they’ve made / you need to look up from the forest floor / in summer.”

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There are also pieces on family, friendships, and old flames. Granier really does seem to be a poet who can take on any subject. As with many large, diverse collections, not all poems will appeal to everyone, and some are (to this reviewer) slightly opaque. But Granier is a poet who writes in a distinctively engaging way, and this is a considered and strong collection.

Tim Murphy is an Irish writer based in Spain. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections. His first collection, Mouth of Shadows (SurVision Books, 2022), is reviewed by Richie McCaffery here. His second collection, Upward Spiral: haiku & senryu (Red Moon Press, 2025), is reviewed by Billy Mills 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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A wide, blank beach in northeast Norfolk,
my young son learning frisbee-throws.

A backhand, arrowed from his checkered breast pocket.
A second like it, only one which reaches

the other thrower slower, stalls,
to hover right above us, thinking.

A third flicked upwards, angled, from the side,
to climb and climb then carve straight down.

A fourth that, late in flight, will arc
in such a way it might provide

a template for all future beauty.
And, on the boy’s face, as he gets it

and as the world falls open slightly
to show its workings oh the joy

‘Muscle Memory’ is from After the Miracle by Richard Meier (HappenStance Press, 2025) — big thanks to HappenStance for letting us reproduce it.
Buy the book from HappenStance here or from the Poetry Book Society here.

Roy: I was in the middle of this review of After the Miracle when I learned that its author, Richard Meier, had died. Richard was in his mid-fifties and had been ill for some time. As someone who has been interested in contemporary poetry for at least two decades, I am not sure how I managed to miss Meier’s previous two collections, both published by Picador, especially as the first one, Misadventure, was shortlisted for the 2012 Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. This book is published by HappenStance Press, and is a typically lovely product with lush red endpapers and attractive cover artwork by Richard’s daughter, Matilda.

The opening poem shares the title of the collection, and it is a fitting introduction, showcasing in only thirteen lines some of Meier’s admirable poetic strengths, as well as touching on the illness that was a part of his life during his final year. In elegant, understated and direct language, the poet speculates on how Lazarus might have reacted to the miracle that brought him back to life. He himself describes seeing a woman (presumably a medical professional) who “took away the pain / which so long stooped and shaped me”, and wonders whether Lazarus too had “no words / to meet such shocking change”. It is difficult to paraphrase any ‘good’ poem, but this one in particular – apparently simple, but complex in its skilful exploration of the inadequacy of language in the face of two separate ‘miracles’ – is one that needs to be read in its entirety.

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The equally memorable ‘Muscle Memory’, quoted in full at the head of this review, is set on a beach where a boy is learning to throw a frisbee with his father. I was reminded of Heaney’s ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’ – another poem that reflects on innocence, discovery and joy. Meier’s voice is, however, entirely his own. After one of the boy’s early attempts, the frisbee “stalls, / to hover right above us, thinking”. I like Meier’s confidence here. To have the frisbee ‘thinking’, instead of prefacing the idea with ‘as if’ or ‘as though’, is a bold move that works for me. The image is all the more vivid for being stripped of any supporting structure, so that it floats on its own. Given the subject matter – a boy’s discovery of a new skill and the emotional power for the parent at witnessing the child’s delight – Meier’s skilful avoidance of sentimentality is impressive.

Just a few poems in, Meier’s command of a variety of forms and structures becomes evident. ‘50’ is a single-sentence poem that owes its pacy movement and colloquial feel to short lines, some only one or two words long. This poem has a darkly humorous edge, as it compares a beech tree, capable of leaning “at forty-five (or maybe forty-three) / degrees” to humans who “teeter” at much less acute angles, so that their feet “unpeel” and they “topple” and “keel”. He also conjures delightful and precise imagery. In ‘The Heron’ the bird itself is “Still, so still, / its focus like a cutting tool”. To fly away “it has to come apart almost, / a loaf being broken open.” In ‘Used Coats, EBay’, a coat is photographed “from the back, hood up, / left arm right-angled, raised” seeming to deliver “a last wave”.

Other poems in this first section explore versions of loss. The creatures in ‘Animals, Wapping’, are not real animals, but pieces of driftwood that have been shaped by the Thames. Given the knowledge of the poet’s illness, I wondered if its seemingly hurried, almost throwaway ending – “like nature cannot stop or something” – might be an expression of the difficulty of having to confront the inevitable and difficult truth of nature’s (and time’s) ceaseless passage.

‘Mistaken’ carries a powerful emotional charge similar to the opening piece, comparing the “terminal lucidity” of people who wake from a coma with the feeling two lovers experience on the verge of separation, their final moments “spent in greeting — // touching one another, / smiling, laughing”. ‘The Undoing’ is another delicate, economical and precise poem in which the speaker is lifting turf he laid when first married, perhaps to replace it with gravel and make a Japanese-style garden. He finds himself surprised (“distressingly so”) at how easily such a change can be made. The emotional punch of realisation is transmitted to the reader through the abruptness of the final line – just two words: “Now what.”

Hilary: The second section of the book, Sketch of a Pagoda, is an homage to Japanese poet and master of the tanka form, Takuboku Ishikawa, who died at 26 from tuberculosis. Meier has said elsewhere on The Friday Poem that Ishakawa is his “favourite poet ever” (he describes him as the ‘Japanese Keats’), and has written about him in a blog post here. This section consists of 28 short (three line) haiku-like poems. The pieces are untitled, but each has a kind of ‘post-title’ positioned underneath and to the right, in italics and square brackets. (The publisher describes these as ‘afterthought titles’ or ‘un-titles’ and says they are “tentative” with “none of the imperiousness of normal titling”.) The poems work perfectly well without them, but they allow a reader to see things from a different perspective, or to develop further understanding.

Some of the pieces are beautifully observed miniature portraits of natural life:

three rising scoops — the route
the pied wagtail takes
from pavement up to roof

[Sketch of a pagoda]

Some simply record a special time – the poet at Evensong in Coventry Cathedral with his young son, for example, or his experience as a child:

getting up at night
to watch the rain fall on our street —
my first act as an individual?

[Six or seven]

Others identify moments when the poet was hurt, or experienced insight or some sort of transformation. Put together, they chart the breakdown of a marriage, the poet’s father’s ageing and death, and his own illness. Many are profoundly moving and often painful to read.

the plain white biscuit tin
you gave me on our ten year anniversary
contains my medicines now

[A marriage]

There’s a lot of white space in this section of the book, but the power of these compressed, brightly burning and intensely felt poems fully justifies this editorial decision.

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The third section, From Memory, is dedicated to Maureen Meier, the poet’s mother, and includes a nine poem sequence about her illness and death (as well as a baker’s dozen other poems). The sequence includes ‘Conviction’, in which the poet’s mother manages to make it to “the top road”, “in early March and a thin, unbuttoned coat / on one egg and an oatcake / down an unpavemented, unlit country lane”. The poem deftly convey the poet’s mixture of frustration and admiration at this feat. Notice the double meaning of the title. This happens with a Meier poem – layers of meaning reveal themselves over time.

The final poem in After the Miracle is ‘From the Darkness‘. It is plain spoken and straightforward, not tricksy, or clever-clever. But there’s so much going on. The poet takes us down into the coalhole “where I tend to store things”. He opens an old tin of red paint and finds “a half-drowned brush, / wild-looking after treading paint for years”. Can’t you feel that sense of release when the lid opens? Can’t you see that brush, the splayed bristles, everything at an angle. The brush becomes animate, becomes a symbol for the drive to survive even in the most difficult circumstances. And the poem ends with a real sense of wonder.

I don’t know how it waited (patiently or not).
Or whether it was tired, or what.
But what I thought of, as I fished it out to use it,
was the heart, the remarkable heart.

Roy Marshall is a UK poet whose first full collection The Sun Bathers (Shoestring Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Award. His second collection, The Great Animator, was published by Shoestring in 2017. After Montale, which contains versions of poems by the Italian poet, was published in 2019. Roy’s work has appeared in magazines including The Rialto, Poetry Wales, The North and The Compass. He has worked as a gardener and a nurse, and as a part-time university lecturer.

Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem.

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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E shows me the bath that he lay in all night, his partner (who couldn’t hear him shouting) sits quietly. The bath sides were a sheer mountain face, he says, he kept slipping back down. ‘And tae think I used to climb aw those munros’. When his partner came in she got a right shock, went to ask the neighbour to help, a tall lad, six foot. ‘When I wis hauled oot ma hauns were cold and crinkly’. I notice the walls blooming with mould, a rash of grey roses climbs around the window. ‘The housing know all aboot it’, E tells me, ‘they want me to move oot, but there’s nowhere to go. Besides I like ma wee flat’ he says, ‘it’s on a good bus route, I can’t stand being stuck indoors’.

‘Room’ (p. 49) is from Glasgoscopy by Vicki Husband (Vagabond Voices, 2025) — big thanks to Vagabond Voices for letting us reproduce it here.

Vicki Husband is a community occupational therapist working in the NHS. She dedicates Glasgoscopy, her second full collection, to her patients and her colleagues. She won the Hippocrates Prizes for Poetry in Medicine 2024 with ‘Non-essential poem’, which is included in the book.

Glasoscopy is a close examination of Glasgow and its community. The book cover glows like a X-ray showing ghostly illuminated internal systems of the human body. Underneath the deep blue of negative space we see boxes which look like street maps laying out the city’s tenements and roads. The image neatly sums up one of Husband’s themes – how our environment shapes us, and in particular how physical architecture has an impact on nature and people. The city itself is a biome, living and breathing, and the people living in its tenements are part of its physiology.

The collection explores themes of poverty, loneliness, and resilience. It illustrates how vital healthcare is, particularly for those at the very margins who can least afford it. Vicki Husband doesn’t seem to me to have designs on her readers, but her subject matter resonates deeply with me. We are in a time of manufactured decline and crisis in NHS care in Britain, which threatens the humanitarian values upon which the Health Service was founded (for more information on the privatisation of the NHS, what it looks like, and the impact it has, see the Keep Our NHS Public briefing paper). The Covid pandemic, a global trauma which is rapidly being forgotten, also highlighted a raft of inequality and specific vulnerabilities for older people and those from ethnic minority groups (see research findings into the impact of Covid-19 on health inequalities across Scotland published by the Scottish Government in June 2021).

‘Non-essential poem’ is central to the collection, and is evocative of the Covid crisis. It shines an unforgiving light on the absurdity of what in one context appears essential (such as advertising) but in another is redundant. Nature bloomed joyously in the UK that spring, in stark contrast to the terrible loss of life. Many people were denied human touch; it was deemed dangerous and unnecessary. Husband writes:

While human touch is not considered essential, trees enjoy
a renewed focus of attention, their blooming seeming
marvellous; a touch of lukewarm sunshine miraculous.

She writes about going into the homes of people who haven’t been visited for “months, years”, and trying to navigate communication and human connection behind personal protective equipment (PPE):

[…] I arrive gesturing,
gesticulating in blue, eyes do the work of a whole face.

The patient she sees is not steady on his feet. Her reaction to steady him is a reflex: “I put my electric-blue palm / on his back, and we both note the small shock of contact”.

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Many of the pieces here are prose poems which describe visits to fictional patients during the pandemic. Forty-one of them are simply called ‘Room’. The first twenty-four of these describe occupants, identified A to Z (no I, no U). Then we go back to ‘A’ and start again, with different occupants, though the list now contains omissions as though people are missing; one presumes dead.

This repetition of the word ‘Room’ invites the reader to consider its meaning in terms of a space, but these rooms are also like confined cells, shut off and contained. Each visit described takes on an anonymous feel, with patients identified only by the first initial of their name (as though in a medical case study). The shapes of the neat square prose poems evoke loneliness; many of these patients are lonely. They are older, often bereaved, and all with compromised physical health.

Husband’s poetry illuminates the acts of intimacy which underpin truly relational healthcare. The power of relationships is now being shown to be essential in good health and social care (Gopinath et al, 2023). We see this over and over again as she engages with people teetering between life and death. Some of the poems are rich with dialect. We feel like we meet these people. They could be our neighbours.

In one room we meet A, who is under-nourished and who has a pint glass of orange squash (or possibly urine?) next to him on a side table. A is frail and struggling to walk. His home has become full of obstacles as his health declines. In her real life OT role, the poet would be assessing for adaptations to the home so that A can stay where he is. B is hoping to be housed in a ground floor flat opposite her own block. The flat is empty, and she is waiting, but the question is how much longer can she wait? Many of the characters here have mobility difficulties, and Husband makes astute observations about how they struggle to navigate ordinary architecture – stairs, baths, kitchens.

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Covid is sparingly mentioned. In fact, the context in which Husband is making visits is almost invisible at first, with occasional and subtle mentions of ‘the virus’. There is no fanfare, just a matter-of-factness. In reality, however, it was a shocking and frightening time; many NHS staff had to adapt to work in conditions they could never have imagined. Numerous vulnerable people were isolated and lonely during lockdown, and this collection vividly brings that back.

These ‘room’ poems are interspersed with pieces about the environment, word searches, and medical jargon. ‘Suffixes’ presents two columns of words, apparently definitional, but the left-hand column can be read independently, creating a spellbinding poem. It is essentially an instruction on how to maintain compassion within medical care:

When ruled by the head
I separate each of my selves
Cut out the smallest
Of sensations
Later find they carry
The shape of me, the glue
For the record this
Is how a condition conditions one
Into a medical prejudice

Everything here emphasises the essential need to retain compassion and a sense of humanity, and how important these are to healing:

The body knows
How to absorb emotion
Apply compassion not compression.

Husband observes families trying to do the best they can for relatives. At the time, this was hard, especially given how communities had already dwindled and the social care networks around older people had been under resourced for some years. Ordinary people were often forced to make impossible decisions. In one room we meet Z, whose son has moved her out of her flat and into a care home, which we learn he regrets. She cries every day for her home, and he tries to reassure her that she is home. But this is a residential home, an alien and new space for Z. There is a sense of foreboding about her fate (many older people died in care homes during Covid).

‘References’ is both sharp and serious, presented like a properly evidenced academic paper. The piece is shot through with absurdity, with titles such as ‘A Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews of Systems of Reviewing’. Science operates in a social and political context, and invented papers such as ‘Deprivation, Inequality and the Dereliction of Duty’ and ‘How Managed Decline was Mis-managed’ remind us that powerful forces which determine health don’t often make the reference list. There are also acerbic reminders that sometimes the obvious things are the things which will help, such as ‘How Routes and Paths can Improve Access’ and that these obstacles in public space also contribute to ‘The Anatomy of Alienation Among Older Adults’.

Glasgoscopy is a testament to those frontline health workers who carried on working through the pandemic, and also to the enormous emotional generosity on which the NHS was founded and continues to depend. As a health worker myself, I found it a moving reminder of how important it is to approach everyone with compassion. As a poet, I admire Vicki Husband’s ability to capture those unmapped and intimate moments and convey them simply and powerfully. Her capacity to create these sharp, witty poems, working in a place where politics, community and the medical profession meet, is impressive. She has made these older people, alone and anonymous in their rooms, visible – a gift to both them and us.

References:

Gopinath, M; de Lappe, J; Kartupelis, J; Larkin, M and Wilson, A (2023). The value and practice of relational care with older people: a research report by The Open University. The Open University. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00015a63

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

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.

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‘The Last Swim’ is from Michael Laskey: Collected Poems — big thanks to The Poetry Business for letting us reproduce it here.

Three hundred and sixty-five poems, most of them under a page; you could read one a day for a year. In fact, even if you have the full set of Michael Laskey’s six collections, I’d recommend getting your hands on this Collected and doing just that. Apart from anything else, this nice fat volume includes a handful of new poems, and you wouldn’t want to miss them. I’ve read it from cover to cover over the past few weeks and have now gone back to read more slowly from the beginning. Why? Because I enjoyed it. Because it touched me. Because it made me chuckle. Because it made me feel happier about being in the world despite the way the world is. Reading Michael Laskey, I’ve decided, improves my mental health.

It’s something to do with his relaxed focus on what is easily overlooked. These poems make me more mindful, more attuned to things around me. Kitchen knives and chopping boards acquire significance. I see the more bizarre possibilities of clothes pegs. I notice the “useless rose windows” hidden inside cucumbers. How much I routinely miss of what’s right here in front of my eyes!

It’s also to do with Laskey’s companionable modesty, his courteous restraint. He never says too much or talks too loudly. He takes pains to make his readers feel at ease. Having said that, some poems are not as seemly as they might seem. Take ‘Cloves of Garlic’ for example – I’ll never look at one in quite the same way again! Like another of my favourite poets, Kit Wright, Laskey makes light of his learning and his technical skill and often combines mischievous humour and self-deprecation with more serious thought.

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Laskey’s boarding school education may have advantaged him in some ways, but not, one suspects, without emotional cost. The poem ‘Simpson and Newell’ captures perfectly the stomach-churning anxiety and dejectedness felt by a group of adolescents when faced with a rugby fixture against a much stronger team. The players run the gauntlet of “cocksure staring boys” and make their way to the changing rooms where half the pegs have been “decapitated”. Once there:

[…] Left to ourselves
we unzipped a little flamboyant
foul language and let it drop
into shallow pooled laughter; we bolted
the bog doors and sat briefly, slumped.

[…]

And afterwards, quiet on the coach
returning to school through the settled
ache of that bruise-darkened landscape,
we breathed on the window and printed
our names in the mist back to front.

There’s that sense of the loneliness one can feel, even in a group. On a related theme, ‘Old School Tie’ describes Laskey’s meeting as an adult with a fellow pupil he doesn’t remember who turns out to have harboured a grudge against him for years and who relates, with gleeful vengeance, how:

on a Sunday evening last September
chugging home into the cut
against an offshore wind and looming
banks of mud and cumulonimbus,
he passed me crouching in the stern
of the Enterprise as it drifted backwards,
yanking madly away at the outboard
that wouldn’t catch. Made his day.

Typically, the poet allows himself to be the butt of the anecdote.

Laskey’s good with verbs, and they do lots of work in each of the poems above – “unzipped”, “crouching”, “yanking”. It’s interesting too, I think, that thundery clouds loom over both. Laskey’s poems usually enjoy good weather, but darkness is almost always part of the mix. Woven into poems about cricket, bicycles, babies, birds, happy families and firelighters, marmalade and soup-making, ratatouille and rice pudding, we find the deeper stuff of life that often goes unsaid. The poet nudges us gently, reminding us of our common emotional subtleties and contradictions, our guilts and resentments, fears and insecurities, joys and longings. He embraces it all, as in the poem ‘Curtains’ where, as with so many Laskey poems, the one-word title comes loaded with associations. The curtains in question (red velvet and threadbare) have been passed on through generations. He describes drawing them, “arms wide as if blessing the outside” and ends:

don’t leave that gap at the top.
Worn, but so what? They’re part
of the one flesh we’ve become.
Let them hang on here and declare
another day open, then put it
behind them, bring the evening on.

This awareness of life’s brevity and fragility is an idea he returns to frequently, finding always the perfect image or moment and catching it precisely. ‘A Tray of Eggs’, for example, describes a necessarily careful bike-ride (with a two-year-old on the crossbar):

[…] the eggs we bring home
in boxes and softly transpose
into the bevelled holes
in the cardboard tray, the domes
of these thirty shells
that will break like the days to come.

It’s often at the end of a Laskey poem that the depth of meaning reveals itself, but one has the feeling that he has arrived at the moment with you. It rarely seems a set-up job.

I’ve been wondering if it helps to be old(ish) when reading Laskey. Maybe. I’m not sure. His language doesn’t sound dated to my ear; it just seems conversational, comfortable and at ease with itself. However, being old(ish) myself, I delighted in words such as “palaver”, “kerfuffle”, “rigmarole” and “skedaddle”, and in references to tinned cling peaches and “top of the milk”.

One of the joys of reading Laskey is his fascination with words and the “crinkle of pleasure” he gets from savouring them. Several years ago, I was lucky enough to attend an Arvon course led by him and Helena Nelson. The first exercise he set us was to write a poem about a word. The stimulus he offered us was ‘Bodkin’ by Vona Groarke. He could equally well have shared one of his own ‘word’ poems – ‘Hassocks’ or ‘Bayonet’ for example, or the truly hilarious ‘Callipygian’ – but no, he drew in the work of another poet, as he did throughout the week, clearly relishing the pleasure of promoting and discussing poems he admired.

But when it comes to his own poems, the ones that touch me most are about his children. I love ‘Registers’, which is about the day his son Jack started school:

Out of the warm, primordial cave
of our conversations, Jack’s gone.
No more chit-chat under the blankets
pegged over chairs and nipped in drawers.

[…]

Good boy, diminishing down the long
corridors into the huge unknown
assembly hall, each word strange,
even his name on Miss Cracknell’s tongue.

I remember asking Michael Laskey about Miss Cracknell. “Did you make up the teacher’s name?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was her real name and suited the poem perfectly.” Of course. It had to be. The poem rings true … because it is.

This collected volume, a whole lifetime of poetry, allows you to settle down and immerse yourself in Michael Laskey’s world, which always feels to me like a good place to be. The poems are arranged skilfully, in such a way that they speak to and affirm each other, and the effect is cumulative. There’s wisdom here, but the touch is so light and deft, it’s easy to miss. You aren’t struck by his ‘style’, for the simple reason that he doesn’t put a foot wrong – nothing jars. The poem ‘Signature’ is ostensibly about a lizard, but Laskey could well be describing his own unassuming poetic trademark:

a rustle in the gorse
stops me short:
dashing off
its signature
in invisible ink,
a lizard
I’ve blinked
and missed.

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.

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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Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party adopted the slogan, ‘For the many, not the few’. Corbyn also co-edited, with Len McCluskey, a poetry anthology titled Poetry for the Many in 2023. One of its contributors, the political strategist Karie Murphy, wrote that its purpose was to “shake off any notion that [poetry] is not something to be read, written, or appreciated by working-class people”. McCluskey wanted it to help change poetry’s image among working-class communities – as in, challenge the notion that it is for “posh people” and/or “softies”.

The line “for the many, not the few” is adapted from the final stanza of ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, which Shelley wrote in 1819 after the Peterloo Massacre. Sabre-wielding cavalry units (operating on behalf of local magistrates) had charged directly at protesters demanding parliamentary reform. Hundreds were injured. 18 died. At the time, 11% of Britain’s male population were allowed to vote. Shelley, despite his aristocratic lineage, wanted to extend suffrage.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.

Corbyn wasn’t the first to borrow from Shelley. From Tiananmen to Tahrir, and the Poll tax riots of 1989–90, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ has been used by campaigners all over the world. The Jam quoted it on the back of their 1980 album Sound Affects. The stanza quoted above is engraved on the gravestone of socialist campaigner and investigative journalist Paul Foot. And it featured in the 2023 conference speech of … er … Suella Braverman. She said, without irony, that she was “shamelessly taking [the lines] back from Labour”.

Why do politicians like to borrow from poets? Writing for Culture Matters, Bob Beagrie argues that poetry’s power is in merging the personal and the political into an “articulation of the social”. In other words, it bridges the gap between you and everyone else. It’s also economical, since politicians might not have the time (or talent) for tight, memorable, impassioned wordsmithery. Since it’s outside politics, (good) poetry can solidarise and collectivise without pitting people against each other. Like a shortcut, or cheat code. As Keir Starmer has proved, if you don’t use language to connect with the people you represent, you don’t connect with them at all.

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Politicians can also use poetry too much, or in the wrong way. In his application of poetic language – poetic in all senses of the word: heightened, figurative, flowery, verbose – Boris Johnson might be the antithesis of Starmer. It’s no coincidence that Starmer campaigned with a promise of “actions, not words”. Johnson’s mouth was full of words. Big words, long words. Poetic words, on occasion. But the result is the same. Johnson’s version of deploying poetry in a political capacity was to recite Homer in the original Greek. How better to alienate your subjects?

If poetry can move people, bring us together, act as a shortcut to collective feeling and channel nebulous, complex and unpredictable emotions into something positive, then it is also capable of the opposite.

[Famously, as an MP and cabinet member, Johnson was caught mumbling Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’ in the presence of local dignitaries during an official visit to Myanmar. “The temple bells they say, come you back you English soldier,” he declared while inside the Shwedagon Pagoda, a sacred Buddhist site. Johnson’s recital so embarrassed the UK ambassador to Myanmar, who was travelling with him, that he leant over to the then foreign secretary and reminded him, “You’re on mic. Probably not a good idea…” “What?” said Johnson distractedly. “‘The Road to Mandalay?’” “No,” said the ambassador. “Not appropriate.” “No?” Johnson replied, burying his head in his mobile phone. “Good stuff.”]

Margaret Thatcher – that well known channeller of nebulous, complex and unpredictable emotions into positive collective feeling – enjoyed the war poets, in particular Rupert Brooke. In a 1987 interview with the BBC, she calls him an “extraordinary poet” with a “straightforward but lovely” eye for language.

She recites, to interviewer Russell Harty, a section of Brooke’s ‘The Great Lover’:

These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such —
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year’s ferns …

The poem at large is a celebration of things past. This section in particular paints a picture of a Britain Brooke loves and misses – he wrote it in 1914, from Tahiti. It’s a homely poem, exulting in the beauty of everyday natural phenomena and the comforts of prosaic household objects: wet roofs, friendly bread, clean sheets, old clothes. You might expect Thatcher to have opted for a more jingoistic piece, something with a bit more … war. ‘The Great Lover’ flips that expectation on its head, exploring instead the warm, cosy, mundane side of patriotism.

But it’s not all cosy and mundane.

In the historical drama series The Crown, Thatcher fires half of her cabinet because they lack grit, and because they’re too privileged and entitled. Queen Elizabeth tells her she’s playing a “dangerous game”, and in response, Thatcher says she’s “comfortable” having enemies. She then recites the poem ‘No Enemies’, by Scottish poet Charles Mackay. He lived from 1814 to 1889, and was part of the Chartist movement, campaigning for working class people in England to gain suffrage and influence.

In real life, too, Thatcher was fond of this poem. A 2019 BBC documentary (Thatcher: A Very British Revolution) revealed that she kept a copy of it on her desk.

You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.

Repetition, exclamation marks, a simple rhyme scheme. And, depending on the context, deeply political. “I like poetry,” Thatcher once told BBC TV presenter Russell Harty. “Some of it is very complicated and you have to study it very deeply, like T.S. Eliot.”

To her credit as a political representative, Thatcher liked more accessible verse than, say, Boris Johnson, who only ever said the wrong poem at the wrong time. However, there are some amusing lines to draw between both politicians and the poet Charles Mackay.

Mackay published ‘No Enemies’ in 1884, five years before his death. Four decades earlier, he had made a splash with the crowd psychology study Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Now his most famous work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions highlights examples of irrational mass behaviour, debunking things like alchemy, fortune-telling, and the existence of the Drummer of Tedworth poltergeist. In it, Mackay takes aim at economic bubbles, which he calls financial manias. Examples include the South Sea Company bubble of 1711-1720, the Mississippi Company bubble of 1719-1720, and the Dutch tulip mania of the early 1600s.

Mackay was a raconteur with a penchant for overstatement and sensationalism, who never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And a popular one too: Extraordinary Popular Delusions has stood the test of time, and features on Goldman Sachs’ recommended reading list. Take from that what you will. But scholars argue that he was just as delusional as the people he wrote about. He was an opportunist whose “sins of commission were dwarfed by his sins of omission”, writes Polish-American mathematician Andrew Odlyzko. One of the popular delusions he poked fun at was the Railway Mania of the 1840s, a stock market bubble based on over-optimistic speculation. It inflated the cost of Britain’s railway network, enabled larger companies to buy up failed lines, and in the process bankrupted swathes of the middle class. Odlyzko describes Mackay as a “free market and technology enthusiast”, and says he was, in fact, “one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the Railway Mania”, and among those fanning flames of the “extreme investor exuberance” about which he wrote.

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We move, at last, to the recital that inspired this piece. Green Party leader Zack Polanski knows how, and when, to utilise the solidarising power of poetry.

Polanski is not an MP, but he has presided over a massive increase to party membership. This is not because of policy changes – his talking points come from the party’s 2024 manifesto. It’s because he knows how to use the tools at his disposal to cut through the noise. He’s active on social media, he builds narratives rather than simply bouncing off of others’, he has his own podcast, and… he knows a thing or two about poetry.

To recap, in early October, Conservative MP Robert Jenrick visited Handsworth, in inner-city Birmingham. A clip of him complaining that during his time there he “didn’t see another white face” was leaked to The Guardian. “It’s as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country,” he told guests during dinner at the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association. Numerous reports emerged in its wake of Handsworth residents calling Jenrick “totally wrong” in his assessment of the area. MPs lambasted Jenrick in news reports, on TV interviews, and on Question Time. By and large, the conversations that followed were predictable and boring.

Zack Polanski did something different. He went to Handsworth, spoke to a handful of residents, and recorded a video of him reciting part of Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem, ‘The British’.

Zephaniah grew up in Handsworth, and called it the Jamaican capital of Europe. ‘The British’, which first appeared in his 2000 collection Wicked World!, doesn’t mention Birmingham specifically, but it celebrates the multi-culturalism and -lingualism of his hometown, while calling for “justice and equality for all”. It’s deeply political, but its format, a recipe, makes it accessible and tonally light. Didactic but not preachy, like myth, or really good political oratory, it communicates something simple, vital and profound without shouting too loudly about it, leaving its lesson at the door rather than waving it in your face.

Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese,
Vietnamese and Sudanese.

Then take a blend of Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians
And Pakistanis,
Combine with some Guyanese
And turn up the heat.

[…]

Leave the ingredients to simmer.

As they mix and blend allow their languages to flourish
Binding them together with English.

Allow time to be cool.

Add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future,
Serve with justice
And enjoy.

– from ‘The British’ by Benjamin Zephaniah

Within a week, Zack Polanski’s video had picked up 60,000 likes. It’s vastly more popular than his usual social media output, which tends to get reactions in the hundreds or low thousands. It resonated with people because it was the right poem at the right time. It was, it seems to me, a good example of poetry “articulating the social”. Benjamin Zephaniah spent decades doing this. But people don’t listen very much to poets. Sometimes it takes a person with a different kind of influence to get a poet’s message across.

During his lifetime, Zephaniah declined an OBE, sought the dis-establishment of the Crown and, like Shelley, was in favour of voting reform. He supported Jeremy Corbyn when, as leader of the Labour Party, Corbyn tried to make the UK’s tax system more redistributive. With a bit of luck, Zephaniah may yet become one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Or, at least, the UK.

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.

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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While the craze for publishing poetry shows no sign of diminishing – certainly not in the English language, over 400 years and counting – there are signs of a rather secretive cabal at work, inspired by an older tradition. I speak, of course, about this fashion for composing poems that, far from reaching out to find readers and listeners, are produced expressly for the narrowest and most limited of audiences.

Doubtless many will, at this juncture, point out that, as much poetry has always been written expressly for the poets themselves, the habit of writing for a very limited audience is alive and well. And indeed, it is. But what I am talking about is not the poem that no one else wants to read or that is never shared, but the poem composed for one single known other. And not just the writing of the poem with this aim, but the sending it to them, and for them alone.

So, such writing happens, and it is the nature of the ‘poetry racket’ (as we amateur economists call it), which is all for sharing / selling / shouting, that this type of work has largely gone unseen. However, it has set me thinking about the joys and disciplines that accrue from setting one’s sights not on the low-hanging fruit of universal approbation – awards, prizes, readings and being carried on the shoulders of the multitude – but on the altogether higher reward which is the pleasure and approval of one other person.

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I should come clean and admit that I’ve spent forty infuriating years trying to achieve widespread publication and all that goes with it. But I should say also, that recently I have dabbled in what might be described as ‘micro-publishing’ or ‘narrow-casting’ or ‘private un-called-for patronage’ or ‘advance mono-reader section’ or ‘anti-quantity/hyper-quality promulgation’, (choose your favourite description). And, I have found it surprisingly difficult and therefore surprisingly rewarding.

It came upon me a year or so ago. I believe it was a Wednesday evening and the weather was inclement. I had been drafting poems and had quite a few waiting to be typed up. The prospect, on that bleak evening, of sending these off to magazines or finding a place to read them or even assembling them for a future collection suddenly struck me as utterly grim, debasing, time-consuming, tedious and almost certainly unrewarding. And I had been recommending this practice to myself and others for so many years!

In a moment of desperation, I heaved the Hermes 2000 (‘the typewriter of champions, accept no substitute’) onto the desk and began to type up the poem I’d written about me and my sister playing badminton fifty years ago in the back garden of our semi-detached ancestral home. I thought I would dedicate it to her – for really, she is the only other human being currently resident on planet earth who could fully appreciate some aspects of the piece – but also, damn it all, that I would share it with her and her alone.

It took a while as the Hermes 2000’s auto-correct function, although as fine as the Swiss craftspeople of 1954 could make it, consists of cursing the typo, ripping the sheet of paper from the maw of the machine and bloody well starting again. But when it was done to my satisfaction and enveloped with the Davidson wax seal and a stamp applied and placed on the mantelpiece until such time as I should pop down to the post box, it got me to thinking about exactly what I had done.

Firstly, I had, of course, written this poem for two people, me and my sister, and that seemed enough. Secondly, I had identified the reader I wanted, one who was right for the poem. And, thirdly, I had just about guaranteed that one hundred percent of those people who I wanted to read the poem would read the poem. And they would quite possibly read it twice, and quite possibly prop it up on their mantelpiece or stick it on their fridge or add it to their personal archive for future generations to discover. I believe the marketing folk call this a very good ‘conversion rate’.

The mean of spirit will now say, yeah, but you only had one reader, and you know her and she didn’t pay you and you haven’t been reviewed in any of our splendid literary journals, both hard copy and virtual, including The Friday Poem, and so no one knows about it. To which I would reply, what greater poetic challenge is there than to write a poem that someone would like and at the same time to know that there will be no ‘range of opinions’ or ‘contradictory reviews’ or even ‘general consensus’, and to know, therefore, that this poem has got to work for her, now and forever? I cannot hope that someone will like it, I can only work damned hard to make sure she likes it.

And as to the matter of payment and the related matter of distribution. Well, I have now written quite a number of poems specifically for individuals who I like and admire, and it is curious how important their response is and if it is positive (as it has been) how overjoyed I have been. It is like writing the poem a second time, but with a reader involved. I care what all readers of my poetry think about my work, but when I am writing for one person, their approval beats that of all judges and juries.

The next question to pose is what would happen if the axis on which planet poetry rotates should tilt more towards this quiet, private but intense writing (and reading) of poems? Wouldn’t that rather spoil things? Where would we be if we were not obliged to pound the treadmill of poetic production, to hawk our wares the length of the town or to stand in the drizzle of a poetic hiring fair, all in the hope of publication, of public adulation, of the general amusement of the crowd. Well, yes. I rest my case.

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These will not be the only types of poems I write. And for those who care more for public adoration than for private joy, they are not right at all. And some poetry has an entirely different purpose. And we all certainly need to see and read many types of poems, even those originally written for private consumption (but perhaps that can wait until the matter becomes posthumous). I am simply reminding us, as if we needed reminding, that some poetry, while it is known to exist, should be impossible to (publicly) detect. These are private poems.

Why I wrote this piece…

As some will know, I have this nagging concern that the poetry world as it is constructed does not always serve well either poems or poets. I like to consider alternate poetry worlds and to suggest that things happen that the poetry establishment choose not to champion. I also dearly like the sound of my own voice and now I am older than I was, I don’t automatically assume that everyone else is smarter than I am (although many are). I have, after all, got Grade ‘C’ A-Level English, which surely counts for something. But, finally, I should thank my pal David Harmer, for reading an early drafting and his very good suggestions for changes, all of which I made.

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

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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A man carries a lantern across the beach.
He slogs through the shingle, taking his light
to the green umbrella at the water’s edge.

His footfalls recede in the boom of swash
as he reaches his pitch, his lantern shadow
hunched from the rain like the first man
who sheltered an ember against the night ahead.

‘Angler’ is from Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley (Garlic Press, 2025) – big thanks to Michael Laskey and Anne Berkeley for letting us reproduce it. You can buy Object Permanence, and other Garlic Press books, through the shop on Michael Laskey’s website.

If you grew up with C S Lewis’s Narnia books you may recall the Wood between the Worlds. In The Magician’s Nephew, our hero puts on a magic ring and finds himself ‘rushing upwards’ through water into a pool in a wood, a wood dotted with numerous similar pools. Each pool in this wood leads to a different world:

The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. [...] It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. [...] This wood was very much alive. When he tried to describe it afterwards Digory always said, ‘It was a rich place: as rich as plum cake.’

Object Permanence reminds me of that wood. The collection as a whole is quiet, but it’s intensely alive – simmering. Individual pages appear unassuming, even ordinary. But they’re not.

‘Growing Up’ , for example, transports the reader to a setting eerily familiar. Everything must be happening in the past, but it’s in the present tense. Although this may be the poet’s own experience, it’s carefully (beautifully) de-personalised. There are two characters, ‘the mother’ and ‘the child’, and only two words are spoken – and not until the penultimate line. Four six-line stanzas focus on one brief event. The child gets out of her cot in the attic bedroom where she’s supposed to be napping. She climbs onto a chair and peers through the window down to where her mother is gardening. She realises her mother doesn’t know she’s being observed. This allows her suddenly to see “how we are all separate and alone”, so much so that she calls down to her parent to establish a connection. Shocked, the mother looks up. We see what she sees: “the child out of her cot standing on a chair, / tall girl from the future”. The mother is shocked by the danger, the reader startled by a collision of time zones. When the poem concludes, it’s all still happening. It always will be.

‛November’ is even simpler. One little twelve-line poem, easy to miss. And perhaps you might not get into its world if you didn’t have the cultural reference. But I did, because this place is part of me. As soon as I read the first two lines (“The morning after, there was always fog / and we hunted for the empty shells”), I knew this was the day after Bonfire Night, the strange flat time that followed the conflagration on November 5th, which used to be (forget Hallowe’en) one of the main highlights of our year. And yes, it was always misty, wasn’t it? And if it fell on a Saturday or Sunday, we would wander round like lost souls, gathering the spent rockets: “We lined them up, damp trophies”. So we did, so we did. I had forgotten. But it flooded back, the triumph of hope over experience, me and my friends “always / hoping there’d be more inside than soot.”

‛When she came back she leaned against the door’, on the other hand, takes me to a place I don’t know, a tragic and terrible territory. A baby has died, a boy, and the awfulness of the fact is suppressed by shutting it down, by closing “the lid / on the small white box my father carried”. No explicit mention of death. Commas disappear and lists crowd into each other, reality blurring. Numerous repetitions of the sound ‛shut’ make the pain open again and again and again. It won’t be shut down. Oh, this poor mother! “She shut the fridge the oven the washing machine the order book. / She shut the questions the questions.” Heart-rending.

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‛You Only Live Twice’ evokes another world altogether. We’re in an English antique shop, in the late sixties. The Bond film is on at the local cinema, and the title reflects what’s happening in the writing too: an apparently insignificant moment re-lived. But why do we recall certain things so clearly when most of the detail vanishes? Here, one of the poet’s former customers “fidgeted, picking up the Derby shepherdess, / put it down again without comment, / winced at the silver épergne (William Eames, 1807) / and then at the price of it”. Sometimes we don’t see what’s really going on. Here, together with the narrator, we work it out. Neatly, and with satisfaction.

In ‛Angler’, there’s an entirely different setting, and the poet isn’t even there. Just a nameless man. No fancy poetic tricks, and only one adjective – ‛green’. But this piece is perfectly judged, surely? It’s intensely evocative, a strange place outside time:

His footfalls recede in the boom of swash
as he reaches his pitch

It could be any fisherman by any sea anywhere, anywhen. Also more than that. When a poem works as well as this, it’s hard to write about. What you want to do is take the reader to the text and say, “Here it is. Go on. Read it.”

The collection concludes with two longer texts, the first of which extends over six pages. I’m wary of long poems, but there are wonderful exceptions. ‛The bowser’ and ‛Object Permanence’ together comprise a powerful ending, marvellous and strange. The eponymous bowser (until now I’d no idea what a ‛bowser’ was either) is pictured on the book jacket rusting in a field. It’s a huge old water tank, or it was, before the rust set in. You may have seen something like it before, a farm relic, and felt no curiosity. Read this and grow curious. Anne Berkeley writes about a decrepit old tank like other poets write about love.

Before I say any more about ‛The bowser’, let me revive the concept of ‛object permanence’, since it’s relevant to other poems here too, not least ‘Growing Up’. If you studied psychology or childcare, it was in the chapter on Piaget. A baby, according to object permanence theory, cries when its mother/carer goes out of sight because it thinks she’s ceased to exist. But as the baby develops, it learns how things continue their existence even when you can’t see them. The term is (unsurprisingly) attractive to poets. In the 1990s Peter Manson and Robin Purves ran an experimental poetry journal called Object Permanence. Alas, that little magazine no longer exists, though there are copies kicking around (for a price). In Anne Berkeley’s book, the bowser continues to exist in its farm field, although she has misremembered its location. She wants to photograph it. It seems extremely important to her, although we don’t know why. From the start, features of personification suggest that she and the bowser have more than a few things in common:

Stubborn mindset. Not even machine.
I long to bang its side, hear it resonate
to tell how empty it’s become

She does find the old water container, and as she lists its components, we experience their beauty, syllable by syllable. It is an assembly of disjunction: “manometer (broken), volume gauge (illegible), / wheelhead gate valves, pressure dome, / external pipes, faucets, hatches, butterfly nuts”. Broken things convey nostalgia. It’s inescapable. As the poem moves onwards through short lines, stanzas and sections, the bowser ceases to be ‛it’ and becomes ‛you’:

I found you tilted one morning
broken axled.
Daylight pricks laceholes in your funnel

*

A train passes
and the water
shivers

*

The atmosphere is seductive, mysterious. Then suddenly the bowser speaks. At first we think it is the poet’s lyric ‛I’. But no, it’s the tank itself:

There was a time when I was full
in all my dark chambers
my valves and spigots lucid
my sweet water drawn daily

[...]

And I in my fullness
and cast-iron contentment

It is a testament to the power of the poem that this works, that the structure of the whole, punctuated by little asterisks, can carry such dramatically different voices while building towards a lyric climax in the style of a Keatsian ode:

O stubborn tank of stale water
o lumpen iron emptiness
o grim beacon of loyalty and decay

‛The bowser’ is magnificent and fun and a joy to read aloud. It would make a fabulous performance piece for one of the ‛poetry choirs’ currently springing into existence. The poem that follows, the last in the volume, slips back into twenty-first century first-person mode (“I woke into silver / the room unfamiliar”). But here is the bowser again, this time in the poet’s mind, alive and present if not visible. Something extraordinary happens in this wood between the words. You won’t need a magic ring to find it.

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

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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Rock I found on a beach,
the colour of terracotta.

Riddled with holes, it’s like a sculpture
of a damaged brain.

I hold it, heavy and knobbly
in my hand, poking my fingers

into holes like little caves,
peering into narrower holes

running through it like the shafts
and tunnels of a mine.

I keep it as a memo
of my mind’s workings:

all the blind ends it arrives at
and occasional triumphs —

after days of drilling in the dark,
breaking through into brilliant light.

‘The Red Rock’ is from The Yellow Kite by Vicki Feaver (Mariscat Press, 2025) — big thanks to Mariscat for letting us reproduce it here.

Susan Sontag wrote, in 1978: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Poetry concerning illness and disease, reflecting on body and mind under health-related conditions of distress and limitation, can sometimes feel exclusive. The writer might (understandably) experience themselves to be so thoroughly a citizen of the kingdom of the sick that they all but lose sight of the kingdom of the well, let alone the rickety bridges joining the two realms. Vicki Feaver, in her 2025 Mariscat Press pamphlet The Yellow Kite, maintains dual citizenship of the two kingdoms, articulating the truth of Parkinson’s Disease in poems of clarity, courage and good humour, rejoicing in life whilst never underestimating what has already been lost, and what will be lost as the disease progresses.

In these twenty-five poems, Feaver invites readers to join her on a walk along the tightrope of living. This collection is not ‘about’ Parkinson’s, but it does use the disease as a powerful lens through which to look closely at both kingdoms.

How does Feaver approach this work? I want to focus here on a few features of the poems that strike me as being keys to the complexity and balance that make this collection so relatable and memorable.

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The first is point of view. In the three ‘Shaking Woman’ poems, Parkinson’s is imagined almost as some kind of invisible puppeteer or ghostly observer, while the speaker as ‘she’ becomes a victim of cruel pranks. For instance in ‘The Shaking Woman and the Kingfisher’: “her future’s as uncertain / as the fate of a silver birch / torn from the bank by the force / of the river in spate.” But the speaker’s lack of agency does not last. At the end of this poem there is a “brave / curious child, still alive / in her chest, beating / tight fists against her ribs.”

The use of third person can be read as a way of the speaker distancing herself from her own disease. It is interesting that in an earlier version of the opening poem ‘Ode to Parkinson’s’ on the Scottish Poetry Library website, the first person ‘I’ is used, whereas the poem in the pamphlet has moved to the third person. Does this imply that the poet has wanted to communicate this distancing more deliberately over time? At any rate, the third person is sustained until well after half-way through the pamphlet, so that the shift from ‘she’ to ‘I’ – when it comes – appears to denote a change over time in the way the speaker relates to the disease.

Suddenly, ‘Magpies’ breaks into the first person ‘I’ in a poem that recalls early memories and delivers a neat Blakean image of magpies:

[…] — strutting
cockily down garden paths,
whizzing through the trees
like smartly dressed waiters —
reminding me that joy and sorrow
flit equally through the world.

The change here brings the sense of a state of illness being accommodated, tolerated in a new way, as though the speaker is accepting a fresh self, no longer othering the diseased version of herself.

After this, Feaver uses the first person several more times, including in ‘The Red Rock’ – an astonishingly effective poem of clear-eyed exploration, in which a holed rock is perceived as “a sculpture / of a damaged brain”. This is a beautiful confluence of two ideas, two realities, seeming to allow a deep understanding, “after days of drilling in the dark, / breaking through into brilliant light.” These first-person poems might have revealed a more personal, more immersive relationship with the disease, but the ‘I’ appears strong, in control.

So, these two perspectives on the lived experience of the disease (‘she’ and ‘I’) enact another duality: the speaker lives in both ways with Parkinsons – at arm’s length, but also side by side. Readers have to stay on their toes, alert to both versions of the story, and sensitive to the changing use of pronouns.

An extraordinary poem, ‘Parkinson’s Speaks,’ appears across the central spread of the pamphlet, bringing the shocking arrival of the disease as a fully-fledged persona. This poem embodies the essence of the feat that Feaver has achieved in this collection – that of being able to look at the disease from multiple angles and write with a voice that is ‘loud and clear’ in every instance.

As well as using altering viewpoints effectively, Feaver brings technical range to meet the challenge of the subject matter. Her development of imagery is firmly controlled and surprising. In ‘The Shaking Woman in the Snow’ she sets up snow as being associated with life, starting with thoughts of “driving / in a blizzard with her baby” and “a quilt where a child // can lie, waving her arms”, and then turns the snow into a “bed for a drunk / or someone who’s reached / the tolerable end / of pain and distress.” All in thirty short lines. Ice and snow turn up in several other poems, and of course each time the metaphor echoes, deepens and evolves.

Some of the most affecting poems, for me, are those in which the speaker is shown consciously observing herself. ‘The Shaking Woman Takes a Bath’ is joyful, painful and honest, bringing a welcome new lexicon to banish the clichéd vocabulary of ‘battling’ and ‘fighting’ disease. Feaver’s relationship with Parkinson’s speaks a language of music and scent, hot and cold, fantasies of exotic places, until finally:

she manoeuvres herself
onto her knees, struggles
to her feet and climbs out,
trembling and triumphant
on the bath mat.

Other poems, such as ‘The Woman in the Mirror’ and ‘Boxing is Good for Parkinson’s’ use repetition in ways that reflect the perseveration often experienced by people with this condition. It’s a great way of putting two fingers up at the disease while representing it in the writing itself.

Towards the end of the pamphlet, we see the speaker drawing closer to rocks, berries, birds and flowers. In ‘Campanula’, subject and speaker rhyme in their trembling. In this piece, the “blue of a mind / held perfectly still” is placed just before the final (and title) poem, ‘The Yellow Kite’, in which the speaker looks back and somehow forward too. Time collapses. It’s a gorgeous resolution.

Clare Best has published a memoir, The Missing List, three full collections of poetry, and several pamphlets and collaborative works. Her latest publications are End of Season / Fine di stagione (Frogmore Press, 2022) and Beyond the Gate (Worple Press, 2023). Clare often collaborates with visual artists and musicians. In 2020-21 she was a Fellow at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Currently she is writing in response to a family archive. Clare Best’s website is 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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you glimpse her, or her likeness, more; perhaps
driving past — you, stuck at red lights — her,
in profile this time, looking straight ahead.

Or Co-op checkout, standing in the queue,
wire basket on the floor, her gaze
downward, not catching your eye (this time), or

walking a terrier past your house, her back
stiffened, her shoulder blades too sharp, a bag
slung crosswise. Could be anyone, you try to say,

except she’s not. She’s too familiar,
too often. She’s on the last bus, hunched
at the back, no other passengers.

In the waiting room she has a chair
near the receptionist, something complicit
you strain to hear. In the midst of life we are —

you catch the echo trailing off. She’s constant,
tidy, working through a list, slowly
crossing through every person, name by name.

‘These Days’ is from Continuous Present by D.A. Prince (New Walk Editions, 2025) — big thanks to New Walk for letting us reproduce it here.

D.A. Prince has a very nice line in titles. I mention this not because her poems are not so much more – they are – but because it (obviously) all starts with the title and hers do good work. The final poem, for instance, ‘Staying on for the Credits’, manages, to offer the most inauspicious part of any film-going experience as a means of reminding us that our appreciation of art is both collective (“the scrolling names / of all who shared”) and individual (“We take what we need, / draining every word, each in our own language.”) This is a typically understated poem, gloriously subtle, not a word out of place.

And at the very start of the pamphlet, we are offered a poem whose title – ‘…in my average moments’ (quoting Marianne Moore’s poem, ‘When I Buy Pictures’) – draws attention to itself only in its effort to appear as modest as possible. This poem sets out the spirit underlying this collection. In the opening of its six three-line stanzas, Prince thanks “Miss Moore” for coining the term “in my average moments” that so well suits “the accumulation of present moments” and “the vast indifferent space”. For it is all about time, how it extends “like a stretching cat / engaged only in the furthering of each paw”, and “recognising” and “noticing” and “pointing to” and, in the final stanza, “sparking a search for the exceptional everywhere […] inside the relentless weight of my own hours”.

And this really is the matter of much of the collection, the unforced moment of observation. Poetry, of course has been no stranger to noticing small details, but I do believe there is always room for more. Here’s one example from Continuous Present in its entirety, to make my case:

Through the Train Window

This could be you and any journey:
the way memory holds the moment

between one nameless station and the next
somewhere in summer

when an instant of silver light
hums through high grasses,

their pool of rippling seed heads
hedged with the weight of elder,

green shadows, a dance of willow
before the engine picks up speed.

We might observe that many other poems have been composed under similar circumstances, and that this might even be a brief response to Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (the final stanza surely), but here it is done with effortless brevity and offers us a graceful recollection of a powerful idea.

Certainly, these are not showy poems and although they feel as though they have come directly from a life lived, they almost always look outwards, look closely at others, noticing pertinent details. In the poem ‘These Days’, it is not even the poetic ‘I’ making the observations, but we the reader, co-opted so that we “glimpse her, or her likeness, more; perhaps / driving past – you, stuck at red lights – her, / in profile this time, looking straight ahead” and later at the Co-op or walking a dog or on the last bus or in a waiting room. By the end, we get the curious sense that we are watching ourselves “working through a list, slowly / crossing through every person, name by name.” So here is a poem made of absolutely nothing any citizen could not have observed in contemporary Britain, with each situation ‘othering’ the subject, and finally alienating our very selves.

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Alongside such ordinariness, it is a tonic to see poems inspired by decidedly unordinary folk: Chekhov, John the Baptist (well, his head), Cézanne. Having said that, the Chekhov referred to is a student production of Uncle Vanya, and our focus is as much on the new Assistant Stage Managers “struggling with the tricks / of conjuring shadows from the stylised birches / and, indoors, the background hum of flies” as the play itself. Or rather, it is a poem about how very hard it is to represent the drudgery of an uneventful life lived day in day out. Even portraying such a life through theatre can be terribly boring, as I’m sure Chekhov would have confirmed. And as to Cézanne, the poem in question (‘Cézanne at Tate Modern’) begins:

Too many apples says my friend, dismissing
Cézanne and his stubborn brush working
the canvas over and over, trying
to uncover truth or whatever
lies under the skin

and thereafter concerns itself only with apples, or rather with the necessity for artists to sometimes concern themselves again and again with the same simple subjects and the same fustian materials in an effort to understand the world by observing it intensely. Which is largely what Prince does in Continuous Presence, offering us poems that look again and again at that which is already familiar but quite probably not really ‘seen’.

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

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.

Support us on Ko-fi

all of nature with its forms and creatures
exist together, interwoven with each other.
tendrils flail, petals fall, a peal of silent
bells, a small world turns upon this axis
of abundance. each purple flower, each
thwarting thorn. to yield, or else to pierce,
to quell its reliquary perfume. small things
all. the night, aching with almond, lilies,
olives, dusk on the tongue, anise and pale
anemone. small things that call to care.
swinebread, sow-bread, cyclamen. there
is spiced and smoking flax enough to
wrap the word. to wither or to quicken.
must all our dewy hymns succumb to
dust? the flower is fleeting, but flowers
return. from forms and frailties infinite,
much yet to hope, much yet to learn.

‘Regarding nature’ is from Love Is Stronger than Death: Mary Magdalene and the Insurrection of Jesus by Fran Lock (Culture Matters, 2025) — big thanks to Culture Matters and to Fran Lock for letting us reproduce it here.

In Love Is Stronger than Death: Mary Magdalene and the Insurrection of Jesus, Fran Lock is concerned with refocusing our view of the biblical Mary Magdalene – a medieval blurring of various different ‘Marys’ – and discarding the image of her as ‘redeemed prostitute’ that has been handed down to us via the distorting lens of the early church fathers. In doing so, Lock claims – or reclaims – both Mary and Jesus (and by extension the concepts of ‘God’, and ‘Love’) for a politically revolutionary cause.

As always with Lock, you don’t have to agree with what she is saying to admire the power of what she says and the skill with which she says it. But if you’re really going to engage with her and open yourself up to the radical treatment she gives these big themes, her lapel-grabbing poetic hectoring will require you to scrutinise your own views carefully.

The collection begins with an extract from George W MacRae’s translation of The Thunder, Perfect Mind from the Coptic Nag Hamadi scriptures, in which a female voice lists, with repeated ‘I am’s, her various and multitudinous seeming contradictions. This sets the oppositional tone for the collection, which does not let up.

I am control and the uncontrollable.
I am the union and the dissolution.
I am the abiding and I am the dissolution.

Intense and didactic, Lock’s poems build layer upon layer of the most beautiful and persuasive revolutionary rhetoric. They become as rhythmical (and perhaps as repetitious) as a fist banging on a tabletop. More than once I recalled footage of Lenin addressing the crowds in Red Square, because while this is in part a reassessment of Mary and her relationship with Christ, and of what Christian love might mean, it is also a revolutionary call to action in the manner of The Communist Manifesto. In place of ‘Workers of the world, unite!’, we have:

[…] so, on your feet, you
lumpenly done-by, insipid with
liturgy, picking the sin from the treads
of your wellies. get up […]

[…] up
you beautiful loafers, serfs, the barbed-
wire wills of you girl, like a slip
of paper in a psalter, pressed, up to
your ankles in pasqueflower. there
is trouble ahead, there is work to do.

(from ‘I come with the...’)

Lock’s Mary is drawn from the non-canonical Gospel of Mary, a fragmentary Coptic text which, in relation to Jesus, places her on equal footing with (or even higher than) the Disciples. She is not only the one person who remains with him at Calvary and the first to see him resurrected in his tomb, but she is also portrayed as an inspirational leader, trusted and loved by Jesus above all his other (male) disciples.

The voice of all the poems (Mary’s voice, although it seems to blend with Lock’s own, particularly in those poems which address modern Britain directly) refers to Jesus as “my beloved” throughout; but the love being worshipped here is not sexual or romantic. It is not quite a Christian love either (although the multiple references to mouths, particularly open ones, do make me wonder if there is a hidden pun on agape /əˈɡeɪp/ and agape /ˈaɡəpiː/).

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Love here is a powerful giving of the self to ‘The People’, a rejection of money and power in favour of the freedom of the oppressed from their oppressors. It is, in fact, a radical political impulse and intimately tied up with the notion of sacrifice, Jesus’s crucifixion being the ultimate example. But Lock takes it further. Just as the miraculous Resurrection of Christ comes about because of the political insurrection of Jesus (the cleansing of the temple), his insurrection in turn becomes a metaphorical prototype for our own reawakening or resurrection – a social rising, a surrection, or revolution:

[...] we
are the resurrection. the hinge
on which the word hangs,
the axis upon which history
turns.

(from ‘Our resurrection’)

As the biblical Jesus returned and rose from death, so must the ‘we’, the powerless, the proletariat (“the swaggering pentameters of truants and scallies”, “the men who exist on offcuts / of overtime”, “all the daughters of enforcement”), return from a symbolic death of apathy and rise against the powerful owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie, the ‘them’ or, in the most accusatory poems, the ‘you’ (or ‘us’, I suppose, depending on who the reader is).

[…] you
are the bane and the burden. you break our
legs and sell us crutches. you’ve handed
us an apple, saying eat around the razor-
blades.

(from ‘and woes...’)

And so the powerless are to rise up against the powerful. Why? Lock is not suggesting anything as simplistic as a parallel between Heaven and some future Socialist Utopia. But we do, I think, find that her understanding of Christian and Revolutionary love leads towards a different kind of parallel, one between the Communist Manifesto, with its claim that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”, and the Gospel of Mary, where Mary reports Christ as saying, “all of nature with its forms and creatures exist together, interwoven with each other”.

In both texts, then, the wellbeing of the individual is fundamentally bound up with the wellbeing of the crowd. Lock uses a quote from Mary’s Gospel to begin ‘Regarding nature’, the most radiant poem I have read in a long time. It’s an unusually restrained 15-line piece in which we can almost see, touch, and smell flowers giving themselves to the world. It is utterly gorgeous, and ends with what is, for me, the collection’s lyrical heart and intellectual highlight:

[…] the flower is fleeting, but flowers
return. from forms and frailties infinite,
much yet to hope, much yet to learn.

As in Marx, and as in Mary’s Gospel, the strength of the One is rooted in the Many, and vice versa; and in that inevitable return of the plural, there is cause for hope. In a collection which defines much in terms of the negative, this positive core feels crucial. The positive does not leaven the negative, so much as show us the engine that powers revolutionary thought. What God is not is as important as what God is: “god is not a badge you polish to belonging”, “the kingdom / of god is not / a promise, but / a possibility”. These negatives are all of a piece with the revolutionary mindset. One thing must be pulled down, after all, before its replacement can be built.

And the same goes for the figure of Mary herself, who is purged of the Patriarchy in an early poem, ‘Seven Devils’, where Lock draws from Luke 8:2 and has Jesus cast devils of multiple but ultimately male ‘negatives’ out of Mary (“seven sins / seven stains, seven bosses — / seven men”). The voice that speaks to us in subsequent poems – on behalf of all women, in Lock’s view (“The fate of Mary Magdalene is the fate of all women”), is symbolically cleansed of the centuries of male misrepresentation and repression.

It is a voice that is impossible to ignore.

Chris Edgoose is a poet and blogger at Wood Bee Poet. He lives near Cambridge in the UK, and has had work published in several magazines in print and online.

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.

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Rec.

There are days, of course, I don’t know what to say.
Sometimes it’s plain wonder, like this late sun
set over the rec against a full moon –
	       the interplay

of bare trees and our stilt-walking shadows.
More often though, come find me at a loss
as the future flatlines all around us,
	       rolling news

it’s easier to deflect or deflate
with the full range of absent-minded routines
our domesticated comity
	       allows for.

Perhaps that’s why I’m attracted to this
simplified landscape, with its single hill
and the looping path for runners, lovers,
	       and dog-walkers

(occasionally, all three at once),
taking in that sparse wood, a moated isle,
the municipal al fresco gym –
	       but largely

the blank sky and a rippling sheet of grass
fitted to each point of the compass.
The rec is a manageable arena
	       for tired thoughts

and on this ghost of an afternoon
it’s the ghosts I’m mostly thinking of:
how in the middle of my life I find
	       them crowding in.

Moon mirrors sun. Between them, long shadows.
The rec itself is a kind of mirror,
and if confronted with such things we are
	       known to pause,

looking beyond, to scan who else is there,
that’s just what happens when we’ve lived a little
and we have lived a little of what our
	       ghosts did not.

‘Rec.’ is from Summers Are Other by Andrew Neilson (Rack Press, 2025) — big thanks to Andrew Neilson and to Rack Press for letting us reproduce it here.

Andrew Neilson is on record (for Poetry Wales) as quoting his friend and teacher, Michael Donaghy, himself channelling C.K. Williams:

Emotions, particularly those involving grief, are far from clear after all. They can take years to understand, because they require a ‘stringent attentiveness […] if the soul is to do justice to their turbulence and furore’. […] And that is how I try to write poems, with a stringent attentiveness to emotion.

Whatever the implications are for Neilson of that abstract notion and its metaphysical, possibly religious, underpinning, this stringency seems to have extended to restricting his output to two dozen published poems in the last decade. One should bear in mind, perhaps, that he holds a responsible, public-facing job, and that four years ago he co-founded and co-edits (with his wife the poet Kathryn Gray) online journal Bad Lilies. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that this is the first assembly of his poems. I hesitate to say ‘collection’ because this is a thin pamphlet of only nine poems, perhaps designed to showcase his range.

The opening sonnet, ‘Little Griefs’, enumerates, in the octet, a list of sorrows small and not-so-small, beginning with “The hamster buried in the back garden” and ending with “the small child who hugged you tightly”, who “now claims her own world and stretches to it”. Both illustrate instances familiar to parents. The sestet broadens the poem from the mostly personal to the philosophical:

No need to reason, or profess belief,
to know these moments don’t disappear,
but like angels dancing, on their pin,
the little griefs grow great. Then grow again.

Neilson uses commas to slow down the reader and enable them to absorb the full force of each clause and sub-clause, including that reference to the post-Reformation satire of Thomist theology in the penultimate line. His rhymes are often clever: he pairs “garden” with “starred in”, and “eschew it” with “stretches to it”. In fact each pair of rhymes in the poem is full, except, to my English lugs, the half rhymes of the closing couplet, though they may well be full(ish) to Neilson’s Scottish ones.

‘Corrections’ has a title, tone and elegance reminiscent of Donaghy, and consequently the Metaphysical poets and the Formalists (such as Hecht, Merrill and Wilbur) who influenced him. Consider its first stanza:

First came the storm, each strange flurried grasp
followed by those fitful buffetings,
as if the sky was an unfolded sheet
draped over and around, beaten and cracked
by what unfriendly, disembodied hands?

The sentence morphs from the confidence of statement and assertion into the uncertainty of a grand question. The piling-up of adjectives is a technique which today’s workshop orthodoxy might frown on, but these lines would surely be poorer without it. The story-telling in the poem could well be either perfectly true or a tall tale, and the reader gains from not being entirely sure one way or the other. Like ‘Little Griefs’ (and the next poem, ‘Meek’), ‘Corrections’ ends with a short half-line phrase – a technique which, like the clicking into place of a Shakespearean couplet, provides a satisfying and resonant closure.

‘Meek’ is a portrait in seven couplets of the British pop impresario, Joe Meek. Meek was gay at a time when male homosexuality was still illegal. He died in 1967, aged just 37. His death was violent and self-inflicted, and followed his murder of Violet Shenton, his landlady. But the poem briefly shifts in the fourth and fifth couplets into a brief anecdote whose provenance may, or equally may not, be suspect:

Thirty years later a woman I knew
lived in the flat and we did what you do

when you’re young and in love, or think you are,
and the sounds you hear don’t come from a star

I would happily quote the whole ending here, but that would be to spoil the prospective reader’s pleasure. The clauses from “we did” to that wry aside “or think you are” are especially Donaghy-esque in their flourish. It’s a poem whose richness becomes more appreciable with every reading. Neilson makes a witty pun on “the same plane”, gives a deftly economical description of the deaths, and name checks the prototype synthesiser which featured so memorably on Meek’s most famous production, the Tornados’ ‘Telstar’, the first British record to reach number one in the USA.

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‘The Instrument’ is arguably the most Donaghy-like poem of all. Neilson narrates the unfolding of events delicately, and finds joy in technical terms (“wrest pins and hammers”) and word-play (“Or thought unthought, nearing thought”). He subtly conveys the sense that the narrator may be unreliable, but trusts the reader to go along with the mystery of the poem without a neat denouement. Like Donaghy, Neilson can write abstract assertions which fall beautifully on the reader’s ear and then settle in their mind. ‘The Instrument’ lands with a Scottish note, and also with an element of Surrealism reminiscent of the Peter Lorre film The Beast with Five Fingers:

The way up here is to say nothing of it.
Perhaps it was the nothing of these things
that now made the instrument play.

But while clearly influenced by Donaghy, Neilson isn’t his imitator. With short-lined, ABBA-rhymed quatrains, ‘In Cool Descent’ takes its title and cue from a poem about spiders by E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web. It considers, not too seriously, spiders’ web-weaving “those finely sprung radials // as shaped as memories, / the close work / they cannot shirk”, and what lessons they might have for us.

‘Rec.’, like Larkin’s ‘Afternoons’, is set in a recreation ground and has a similarly downbeat, reflective spirit to it. But where Larkin’s narrator turns his gaze on young mothers and children at summer’s end, and rather condescendingly imagines their home lives and the limits of their ambitions, Neilson’s afternoon is in late-autumn and sees him examining the self as much as his surroundings. It opens:

There are days, of course, I don’t know what to say.
Sometimes it’s plain wonder, like this late sun
set over the rec against a full moon –

This is splendidly lyrical poetry, in unpretentious yet still emotionally affecting language. The rhyme-scheme of the first two stanzas is abandoned from the third, almost as if the poet–persona senses that the familiarity of the rec is unworthy of it. But the poem continues in a fairly high register, addressing “this / simplified landscape” with “that sparse wood, a moated isle, / the municipal al fresco gym”. The park is “a manageable arena / for tired thoughts” as Neilson cutely puts it. It’s another poem which demands repeated readings. Neilson’s command of syntax across line- and stanza-breaks is exemplary, and here it’s assisted by his imagery (“our stilt-walking shadows”), a shift into the imperative, and that exquisite “domesticated comity”. The rest of the poem – and its autumnal, Macbethian contemplation of the fleetingness of life – is equally striking.

‘The Viaduct’ is a short, short-lined and lovely elegy in four ABBA-rhymed quatrains, dedicated to Neilson’s uncle. The recollection of walking with his uncle is infused with a quiet melancholy, and conveys Neilson’s keenly-felt responsibility to pass on avuncular wisdom to his daughter: “I must teach her the laws / that govern this matter, // how the viaduct’s span / becomes heartsore and steep.” That archaism “heartsore” suits the mood beautifully.

In the tradition of Burns, MacDiarmid, Jamie and other Scottish poets writing in both ‘standard’ English and Scots, Neilson renders Yeats’s 1893 poem ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ into Scots, as ‘Wha Stows Wi Fergus?’. This, however, is no direct translation. Rather, it’s a curious, irreverent and funny updating, in a voice redolent of the novels of Irvine Welsh, including several contemporary references and giving a name to the anonymous ‘maid’ of Yeats’s original. This exercise could easily have tipped into parody but Neilson avoids that trap, retaining the wording, suitably turned into Scots, of some of Yeats’s lines, while taking greater liberties with others.

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The pamphlet closes with ‘Winding River’, a translation of a poem by the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu. There are no notes to indicate whether Neilson has a command of 8^th century Chinese; I’m presuming he hasn’t. Perhaps this is his attempt at a more concise and more poetic rewriting of one of the many flat and seemingly literal versions available online, (such as Kenneth Rexroth’s flowery, ‘By the Winding River’, in his One Hundred Poems from the Chinese published in 1956). Nice as Neilson’s version is, I’m not sure that it serves much purpose other than to demonstrate the breadth of his interests and ability. It seems to me a somewhat disappointing end to the pamphlet. This apart, Summers Are Other is a richly eclectic treasure box which showcases the poet’s fine technical prowess, ear for lyrical lines and sentences, and ability to marry memorable imagery with thoughtful and unsentimental, yet affecting, phrasing. Stringently attentive, indeed.

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

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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Some days I’m the oak, those years
of learning written in rings

inside me. At other times
I’m the concrete weir, whose sharp

and shaming edge interrupts
the water’s flow. If I step

outside myself, I see both
oak and weir, how suffering

shapes their being. It’s then that
compassion grows. The stream feeds

the oak, softens the weir’s edge,
and knows no words, nor needs them.

‘Outside’ is from Still by Alan Buckley (Blue Diode Press, 2025) — big thanks to Rob Mackenzie at Blue Diode, and Alan Buckley, for letting us reproduce it here.

Alan Buckley’s new collection is self-consciously self-conscious. But in a good way. In fact, there’s even a nine-page ‘Note on the Form and the Place’ at the end of the book, where the poet outlines how the collection developed in thematic and technical terms, explaining elements of his method.

Buckley is hugely aware. Of the self. Of the natural and social world around the self. Of the relationship between them. Of the uses of language in poetry, starting with this collection’s title. The word ‘still’ appears nine times throughout the book, used in different ways and in different contexts, underlining the multiplicity of its semantic and syntactic roles.

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However, there’s another word that’s repeated far more frequently. ‘But’ (or its variant, ‘yet‘) crops up no fewer than twenty-two times. Often its role is pivotal, acting as a hinge where a poem opens into its core, or is balancing two perspectives, or at a point of movement between the natural world and human feeling. Here are a couple of instances:

[…] The air’s begun

to cool down. But in my back
the fox’s eyes keep burning.

(from ‘Fox’)

I know you’re hurting. Being
here feels too much. But would you

choose to leave a place that can
offer you moments like this?

(from ‘Seesaw’)

In metrical terms, this last extract also feels especially interesting as an example of the poet’s technique. Let’s look at why.

These twelve-line poems are in syllabics. However, Buckley’s clearly aware that the coherent and cogent use of such a form in English cannot ignore the natural stresses running through each line, the iambs and trochees, the anapests and dactyls – all surging and ebbing within a syllabic framework that offers a quieter music just below those stresses.

As the poet explains in his notes, he’s decided to write in heptasyllabic lines. Given the predominance of iambs and trochees in English-language poetry, this is an unusual choice, not least because syllabics naturally lend themselves to even-numbered lines. So why seven syllables? Well, as Buckley states himself:

I like the unexpected rhythms the seven-syllable line throws up, always hovering between three and four stresses without ever settling on either. And I like the way it creates an intense focus on line breaks and word choice […].

Going back to the closing couplets of ‘Seesaw‘ (quoted above), it’s possible to see this technique in action. Every line seems to hold back the natural final word or syllable, then deliver it as the opening word to the following line.

If Buckley has a focus on generating pivots and hinges within each poem, as discussed earlier, so the stresses and syllables of each line offer a microcosm of that same device, demonstrating the unity of his approach, always striking a balance, always seeking out counterpoints. Moreover, that unity is present in other ways through the book, from the word ‘Balance‘ being invoked as the title for one of the individual poems, to the use of ‘Here (I)‘, ‘There’, and ‘Here (II)‘ as titles for the collection’s sections.

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The poems in Still are rooted in a place and in the daily experience of walking through that place. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that they turn their back on the explicit exploration of concepts or ideas. In fact, the opposite is true, as in ‘Muntjac’, reproduced here in full:

Months back I’d startled one off
the path, the fear in its blank

gaze a mirror of my own.
Now, walking up from the brook,

I glance ahead at the gap
in the spinney, see a strange

animal in silhouette,
with four wings raised on its back.

A small reminder – thank you –
that fear can be close to joy.

The deer bolts, hurling the pair
of magpies into the air.

Few contemporary UK poets are as comfortable as Buckley in their invocation of abstract nouns. In this case, as in many others, he brackets them with real and/or surreal concrete experiences, yoking them to a specific context of layered nuances.

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In his approach to prosody, in his use of language, and in the way he delves into life, Buckley continually demonstrates a fierce ambition, the poet refusing to take the easy way out of the poem’s emotional truth. He might easily be labelled a poet’s poet for the way he implicitly encourages other writers to revisit their own methods, but his poetry is also accessible, working through universal ideas via apparently simple language. Still will appeal to a broad church, but should also find a particular niche among poetry aficionados. It deserves both.

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

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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