Interrogating the bare expanse

Victoria Moul and Hilary Menos discuss 'The Gathering' by Partridge Boswell, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Competition

Hilary: So, the dust has started to settle on this year’s National Poetry Competition winners announcement. We’ve all read the winning poem, ‘The Gathering’ by Partridge Boswell, of Vermont, and the second placed poem, ‘Axe’, by Damen O’Brien, from Queensland, Australia, and the third placed poem, ‘Badminton’, by Zoe Dorado, from California, and we’ve all muttered something about how none of the top three are British, as far as we can tell, or living in Britain, so why is the competition called the National rather than the Open or the International? Then we’ve gone back and really looked at the winning poem again, and … well.

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.

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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.

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.

It seems to me to have almost all the vices of the typical ‘poetry magazine’ poem and no real redeeming features

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?

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.

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?

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

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Hilary Menos is Editor of The Friday Poem.

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