Half a page, half a page onward

Three Friday Poems for you from our Archive, one from Meg Peacocke, one from Mark Granier and one from Kathy Pimlott.

May 15, 2026

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

Book

by M.R. Peacocke

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything You Always Wanted To Know

by Mark Granier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Baby in the Wardrobe

by Kathy Pimlott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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