The cutlery. The fruit. My god.

Helena Nelson and Hilary Menos discuss the five pamphlets shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets

Jun 05, 2026

The Michael Marks Awards Ceremony for Poetry Pamphlets
is on Tuesday 9th June at the Pavilion Theatre, British Library, London
from 18.30 to 19.30
It’s free, but booking is required. Doors open at 18.15
BOOK HERE

What should a pamphlet do?

Hilary: For me, a pamphlet should contain a set of poems that’s unified, one way or another – through theme, style, voice. I need to feel there’s a reason for this particular set to be stapled together. I get a bit sad when I read a dozen poems that work well as a set, mixed with half a dozen shoved in to make up the numbers. Wait. Work at it. Of course you can get around this by simply calling it ‘Recent Poems’ or some suchlike (Hugh Foley, I see you).

I’d like each pamphlet poem to pretty much stand on its own two feet, although there’s some flexibility here because we’re expecting to bring context (the poems should speak to each other). I want the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Nell: Right enough. Synergy. Although sometimes a fifteen-of-my-best-poems chapbook can mysteriously achieve this anyway. Is there any ’should’ at all? I’m not sure. There’s a ‘shouldn’t’ though. I think pamphlets shouldn’t try to be books. These days there’s such intense publicity. Entering competitions puts too much stress on them. They should be able to get on with doing what they want. No pressure. Having a bit of a fling. A chance to try things out on readers, something to give away or sell at readings. There’s a lot to be said for interesting flaws.

Hilary: When production values are high, it’s hard to treat them as lightly as that. Look at Hercules Editions pamphlets, for example, and some of your more recent ones from HappenStance. They’re more like small books, and I guess people treat them as such. I’ve only read these five shortlisted publications in pdf form. You’ve got the actual things. What are they like to handle?

Nell: Foley’s is the most pamphletty. It’s pocket-sized, looks unassuming and is saddle-stitched (stapled). Thin covers. Attractively modest. The only one without a Contents page. The others are booklets, perfect bound, with heavy-weight card backing and efficient spines – more the current trend. Appleby and Ellis have lettered backbones you could just about read on a book shelf.

Hilary: But when it comes to reading the poems themselves, I found a variety of barriers to understanding and pleasure in each one. How accessible should a pamphlet poem (or set of poems) be?

Nell: More to the point, to whom should it be accessible? In other words, how wide a readership? Is the Michael Marks panel expecting poems directed at readers like them? And what are they like? Karen McCarthy Woolf (Carcanet poet, editor, Fulbright post-doc scholar, Goldsmith’s creative writing teacher), Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet poet, The Little Review editor, journalist, Substacker), and Eleanor Dickens (British Library archivist of contemporary lit stuff).

Hilary: And what are their judgement criteria? The best set of poems? Or the best publication? And is there any difference? (Those who enter the publishers’ award have to submit information about their “philosophy, aims, plans, design ethos and marketing strategy as well as the quality of the poetry and physical pamphlets”.)

Photos of the five poets — James Appleby, Rachel Cleverly, Eve Ellis, Hugh Foley and Hasti

Opening salvoes

Hilary: Whatever the judgement criteria, it seems fair to assume both poet and publisher want to grab attention on the first page. So how successful are they? Let’s talk about the opening poems of each, starting with Hugh Foley.

from NO MONUMENT
What else should tempt them back to taste our air
Except to see how their successors fare?
(1)
We decorate our fate. That’s the simplest
way of saying it. The way the seeing
of a gleaming on a leaf means separating
things out. With consequences. I was leafing
through thick romances, to ironise them and reveal
a newly immanent critique of stylised despair.
You were doing the same
thing. The benison of the hedges. Gold
in leaf, aflame. You can’t see. Agramante meant
no harm to our Christian kingdom
but he should have. Love is crazy. As
the zip at your back catches
the light, the indifferent identity of gold goes.
Each tooth a flash in the pan, piercing sweet by the river.

Nell: The modesty of Foley’s A6 publication appealed to me. But I found this sonnetty opening off-putting. Why? Too many allusions to swallow. ‘No Monument’ sounds like Shakespeare. The epigraph (thank you, Google) is Sordello (Robert Browning). Googling ‘Agramante’ took me to Ariosto (I should have known). Then there’s “The benison of the hedges” (Rupert Brooke?) Pop culture one moment (“Love is crazy”) and weird the next: “leafing / through thick romances, to ironise them and reveal / a nearly immanent critique of stylised despair”. (Who does that?).

Most of all, I couldn’t warm to the closing line. I don’t care for the rhythm, and I don’t much like “flash in the pan”. As for “piercing sweet by the river”, it sounds sentimental. Google suggests it’s the other Browning. Lord save us, Elizabeth. Is this some kind of joke?

Hilary: The approach reminds me of the first time I read, actually read, T.S Eliot. Allusions, references, borrowings. Though TSE (famously) included notes – at least in The Waste Land. Is this a legitimate modernist strategy? Foley risks his poem feeling like a hollow piñata, massively over-decorated, and needing considerable pummelling to get to the riches inside.

Can we make head or tail of the content? Let’s see. Two people (partners, probably) are reading outside, near a hedge. A leaf gleams gold. This inspires the speaker to conclude that we “decorate our fate.” Does he mean we accept the inevitability of things, and find beauty in them? “The way the seeing / of a gleaming on a leaf means separating things out. / With consequences.” (I find all those ‘ing’ sounds distracting.) Does he mean that the act of seeing requires an understanding that the person seeing is different and separate from the thing seen? “You can’t see” comes apropos of this, so seeing is clearly important. Agramente was a Saracen king who invaded Europe to avenge the death of his father. I’m not sure what he’s doing in the poem. Back to the speaker’s companion/lover with “Love is crazy”, and a link between the gold of a zip (cue idea of undressing) and the gold of the leaf, which now “goes”. A “flash in the pan” takes me to panning for gold, appropriate if they’re by a river. Confused? I am.

Nell: All my metal zips are silver. I was drawn to “The way the seeing / of a gleaming on a leaf means separating things out. / With consequences.” I’ve thought about it for ages. I don’t understand it but I don’t think it’s lightly said. And although the allusions are taxing, I don’t believe the author’s trying to impress. This is just him. His mental world. But I find this poem hard work.

Hilary: What about Hasti’s pamphlet, young, dumb, and full of poems. The opening poem is rather different. What do you make of ‘Poet as Cyborg Pornstar’?

Nell: I’ve read a lot of poems with titles like that. Portrait of the Poet as Washing Machine, Portrait of the Poet as Dead Crab, Self-Portrait as Reincarnation of Buddha. That kind of thing. Poet and Cyborg Pornstar is about the most unlikely pairing, I guess, and it connects with sex and therefore merits attention. But by line three the end word is “fucking” with a line break before “hot”. Hardly subtle. Then a bit of textese: “I am peeling / my skin 4 u.” I know it ought to be entertaining, but I’m not enjoying it. Probably too old. Sorry Hasti.

Hilary: I bet the title came first. Hasti’s having fun, and also wants to shock. The poem references Donna Haraway, feminist author of A Manifesto for Cyborgs, who invites us to imagine “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with ... machines.” Haraway may not have had sex robots in mind, but this is where Hasti takes it. And why not? As a theme, it’s an interesting one. Will the advent of sex robot technology usher in the demise of intimate relationships in the modern world? Don’t sex robots dehumanise women and girls, reducing them to consumable parts?

I don’t think Hasti addresses such questions here though; and if she’s expressing an opinion on the ethics of cyborg porn, I’m not hearing it. The poem seems to function mainly as a vehicle for the title. There’s odd syntax (“With her long French tips and how their bodies work.”), as well as bits of text-speak and a lot of what sounds like collaged material. I get a glimpse of a futuristic world where sex is monetised and consent is irrelevant: “Outsource ur erotics / to the moneymakers”. I think she might be heading into interesting territory with, “Let’s talk about it: how we fabricate intimacy”, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even make much sense: what are the “the wet scapes of the world” and how can they be “scolded back to rigid, flashy direction”?

Also, I don’t know what the layout adds – two dramatically indented lines in the middle make the shape like a horseshoe on its side.

Nell: I didn’t like it enough to work at it. Fortunately I liked later poems much more.

Hilary: Let’s move on to Eve Ellis’s pamphlet, spit valve. Her first poem is ‘All My Dead Relatives are Picnicking on the Banks of the Tennessee’.

Nell: Is there a name for this type of title – a long, descriptive complete sentence? I see a lot of them now. At first I thought they were interestingly different. Now I think they’re interestingly the same. But dead relatives are always something. At first I was reminded of Charles Causley’s ‘Eden Rock’, which most people (including me) love. That made the horror, as it unfolded, even more horrible.

This one is easy to read. Clear. No super-clever references or trendy techniques: not one verbless sentence. No fancy line breaks. A solid block, with lines visually about the same length but relaxed, no particular metrical or syllabic pattern. The girl who laughs “high and zithery” turns out to be the main interest. Her laugh turns to a “zithershriek”. This is the only opening poem with a story (a horror story). I was absolutely appalled. This is good writing, I think, but I didn’t want to go into its world again. Ever.

Hilary: I read this pamphlet when it came out, and coming back to it now, this was the poem I remembered most vividly. I’ve had enough of poets excavating their pain, and a whole pamphlet of trauma leaves me cold, but to be fair I think this poem is evocative, and convincing – except, perhaps, for that last line,

She’s at the river, kneeling in the shallows, looking
for the place where her mouth used to be.

I find this over-dramatic, weakly unspecific, not even properly surreal. I understand she’s lost something, but I don’t get anything interesting from this last line, and I’m left wondering what they actually did to her mouth. In her conversation on the Michael Marks website Ellis says the pamphlet is “1% fact, 99% imagination. Is that an issue?

Nell: I found the last line immensely disturbing. I assumed the young girl’s mouth was torn and bleeding, like other more intimate parts. But yes, fact versus invention is an issue for me. Only 1% fact? I had assumed this dealt with a gang rape, something that happened to a real person, probably a relative. I can’t imagine why anyone would invent it.

Hilary: What about the first (and title) poem in Spurious Language by James Appleby?

Nell: A left-justified prose poem. A series of sentence fragments without finite verbs. Prose rhythms partly driven by repetitions of the word “Language(s)”. I’ve read too many poems following a similar pattern, though this poet does what he does slickly. He uses the American spelling in “you have practiced” both here and in the next poem – this causes me pain (most readers wouldn’t notice). He throws in an impossibly compound noun – “Language-so-agglutinative-each-word-eats-the-next.” Then there are witty bits (they’ll get a laugh in performance). And a bit of sexual allusion. Playful, certainly. But.

Hilary: This is an interesting subject, though, don’t you think? More so than critiques of stylised despair, sex robots or trauma (real or imaginary). And readable, accessible, understandable without googling, and therefore thought-provoking rather than just provoking. What constitutes language? What sort of things display features of language? Appleby starts with the concept of spurious languages, moves on to braille and semaphore, and then goes off on one. It’s playful and fun, and if I was writing puff for it I’d use the word ‘bravura’, but I don’t think you’d agree.

Nell: Yes, the subject has possibilities, and he’s certainly aiming for bravura. I got stuck on the second sentence: “What can be read by the Braille of your skin.” Braille’s a language of lumps and bumps, a tactile communication. But the passive construction sounds as though Braille itself is the reader.) Perhaps he might have said “from the Braille of your skin”.) So though he’s driving the thinking via ideas of what a spurious language might be, he keeps changing his syntactical pattern. “Semicolon of the clever remark you have practiced in front of a mirror”, for example, isn’t a language, although “Swearing considered as the alarm call of small animals” might be. “Imperative of nerve signal when you write by hand” doesn’t seem a form of language to me though it’s punning on “imperative” as a verb form. The last few sentences adopt more of a repetitive pattern and allow for a strong ending.

Hilary: Last but not least of the starting poems is ‘Toil’, the first poem in Rachel Cleverly’s pamphlet from flipped eye, Prickle. What did you think of this as an opener?

Toil
My employers force me to take holiday.
I don’t have the money to go anywhere.
I spend the morning watching pigeons
eating vomit in the Asda car park.
I’d rather be at work, with my camera off.
I don’t like to be involved. I find
a listing for free comedy. I am hot
in the audience, in the dark, my beer green
in the stage light. A comedian impersonates
a paper straw. She says: Don’t pretend
you’ve not been watching me. Buy me a drink.
I sip my beer and feel anaemic and the comedian
inhales a glass of clear liquid. The set ends
when my tongue is coated with something
the texture of algae. I am wilting in the dark.
I hold the glass between my legs and clap.

Nell: Hm. Double spaced formatting this time. Why? This is her only double-spaced poem. Harder to slip into the flow when every line’s its own unit. Personally I wouldn’t have opened with this one. By lines three/four she’s “watching pigeons // eating vomit in Asda car park.” Why is this so nasty – especially when “vomit” is delayed over a double-spaced line break?‘I’ appears eight times in this poem, I notice. (In their opening poems, Foley has one ‘I’, Hasti has three. Appleby and Ellis have none.) Cleverly’s first person is not having a good time. Me, I could probably find the central viewpoint sympathetic if the double-spacing wasn’t so assertive. But I know that’s unreasonable and there is much I like here, including no literary references, no irony (so far as I can tell), pleasingly few adjectives and apparently no metaphors or similes. In fact, that is interesting.

Hilary: Yes, there are good things here. Clarity. A certain flatness of tone. I don’t feel as if the poem, or the poet, has designs on me, which is refreshing. However I too am held up by the vomit. What is pigeons-eating-vomit a metaphor for? Is it exploring how the poet feels about daily existence, so … disgust? Pigeons eating vomit as a metaphor for anything just can’t be good.

Nell: I didn’t think it was a metaphor at all. Isn’t it simply that her life is so empty that she sits and watches pigeons, wishing she was at work?

Hilary: Like you, I’m not sure this poem is the best one to open the pamphlet with, but it does leave me wanting to read more. I’m relieved that Cleverly’s subjects – crappy employers, poverty, illness, the modern city-dweller’s condition – are not obviously ‘poetic’ ones. I like the short end-stopped lines, and the slightly surreal tone. The poem is like a series of dispatches from a place you’d rather not visit. Something of the narrator’s character comes through, too, and I have a sense that our trip round the seamy underbelly of her life will be entertaining.

Let’s switch to the publicity poems on the Michael Marks website. One assumes they chose the poems that best illustrate the poet‘s style.

Nell: Or examples that are accessible or striking − the ones most likely to entice people along to the awards ceremony.

Hilary: You cynic.

Michael Marks

Hilary: Let’s start with ‘In Lidl’ by Rachel Cleverly.

Nell: I think this is a cracking poem. In fact, it’s my favourite of hers. It looks ordinary but it isn’t. I can relate to the situation of standing in a shop queue seeing someone I know further in front. “I wasn’t thinking / of him when I should or might / have been, given that almost / everyone looked like him”, she says. So really she was thinking about him, wasn’t she? Nobody doesn’t remind her of him. And her tone is so trusting, confiding. Absolutely not trying to shock. As if she’s sharing her private thoughts. And then she does shock, with what perhaps is the truth: “I do think about him / often: e.g. when someone / I’m sleeping with hits me”. That sounds like she might be going into trauma territory but she’s more interesting than that. She moves towards something lighter:

My boyfriend has recently
told me I often use e.g.
when I mean i.e. He explained
the distinction, and I’d thought
about him then, too.

This is such an interesting narrator. Vulnerable. Open. I’ve come to care about this girl. And the last three lines are a metaphor for her existence I think:

I almost want him
to see me, too. He can’t: I am too
many people away, holding onto fruit
I am almost ready to put back.

Hilary: The word ‘almost’ is the dominant feature of this piece – four in the first stanza, three in the final stanza and another five shared between the middle four stanzas. (It made me wonder whether this poem of six sestets hadn’t started off as a sestina.) Almost … almost … this repetition creates a sense of not having quite arrived somewhere, or of a lack of commitment, an oscillating between choices. I, too, like what she’s doing.

Cleverly says her pamphlet is “about itching, discomfort and being a generally dry person.” She says it’s “a lot of narrative-based poems which use humour to make light of the everyday. It’s uncomfortable and icky but a lot of fun.” Well, her “everyday” actually sounds pretty appalling – lousy relationships, lousy beds, lousy flats. I hope she’s using poetic licence to up the ick, for her sake. However, I find the pamphlet readable and entertaining. She has a distinctive voice, and the poems all hang together and cohere round a theme.

Nell: I think there’s plenty of sadness in Prickle too. ‘Streaming’ is relationship-sad, and so are ’Best Seat in the House’ and ‘Spread’. I didn’t enjoy everything, though. One or two seemed to demonstrate poetic versatility (e.g. ‘[Enter me]’ and ‘Submissions’) more than anything else. But I thought her work was really interesting, and that’s worth a lot. What do you think of ‘Love Bugs’? It’s longer, ambitious in its scope, with different characters and voices.

Hilary: Amusing and horrifying in equal measure. Cleverly’s good at finding humour in a situation, and the humour isn’t laboured. The poem’s part comedy, part tragedy. “I recently started / moving his things in; / he recently started trying to leave me.” What’s it all about? Ostensibly, a bed bug infestation. But it’s also about housing conditions, the narrator’s relationship with her boyfriend, and her own self esteem.

I ask Vicki, an exterminator, to connect on LinkedIn.
We DM a bit. I send tasteful nudes of my back
sloppily covered in bites. I discover these are
stains from my (homemade!) coffee facemask
which somehow seems less like self-care
and more disgusting now.

I like her candour and (as you say above) her vulnerability. There’s a real sharpness in lines like “pulling a shrunken hoodie from the dryer: I whispered / I’ll be keeping this for your grandkids”. This pulls the poem back from being full-on mawkish confessional. She’s having a bit of a time, but at least she’s got perspective on it.

I found similar self-deprecating humour in ‘Off the Clock’, where the narrator advertises for someone to share her “affordably small” flat. The new flatmate, a “senior consultant”, teaches her a range of life skills before deciding that he prefers not sharing a bathroom, and moving out.

He taught me to turn the heating on when I was home alone.
He taught me to stack the dishwasher, cutlery sharp side up
for a thorough clean. He taught me not to fear
use-by dates, unwashed fruit, the TV Licence people.

The poem ends:

I look around my flat and see what there is to do.
How I lived before. The cutlery. The fruit. My god.

The horror! But it’s also funny. I’m not sure how much she’s taking the piss, and how much she’s actually disgusted by the gritty reality of her life. Cleverly walks this line with flair, creating a lovely balance between humour and unease. Sometimes I feel she veers rather too far into unease. For example, in ‘Baby on Board’, she reluctantly relinquishes her seat on the bus to a pregnant woman (“I want your seat not your life, / says the pregnant lady”) then considers the noises her friends’ “variously-sized offspring” might make if she dropped them on patio floors, especially newborns. “Their heads. Their necks.” I think she may be stretching our credulity too far here, and this particular poem doesn’t have a lot else going on.

Back to Foley now. What about his publicity poem – ‘Snowdrops’. Was this an obvious one to pick out as his show piece? It doesn’t seem to me really illustrative of his style.

Nell: No, not in the least. Although it does suggest he might be a lyric poet, as he himself says in his Michael Marks conversation. And it looks clear, short and anthologisable, at least at first glance, and anthologisable poems are remembered. People like poems about snowdrops. It looks (like Blake) simple. In fact, it’s really hard to understand (like Blake). What (for example) is “not like saying snowdrops”?

Hilary: I played with the idea of pronouncing “snowdrops” as two separate words, (snow drops), but Foley could indicate that with a space, and doesn’t. It’s playful – the run around snowdrops, droop and drop. Perhaps “supposedly already dropped” means the flowers have formed in their droplet shape? It’s a jump from they have dropped to they are dropped '“as we are dropped”. What, dropped onto this planet, and alive as opposed to dead (as we will drop)? Birth, life, death – all the big themes.

Nell: None of which are the central idea, I think. He drops in “drop“ so many times that it stops having meaning. If he had opened with “It’s not like saying snow drops”, he would have been making sense. He’s chosen not to.

Hilary: He’s making sense at the start of the second stanza. “I slow down / to point out the snowdrops and / say snowdrops”– terra firma at last! He’s on a walk with his young daughter, mentioned in the Michael Marks conversation. He slows and points and speaks NOT because he’s full of the joys of spring, and NOT because he wants to show them to his child, he doesn’t do it “for any reason”. Is it even possible to do something for no reason?

Nell: When a poem lists things that something is not (an interesting technique), there’s an unstated contract with the reader that what it actually is will eventually emerge, even if only by implication. But not here. So what’s going on?

Hilary: Is he saying something about instinctive behaviour in a parent? Beyond reason? That the process of speaking a child when you’re its parent is different from other modes of speech?

Nell: I have no idea. But what he says at the end doesn’t add up. Human attention is drawn to snowdrops because they’re the first flowers of the year. They’re white and therefore eye-catching. Most people are pleased to point them out, not least to children. However, this chap says he stops and says ‘snowdrops’ for no reason. He’s switched to second person now though, and may be generalising: “It’s not for any reason, that’s not / why you see them, or why you stop.” But nobody does anything for no reason. The reason may be unconscious, but it’s there.

Hilary: Let’s shift to a Foley poem I know I like, (38), another one from ‘No Monument’, which opens:

The love of destiny and the love of the untimely
coincide, nowhere more beautifully than the
art deco cinema that is now a Wetherspoons.
I remember drinking in the circular room,
my circular glass and circular thoughts. We discussed
form and then left the Arsenal fans to their gloom.

I suspect I’m drawn to this because I’m drawn to art deco buildings, and seeing any beautiful old cinema being turned into a Wetherspoons pains me. The opening lines sound great, though I don’t understand what he’s on about with the coincidence of the “love of destiny and the love of the untimely”. I can overlook that, though, while I’m enjoying the sound-ride. I like that repetition of ‘circular’. I like the dual meaning of “form” – poetic form or footballing form? I like the sound of it, the run of ‘oo’s in spoons, room, form, gloom. I’m intrigued by “the pure hatred of Jeremy Corbyn”. The piece has something to do with fate, determinism, the past influencing the present. It has the feel of a poem with something meaningful to say. I don’t entirely understand it, but I’m convinced the poet does.

Nell: I like (38) too. Why doesn’t he do this more often? Pleasing syntax, elegant flow and control, and something to think about that feels real. The idea of being doomed by decisions made long before you were born – that ties in with the old epics, the whole of literature and politics, and much more. Arsène Wenger and Arsenal made me smile (I’ve never noticed the aural link in their names before). I love “the power loom” and “the thread / from out the mind and back again”, and that whole long sentence followed by two short ones. And “obsolete / spinning of the tune” strikes me as something in which this poet has a professional interest. Also the last statement is a great ending. It could mean all sorts of things and that’s okay because it opens up. It challenges. His touch is light but sure.

Hilary: I think if I spent enough time with Foley’s poems I’d find ways to appreciate them all. But it might be like being stuck in a lift with a rather taciturn stranger. After an hour you‘d find things to talk about. You’d bond over a shared liking for onion platzels or Dickies workpants or the films of John Travolta. After three hours your joint experience of being stuck in a lift would unite you. You’d weep together. But when they let you out, off you’d hurry without a backward glance.

Nell: I found ‘Current World Modelling Capabilities’ interesting. I thought about it for a long time and didn’t feel abandoned. It seemed to me to mean something. It would take me a long time to explain what, but that’s no bad sign. In the end, my interest in poetry is selfish. I want interest or pleasure, or something from which I can learn. But I want an emotive kick too. Hugh Foley can satisfy all these needs. He just doesn’t always choose to.

Hilary: That’s what’s so frustrating. He can do it, so why doesn’t he do it more?

Nell: Pass. Let’s move on to Hasti, a different kettle of fish. We both liked the display poem ‘For My Barista Poets, Who’. Is that right?

Hilary: Yes. It’s a fully-justified prose poem in one long sentence. In fact, not even a sentence because there’s no full stop at the end – the poem’s left open for another day, another cup. What’s it saying? That there’s no money in poetry so you have to make coffee (the modern equivalent of waiting tables or pulling pints)? Like poetry, the barista role requires care and precision, even though it can be an undervalued job? There is an connection here between making a good cup of coffee and making a poem, isn’t there, in “For the years you’ve spent training your intuition to move between […] short expression and long”? And it’s lightly done.

Nell: Not one long sentence – two. The second starts about three quarters of the way through after ‘hourly rate’. But neither is grammatical. They’re lists, an extended dedication “for” the barista poets because, yes, working as a barista is in some sense pure poetry. But then the “for” changes into what the barista poets are waiting “for”: “inspection, the regulating bodily drill, the who closed last night?”, and so on. The list continues but now it’s building a picture of the barista life. It started as a dedication. Now it’s dedicated to detail, and the detail is rich – “the service voice, the blank and generous smile”, “the groupchat rota jpeg”, “the coworker’s careful sidestep”, “the gleam of stainless surfaces against the moon”, “how each moment the door is open you are breathing in the day and practising what it means to give everything away”. A whole world. Hasti and Appleby are both showcased with list poems, but they work quite differently.

I like Hasti’s ‘Pardis’ too. From barista as poet to poet as gardener. Both poems allow detail to accumulate, as phrases and lines tumble out. I also like ‘I am trying to write like the frying pan’ and ‘What Makes the World’ (nice to reach a poem that divides itself into neat stanzas with a central metaphor that’s easy to relate to).

Hilary: I liked ‘MIXED WHITE/ASIAN AND/OR MULTIPLE OTHER (SPECIFY):’ which opens:

Please don’t ask me for any answers—I
can barely bring myself to step up to this page and smile.
There are too many uncertainties in your work: too
many maybes, sometimeses, ors, too much ambivalence,
ambiguity, ambition—I told you, I also dislike
how I can barely string my self together,
barely convinced I deserve it

and ends:

[…] I have
been navigating this world murkily, like when the friend
I haven’t seen in a while says wow, you’re looking brown
and I can only ? until they laugh and say yeah,
you’ve just lost your white-passing privilege hun, and with
the sting I feel myself swell with enormous pride and grace, like maybe now I can be my mum’s real kid, like I would were I born without this half of me
that bites, that bursts, that clasps like a worm.

This seems both deeply felt and well-controlled. It’s straightforward and clear, but she’s also digging into something really interesting.

Nell: Yes, this one demanded several readings. It’s plain enough in its structure and form to be easily understood, but calls you back to work out the layers. Gives me the emotive fix I look for. There are lots of prose poems here and I tend to find that form (in this writer) intense and busy. Despite that, ‘Our Honeymoon with the Machine’ stayed with me.

Hilary: More robots! In her Michael Marks conversation Hasti says she’s preoccupied with science fiction, and she’s co-written a short sci-fi film, DIGGING, produced by Film4. I like a lot about this poem, particularly her description of the machine: “The machine is armed, and each glittering tentacular arm is painted the dazzling copper of a cockroach shell”. This is an awesome piece of futuristic kit which, little by little, we come to realise is not as great as it first sounds. “I am often too tired from cleaning and moving levers to invite anyone round for dinner. […] We are learning and moving and wondering how much longer we can keep this up.” I like Hasti’s sense of humour: she’s “Not broke they say, but pre-rich”.

Nell: So what about Eve Ellis’s publicity poem, ‘Reunion, (also her title poem)? The term ‘spit valve’ is explained in the pamphlet epigraph, a quotation from trombonist Dave Wilken: “When performing in a solo situation, either in front of an ensemble or in a recital, I think it’s classy to not call too much attention to emptying out your spit valve. I [...] turn slightly to the side and without any fuss empty my spit out behind me. It’s more subtle and less distracting than unceremoniously blowing all the water out in full view of the audience. [...] Many may not have any idea why you’re doing that.”

Hilary: Ellis says she called it Spit Valve because it was “the most apt, most revolting title” she could think of. Suggesting the release of some kind of accumulated waste product, perhaps, with connotations of skewering things.

Nell: ‘Reunion’ strikes me as deliberate, well-made, honed. I didn’t understand why the trombone player’s forehead wore the narrator’s wrinkles, but that was the only thing that snagged me. What did you think?

Hilary: I got caught on that line too, but otherwise it’s very tidy. Nothing there that doesn’t belong, and everything that the poem needs. ‘Reunion’ was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition in 2022 and I can see why. I felt much the same way about ‘Keeper’.

Keeper
after Kim Addonizio
It’s too early in the evening to say if you’re a keeper
but if you are, you’ll nod without blinking
when I tell you I once met God.
It was at a Greyhound bus stop. I was sixteen,
newly shorn, holding an unlit Camel. God held out
his Zippo. See, I’ve still got the smoke smell
here on my palms. Yes this is the same guitar
I had strapped to my back that day. I never did learn
any chords, but I’m a believer in might and someday
so I keep things, things like you — I mean
people — who have spare plectrums
and portable plug-in amps, people who are
actually equipped for life. And if you’re one
of those people, you could stand behind me
and lay your arms on top of mine while I hold
this wooden body. I’ve been carrying it
a long while. You could teach me to grip its neck,
how to callous my fingers so I can play.
Am I keeping you? Your eyes flick over my shoulder
like God’s did, that one time, when he laid
his big thumb on the lighter’s flint wheel.

I really like that slip – “things like you — I mean / people” – which tells us so much about the narrator. We get a whiff of it first with God, and with the smoke smell, don’t we, and the rather desperate demand to be taught. This is not a person who is “actually equipped for life”, and if you or I met her, we might also find our eyes flicking over her shoulder searching for an escape route. Or an I reading this wrong?

Nell: I have to rant about epigraphs first. I’m driven nuts by ‘after’ epigraphs that name a poet but nothing more specific. Is ‘Keeper’ ‘after’ the whole of Kim Addonizio? In her style? Or is it inspired by one poem I ought to call to mind? Because I can’t. And if an epigraph is important (why else would you have one?), it should tell the reader something useful. And I could certainly do with a useful bit of insight into how to read this poem.

Hilary: Ellis’s pamphlet has three ‘after’ poems. The other two are ‘after’, respectively, Louise Glück and Lisa Adjoa Parker. No reference to a specific poem in the epigraphs. Of our five short-listed poets, only Ellis and Hasti have ‘after’ poems, though Appleby has three translations. Hasti has two ‘afters’. One name-checks a well-known Iranian singer-songwriter, though not the famous song it certainly draws on; the other has a double reference: a Radiohead podcast plus a painting. In Hasti’s case, you can find the relevant sources (the notes help) and see a connection. With Ellis, you can’t.

Nell: Still, putting that aside, I agree this is a controlled, impactful piece. Good clear syntax. Pleasing flow. Another poem in three-line stanzas (she has six in all). I’ve been thinking about ‘Keeper’ for days, trying to understand what’s going on. I don’t think the speaker “demands” to be taught. They hopefully suggest it might happen, maybe. I think what they need most is to be held.

Hilary: Well, who or what do you think is the “keeper”?

Nell: There’s an obvious doubt about that, deliberately planted. Usually a keeper is a person, like a zoo-keeper. We assume the person addressed at the start may be such a person. But when we get to line 10 ( “I keep things, things like you — I mean / people”), there’s a switch of perspective. Now it seems the speaker (the guitar-carrier) is the keeper. Or just possibly, the person kept could be a ‘keeper’ i.e. the kind of person you choose to hang onto. Why? Because they’re a person “actually equipped for life” who could help the speaker play the instrument they’ve been carrying on their back for ages. But in the final stanza, everything changes again because there’s a third kind of keeper. The speaker says, “Am I keeping you?” which is what we say when we mean ‘Am I keeping you back?’. This play on words is central to the poem, and one of its attractions. But I’m still trying to make sense of where God fits in.

Hilary: Yes, God’s mentioned three times. You don’t drop God into a poem lightly.

Nell: You don’t. But God’s hardly a superior being here, although God did give the speaker a light, back when they were “newly shorn” (in biblical imagery, a sheep). God may be the only one to have given the speaker anything ever. But God, it seems, didn’t find our first-person speaker (with whom the reader identifies) interesting. Nor does the addressee. The ‘you’ of the poem is, as you said, keen to escape. And although the speaker claims they “keep things […] / people”, there’s no evidence that this is true. If the kept people are the sort with plectrums and amps, why has our speaker never learned to play the guitar? The speaker isn’t a keeper. The speaker’s a loser.

Anyway, what does the speaker suggest the well-equipped person might do? It’s utterly weird. They “could stand behind” the speaker, lay their arms on top of theirs, teach them to how to grip the neck of the guitar and “callous [their] fingers”. Nobody teaches anybody to play a guitar like this. And since the speaker can’t play, nobody ever has. This somehow reminds me of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, where Coleridge’s narrator holds back the wedding guest (who is also you, me, the reader), in order to tell him a story about being doomed. The subsequent tale is compelling enough to implicate the listener/reader, somehow. Haunt them, even.

Hilary: What’s Ellis getting at? The unplayed instrument has to mean something – something about art, poetry, whatever. What could it mean to carry a guitar for years and years, a guitar you can’t play?

Nell: Doesn’t “this wooden body” suggest the speaker’s own body, too? So many body parts here! Neck, shoulders, thumb. And the word “lay” (for the arms) echoed in “laid” (for the thumb). Makes me think of the laying on of hands. But also the loneliness of the person who goes untouched.

Hilary: The lighter, I guess, could symbolise illumination, understanding.

Nell: It could.

Hilary: I read the ‘keeper’ as a prospective lover, at first, but as the poem progresses I think we start to understand that the addressee is the reader. It’s a poem about trying to capture and keep the attention of a reader. So in a sense it is about trust. Given what Ellis has said about her pamphlet being 1% fact, 99% imagination, I’d say she’s wondering whether the imaginative part has convinced us, the readers, to stick around. It’s the thirteenth poem out of seventeen, so not that “early in the evening” to say. But still, she’s not sure. And she makes her narrator a loser, as you say, perhaps to explore what it might feel like to be the sort of person that readers (or lovers, or God) don’t want to spend time with.

Nell: Oh that’s an interesting idea. And persuasive. Although if the ‘you’ of the poem is the reader, it would be odd for the reader to have to show the poet how to use their instrument. And odd for the first person (assuming that’s the poet) to have been carrying an instrument that had never been played. I think there’s a tragedy of some sort going on here. But this poem has lots of possibility. I think it’s taut and intriguing.

Hilary: Let’s turn to James Appleby. He says in his conversation on the Michael Marks website that he doesn’t think his pamphlet is themed, really. All the same, it seemed to me to be obviously themed at first (language, translation, language learning) and when there were a few poems that clearly didn’t fit this central idea I was disappointed. Language is clearly his thing – he’s a translator, he speaks four languages fluently, and he’s editor of a translation magazine, Interpret. Three of the poems in his pamphlet are translations, but not his publicity poem, ‘At a Funeral, Someone Eating Ash’. This is one of the ones that doesn’t tie in with the language theme. Although in a sense all poems are about language.

Nell: It’s not my favourite from his set. I’ve read many poems about scattering ashes. Oddly, I’ve also heard or read about ash scatterers beside the Thames choking and coughing because they hadn’t realised the wind was blowing the wrong way. It happens. This poem has its own character of course, and the idea of the black comedy fitting the character of the dead man, the joker – that’s interesting. And I think it works as a poem, even though “I thought of” strikes me as a little pedestrian. What did you think?

Hilary: I felt a bit ‘told’ by “It is a thing to swallow a funeral”, as if Appleby was trying too hard to inject gravitas. And it’s not a funeral that’s being swallowed, just ash. Also, I was confused by this part:

I thought of the emaciated birch
we’d planted in his honour, the elegies sombre
and ridiculous as cassocks, how none of them had fit
the scatterer clawing at his own grey mouth

Appleby says that the birch and the elegies didn’t fit the scatterer, but surely the point is that they didn’t fit the dead man, who was funny and made bleak jokes.

Nell: My confusion was with the dead man and how, under other circumstances, “he might’ve slouched / in the corner with a cocktail stick / to get his own burnt body from your teeth.” I like the surreal image. But wouldn’t the person with the cocktail stick be trying to get ashes from his own teeth? Is Appleby deliberately blurring the distinction between the dead man and the scatterer?

Hilary: I found ‘I lived once beside a slaughterhouse’ more interesting, and more convincing. I didn’t actually live beside one myself, but we used to take animals to be killed at one – Gages farm in Ashburton – and I once spent a morning inside with the slaughtermen, so I felt I had something to bring to the reading.

I lived once beside a slaughterhouse
Mornings were a thing of gears.
They were regulation-compliant machinery.
The trucks, mounted with cylinders, broke their necks
on the switchbacks of local roads. They drained.
These are the problems of living by a slaughterhouse:
excess life. I remember the thermalling birds,
flies on the screen doors and fruitbowl,
and when the wind hitched and tumbled
like a freighted truck on a bad turn,
a living smell came into my room.
The conversation of a pig with a knife
you see, lasts a long time.

I’m a fan of this; it’s tight, assured, smart. I like “broke their necks”, “switchbacks”, “drained” – we know where we’re going. And if you’ve ever taken pigs to an abbatoir you know that they can smell death, they know exactly what’s going to happen, they don’t like it, and they let you know. What did you think of it?

Nell: I like this poem too, though I hesitated over “I remember” (like “I thought” in the ash poem) and I wasn’t keen on “you see” in the last line. I feel equally uneasy about an aside in the penultimate line of ‘Rental Contract’: “Our questions have their answers, friend”. I couldn’t help feeling “friend” was there for the rhyme. And in ‘Whale at distance’, there’s a professorial reminder to the reader: “A whale at a distance, / you must understand, is mostly the idea of a whale”. I know “you must understand” is part of the voice, but I began to feel these asides were a bit of a habit. And although I mostly like the whale poem, I was thrown by the syntax at the start:

It is lost here; dying. It has strung the rope
of a buoy about the base of its fluke, or, or,
we watchers air our theories during dives,
brained by a motorboat.

Are the “or” repetitions the watchers’ theories? If so, perhaps they might have question-marks – or dashes – rather than commas, because at first I thought this was a typo. And it sounds as though the watchers are diving and being brained by a motorboat when obviously it must be their conjecture about the whale. But I like the poem as a whole. I just thought the opening needed more clarity. At his best (as they say), I think he’s writes extremely well.

Hilary: I didn’t feel particularly confused by the “or, or” in ‘Whale at distance’ – it seemed obvious to me that they refer to alternative theories as to why the whale is dying, though I agree that better punctuation would add clarity. I did find “during dives, brained by a motorboat“ confusing. I guessed “brained by a motorboat” meant the noise of a motorboat was mind-shattering. But are the watchers discussing theories while watching the whale dive, or are they diving (and communicating while diving)? Who exactly is being “brained by a motorboat” – the watchers or the whale?

Nell: My favourite Appleby is probably ‘The Man I Saw Dead in the Road Reproaches Me’. Also this one does tie in with the language theme. Did you like it yourself?

Hilary: I don’t understand it! The entire poem’s in the dead man’s voice. It opens:

Here’s why I lie on the road through your head:
you can’t imagine me as funny. In all your poems, which I think are shit,
I never joke. I’m your age, but we never get a beer.

We infer details about the accident (there’s a “hair stylist, asking why she’d bought a salon on a blind corner”) and the dead man berates the poet (“You aren’t death’s sidekick, you know. Just some foreigner: / wrong place, wrong time”) before inviting him to wind back time to the previous day and meet him there for a beer. I don’t know what it’s doing, and it’s not doing anything for me. What’s it doing for you?

Nell: The dead man speaks because the poet has really seen someone dead in the road and can’t stop thinking about him. Perhaps he habitually makes light of things, but he can’t this time. A dead man isn’t funny. Anyway, this one has acquired a kind of life of his own in the poet’s imagination. He’s a foreigner (in the narrator’s head) and therefore to him the narrator is foreign. And although a dead man can’t really talk, his ghostly self can echo the poet’s preoccupations. Including commenting on the whole business of making a poem out of him. He gives that short shrift, as well he might, and it’s a double irony, because although death isn’t funny, this is. At least, it would get a laugh in a performance, I think. The dead man is an alter ego, a doppelgänger, the poet himself commenting on himself. I love the end: “I’ve got so much to say before I go.” Great last line. A twenty-first century before-my-pen-hath-gleaned-my-teeming-brain moment.

I like the following poem, ‘Staircase, Ladders’ too. The form in five prose stanzas mirrors the idea of the rungs of a ladder. The idea that in most languages there’s “no difference between a set of stairs and a ladder” is interesting. But so’s the fact that this is what this poet reflects on, even as he processes a real scare, a near-miss. He’s been driving on a motorway or dual carriageway and has passed a ladder lying lengthways in the middle of the fast lane. (It must have fallen from another vehicle.) Of course this is incredibly dangerous. He doesn’t hit the ladder, veer out of control and die, because he’s in the slow lane. But he might have done. His mind goes back over and over the moment, and because he’s language-obsessed, he thinks of the ladder as “a run of hyphens, like repeated gasps”. Many people swear when they have a narrow escape; this poet-driver thinks of “a run of swearwords like an endless lengthways ladder”. He could have died – and what he’s doing is thinking about the etymology of “ladder”. It’s quirky. It’s real. It’s a mind I can enjoy inhabiting.

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