Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

In the latest, brilliant issue of The Dark Horse, there’s a really fine double review by its editor Gerry Cambridge of two debut collections – Andrew Neilson’s Little Griefs (Blue Diode Press) and Graeme Richardson’s collection Dirt Rich (Carcanet) – and on the strength of it I had to read Richardson’s book (having already read and written about Neilson’s). Cambridge writes:

Too often contemporary poetry now is concerned to present its writer as a deeply humane, even saintly figure, as if one could exist without sin and guilt, terrible contradiction and the multiple ironies of actual life; there is none of that in Richardson, none of the self-congratulatory worthiness attendant at points at, say, some poetry award readings, a bunch of evolved, middle-class souls agreeing with commendable poetry sentiments that no one of any sense would disagree with.

While the generalisation of this sentence can, like all generalisations, be punctured by pointing to examples which aren’t as self-satisfied as Cambridge’s targets, it would be hard to disagree with the gist of it. Richardson, as Cambridge implies, is a warts-and-all poet whose output gets down and dirty with the dark side of life (and death) as well as the light(er). In poems covering his years an Anglican priest, notably in his native Notts., and in others of his childhood and adolescence, he is refreshingly frank and unflinching. Take the octet of his sonnet-of-sorts, ‘Bearings’:

One poor dear – 84, in the hospice,
just a few picked chicken-bones
under the sheets, fists
bulbs of dried garlic,
and a head of dandelion fluff
almost blown –
before she finally gave up
cried out all night for her Mum.

As much as the precision of the three uncompromising comparisons, the cumulative impact of which served to remind me of my mother’s last days, I like that it took me a couple of readings to grasp the syntax. I like the line-endings too – six end with a noun end all of them end with words which are significant in conveying the overall portrait of the elderly woman: here is a poet who knows how to arrange his sentences across and down the page. What should we make of the opening, ‘One poor dear’? Is it condescending, demeaning and/or sexist? Yes, to a degree, I think, but it’s the sort of language which many of us would use. The unnecessary capitalisation of the first em of ‘Mum’ possibly serves to emphasise the woman’s reduced and infantilised state. It’s unsparing writing, and for that reason will be read as either brave or beyond the pale, depending on your viewpoint.

The poem on the facing page, ‘In Holywell Cemetery’, is, for my money, the finest in the book; a beautiful lyric of five ABAB-rhymed quatrains. Here’s the opening stanza:

Swirling iron, craquelure and rust,
shuddering with slowly crawling cars,
Earth absorbs the poison with the dust;
graves await an amaranthine grass.

The trochaic meter, reminiscent of Auden, well suits a poem about a Victorian Oxford cemetery. Those two words ‘craquelure’ (the cracks in a painting) and ‘amaranthine’ (of, or like, plants in the amaranth family) are showy indicators, as clear and bold as the meter, of Richardson’s ability to write in a high, traditional register. The poem isn’t moving solely because of these facets, but they augment the poet’s intention to write a poem with an ambition to say something beyond the superficiality of its concrete subject-matter. The full poem can be read here, in Bad Lilies (edited by Neilson and his wife Kathryn Gray) where it was first published – as you’ll see, it unfolds and circles back quite beautifully. While I knew who Kenneth Grahame and Walter Pater were, I had to look up (Charles Buller) Heberden, a vice-chancellor of Oxford.

While that might sound a bit fusty, crusty and, well, patriarchal, I can assure you that Dirt Rich comprises an array of forms, both classical and contemporary, and subject-matter. It was quite bizarrely overlooked for the Forward Prize longlists for both first and best collection, let alone the shortlists, at the expense of some collections which I’ve read and found much less rewarding. I know that prizes aren’t important, that lists are subjective and, worst of all, that judges appear not to recuse themselves from evaluating collections published by their own publisher and instead seem merrily oblivious to how looks; however, it doesn’t help the poetry landscape of the UK if books as good as Richardson’s don’t get a look-in. Maybe he’s upset too many people with his reviews in the TLS and the Sunday Times – not that I’ve ever read the latter, but I gather that he cam]n be quite trenchant.

That brings me to Caroline Smith’s collection Bycatch (Nine Arches Press), which has been shortlisted for the Forward best collection prize. Its 69 poems, arranged in six apparently chronological sections, address the mental and physical decline of Smith’s elderly parents, especially of her father who had dementia and whose death is the book’s end-point. Some poems recount well incidents that illustrate that sense of degradation, such as ‘In Decline’:

To start with there was an odd word
left like a fridge on a street corner,
not where you’d expect,
but easy enough to explain.
Then we noticed whole sentences
being wedged into strange places,
a collection of beer cans glittering
in an otherwise ordinary winter privet hedge.

This is admirable writing, and I particularly like the compound description of the hedge, hinting at the weird-anti-thesaurus-like language of a person with increasing dementia.

Alas, though, there are also a fair number of poems in very prosaic language and with insufficient, sometimes hardly any, artistry. That reaches its nadir in a poem called ‘Shower’ which consists of three sentences of the plainest reportage, e.g. ‘The paramedics say they’ll have to / take him into hospital if he tries / to get out of bed again on his own.’ Simply describing an incident – however awful it is – isn’t enough to make memorable poetry. One poem, ‘Pigeon’, that expounds the tale of when Smith witnessed the flattening and miraculous survival of the title’s bird, aims for an epiphany which, apart from the repetition of ‘nodding’ and the oxymoron of ‘cold sunlight’, is undermined by the flatness of the language; the dull verbs and repeated prepositions:

It wouldn’t stop nodding, nodding.
The fishmonger
in his black beanie,
was unloading
white dripping polystyrene boxes
that sprayed arcs of water
in the cold sunlight.

(The missing comma, after ‘ fishmonger’, is unfortunate.)

The title of Smith’s collection, as mooted in the poem of the same name, is intended as an overarching metaphor and provides a greater degree of ambition than is commonplace elsewhere within the book:

Indistinguishable, like dying fish,
old men lie there, long faces
silver heads and black triangular mouths.
They are the bycatch of a trawler
that has dragged its weighted nets
and steel rollers through their lives,
torn up fragile habitats
and the symbiosis
of ancient partnerships.

(Again, there’s a glaringly missing comma, after ‘faces’.) The trawler and bycatch metaphors are akin to Philip Larkin’s death-as-‘black-sailed unfamiliar’ (in ‘Next, Please’), but not as successful. I appreciate the writing here, and the picture of the boat with its ‘weighted nets’  and ‘steel rollers’ but I’m not sure what exactly the trawler is a metaphor for. It can’t be dementia itself, because that has only catch, rather than bycatch (unless the relatives of the sufferers are the bycatch, which the poem obviously isn’t suggesting). In his endorsement for the book, the (wonderful) poet Bernard O’Donoghue asserts that, ‘The title suggests with beautiful delicacy the way ordinary lives might seem incidental to the country’s history which they constitute, described in a narrative of great precision and clarity in a marvellous evocation of place and time.’ Presumably, that was the sense that Smith was aiming to convey; I confess, though, that I didn’t intuit it from her poems.

For me, the book’s best sections are ‘Removal’, in which the small details of domesticity are gradually undermined (e.g. ‘I’m not sure when the Teasmaid / stopped being part of their lives’), and ‘Archaeology’, containing poems in which Smith harks back to her and her parents’ younger days. One, ‘Woolwich Ferry’, recounts times from her childhood, when, ‘in the back of the old Singer Gazelle’ (Larkin’s car of choice, incidentally), her father would tell the story of how his parents met: ‘His voice strangely low, / carried along with the grind of gears, / the streetlights’ tired glow above’. This is fine writing, where the language is fresher and working harder.

Another more successful poem is ‘Forest Canopy’, in which Smith imaginatively deploys the title’s metaphor to good effect:

His language has become
its own ecosystem
high up in the roof of the cloud forest
broken free from the ground.

Most of the poems are in blocks, and I suppose a case could be made for saying that the block’s innate lack of form (other than choices at where the line-breaks are made) is a good match for the jumbled confusion of dementia and its impacts, but the lack of variety becomes a bit wearisome. Smith’s line-breaks are almost always in the places where breath has a pause, which is perhaps too neat for the subject-matter; and, disappointingly, there’s barely any rhyme, either end- or internal; and barely any assonance or alliteration.

I don’t wish in any way to trivialise the experiences which fed into Smith’s poems, and I say that as someone with great sympathy and empathy for what Smith and her parents went through; however, there is no doubt in my mind that, though Smith writes well, the abiding impression for me is that her good poems could, if worked harder, have been much better and that there were plenty of weaker ones that could have been weeded out.

Our poetry book club choice for July was The Storm’s Flora by Laura Wainwright, published by Seren. As is often the case, I appreciated the book more when we looked at poems in detail during our Zoom meeting than when I’d read the book beforehand. Wainwright’s poems reminded me at times of Gillian Allnutt’s: invariably beautiful in how she makes the words sing, but a little too minimalist and therefore a bit dissatisfying, in the same way that a really lovely tapas doesn’t feel quite like a full meal. That said, the poems in The Storm’s Flora  are full of a very keen sense of place and shot through with Welsh mythology and flora and fauna in a way which makes this a very coherent and interesting collection. No wonder it’s recently won Welsh Book of the Year.

The book I enjoyed the most in July was Ciaran Carson’s unclassifiable Fishing for Amber (Granta, 1999). Ranging across Irish folk tales, Greek myth, Shakespeare Dutch Golden Age art and science and much else besides, Carson often slips barely perceptibly into fiction and back out again, like W.G. Sebald did. In his range of erudition, and the beauty of his prose, he deserves to be as well-known  and at least as highly-regarded as Sebald, but he didn’t fit the bill in quite the way that Sebald’s overnight rise from quiet academic obscurity did. Carson cited his references, while Sebald never did, and the latter deliberately obscured his life, background and influences – other than those like Stendhal, Browne and a host of German and Austrian writers little-known in the Anglophone world whom he acknowledged.

While reading the book, I was reminded of Zbigniew Herbert’s prose book, Still Life with Bridle, which I re-read last year and write about here (scroll down), and so I wasn’t surprised to see it listed at the back as one of Carson’s many source books. I was also reminded of some of the writings of Berger and Borges. What Berger, Carson, Herbert and Sebald all had in common was a restless search for knowledge, which came together in their writings like an alchemist’s experiments synthesised all kinds of arcana. I love Carson’s poetry too, but, if anything, I think he was an even greater prose writer than he was a poet. Lucky me, that I have some more of his prose books in the TBR pile.

I’ve always found the summer to be the only season in which I struggle to write poetry. Of course, an extraordinary heatwave like the current all-but-unbearable one inhibits doing very much except lounging about in whatever shade there is. Jackie Wills’s brilliant new collection aside, I’m also struggling to concentrate on reading; or doing anything else of consequence for that matter, though I enjoyed watching Ecuador win last night. If only all the World Cup games were on in the afternoon and evening . . .

That said, I finished a rare political-ish poem last week and sent it off to the Morning Star, who have since said they’ll publish it in August. As a lifelong leftie, it does my heart good to help to support a publication with values broadly similar to my own. I never quite understand why poets might, instead, want to place poems in right-wing rags, like The Spectator, which gives platforms to some truly odious far-right ‘thinkers’, such as very far-right Douglas Murray (its associate editor) and Max Klinger, and is edited by Michael Gove for pity’s sake. It also happens to be owned by Paul Marshall, the hedge-funder who set up GB News. I like its poetry editor Hugo Williams and most of his corpus of poetry as much as anybody does, but, to me, The Spectator’s values aren’t in the slightest bit compatible with the inclusivity of poetry.

I don’t buy the argument that getting poems published in journals and papers which don’t specialise in poetry must be a good thing per se; or that putting poetry in front of the sort of people who like to read very right-wing tripe might broaden, perhaps even change, their minds. I suspect that is very unlikely. In the same way that publications are necessarily picky about the poems they publish, poets surely have a moral responsibility to be picky about where they attempt to place their poems.

A counter-argument is that placing left-leaning political poems in left-leaning publications like the Morning Star and the New Statesman will only preach to the converted, but how likely is it that a right-wing publication would publish a left-leaning poem or even one that, say, even tangentially alerted the reader to the horrendous adverse impacts of climate change?

In other news, I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Penarth, at the weekend just gone, to read at the literary festival organised by the fabulous Griffin Books. Not just my reading itself – alongside Bethany Handley, Hilary Watson and Tracey Rhys, each of whom read an excellent set of poems – but the whole weekend. The amazing poets Stephen Payne and Katherine Stansfield co-hosted the event, and Stephen even wrote and read out a clerihew for each of us four readers.

Stephen and I also met up with about half of our fellow poetry book club members for a curry on Saturday night, and some of us went to see the ace Gwen John exhibition in Cardiff on Sunday afternoon. It served to remind me that it’s lovely to be part of different poetry communities, all of which are part of a wider, overarching one. I must mention that Stephen’s next collection will be published by Parthian Books this autumn. Parthian – website here – make beautiful books, including Tracey Rhys’s, with excellent covers and end-flaps and all.

Now that the pain of my frozen shoulder has considerably lessened, I’ve been better able to concentrate on and enjoy reading, which is just as well because trying to force my own poems out has been like trying to squeeze a last smidgen of toothpaste out of a spent tube; at such times, it’s far better to stick to reading for a good long while.

Among other things, I’ve read a good few poetry pamphlets. I’ll start with one for which I have to declare an interest since it’s published by my own publisher: Before It’s Too Late, by David Harmer (Crooked Spire Press, available here). David is perhaps better-known as a children’s writer and as one half of the Glummer Twins (watchable in action here), but is also an excellent poet for adults, as this publication shows. Many of the poems depict childhood memories; others are elegies, for his parents and friends, as the title hints. My favourite poem of this rich seam is the closing one, ‘Out of Our Hands’, which movingly shows how responsibility passes through the generations, in this case to David and his wife Paula’s children:

It took the kids, all grown up
and in charge of a skip, to hack away

the thickets and tangles, dig up
the roses they wanted, complete the task
of organising our chaos; a job we once

did for them, but they are young enough
to learn a new trick, clear up January,
uncover old pathways with a smile.

Another very fine pamphlet is Hilary Menos’s Vox Wah Wah (New Walk Editions, available here). Again I have to declare an interest in that Hilary is the editor of my reviews and essays for The Friday Poem. Its 20 poems are mainly themed around music, and musical gear (like that in the title), and encompass, inter alia, Hendrix, Coltrane, Davey Payne of the Blockheads, the Dead, Sinatra, Elvis (several times), Karen Carpenter and, magnificently, Etta James. Shot through these poems is Hilary’s love not just for music but also for her partner Andy Brodie, who plays guitar in at least one band. (I must point out here that, just like the fine cover of Before It’s Too Late features a painting by David Harmer’s wife, Vox Wah Wah’s equally fine cover is designed by Andy.) ‘Used & Vintage’ lists the guitars which Andy (presumably) has owned and how he acquired and got rid of them, and ends, rather beautifully, with ‘the blue Dan Dunham / which he ditched last year for the Blonde Tele here in his lap’ with its

ash body, maple neck, just starting to open up
the way tome woods do, like sycamore, spruce, mahogany,
the sap settling in sweeter patterns the more you play
so with use and age come depth and resonance
and I look at him and think, yes.

Well-researched information (and/or anecdote) is always presented in service of the poem rather than for facts’ sake, helped by Hilary’s skilled use of varied forms – couplets, tercets, chunky long-lined stanzas, etc. – and often, as in the example above, by subtle, unobtrusive end-rhyme. Again like Before It’s Too Late, it’s a pamphlet which repays re-reading to absorb its intricacies and pleasures. Zoë Walkington’s Missing Person (smith | doorstop, available here) was my reading matter of choice on trains to and from Leeds on Saturday. It’s ground-breaking: a mash-up of poetry pamphlet and police procedural detective fiction, in which we encounter suspects, and police investigators in a case of child abduction from an underpass in York. The reader is invited to read the poems and solve the case. I’m glad to report that yours truly did indeed crack the case. (No wonder I bought a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes in the book sale at the Leeds Library.) The richness of Missing Person lies, though, in the details – I have to say ‘gritty’ details. ‘Black Gloves’ opens thus:

How much for these? I ask the bloke
behind the trestle, who looks like
he has just eaten his own young.
And he looks me up and down
and says Seven quid to you, and I say
I’ll give you three and he shakes his head
as though I’m asking him which of his
Alsatians he wants to have put down.

The (black) humour here will be recognisable to anyone who read Zoë’s marvellous I Hate to Be the One to Tell You This (smith | doorstop, 2023). I won’t spoil the surprise and cleverness of Missing Person any further.

I also enjoyed some heftier non-fiction. Barry Miles’s London Calling, subtitled ‘A Countercultural History of London Since 1945’ was right up my street, since Miles, as he’s always been known, was almost as Zelig-like as Joe Boyd in the late-Sixties. Friend of the Fabs, McCartney especially, Miles was one of the organisers of  the ‘International Poetry Incarnation’ at the Albert Hall in 1965 at which Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti read among more local poets like Adrian Mitchell and Harry Fainlight; co-owned and ran (with John Dunbar and Peter Asher) Indica, the gallery and bookshop – pictures here – where John and Yoko first met; was involved with the International Times (IT) and Oz; and was seemingly at every happening, like the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at Ally Pally. Unsurprisingly, Miles’s book is especially good on the Sixties and early-Seventies, and less so on the movements he wasn’t directly part of, such as Punk and the New Romantics. Nevertheless, it’s a jolly jaunt, chock-full of great stories.

David Shields and Shane Salerno’s oral biography, Salinger (Simon & Schuster, 2014) is an extraordinary book in how it mixes interviews with Salinger’s friends, family, colleagues and comrades-in-arms with previously published written testimony, and leaves the reader in no doubt as to the traumatic impact of what he’d seen and witnessed from D-Day on to the liberation of satellite camps of Belsen. It conveys so well how driven he was as a writer, in a manner reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, to the detriment of the succession of (young) women whom he groomed into relationships with him and of his daughter.

I’m currently reading Matchdays (Simon & Schuster, 2015), subtitled ‘The Hidden Story of the Bundesliga’, by Ronald Reng, translated into English by the novelist James Hawes. The history of football is necessarily reflective of wider social and political history , and Reng’s book proves this in spades. The Bundesliga was only founded in 1963, as if West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’, out of the ashes of the defeat of the Nazis, had to mature before a league competition could be permitted. Even then, footballers’ wages were capped for far longer than in England, TV coverage was amateurish until well into the ’70s, and tactics seem to have been all but non-existent at many clubs, despite Bayern Munich’s and Borussia Mönchengladbach’s European successes. At the book’s heart is the story of the immensely likeable Heinz Hoher, a cut-above-journeyman player who became a manager of the same ilk.

At the top of my TBR pile is Jackie Wills’s new collection Making the Wedding Dress (Salt), her first since 2019’s A Friable Earth (Arc, 2019). Wills is one of my favourite poets, so I know this will be an unqualified pleasure.

*

This coming Sunday I’ll be one of four readers – alongside Bethany Handley, Hilary Watson and Tracey Rhys – in the poetry showcase, the final event of the weekend-long Penarth Literary Festival, organised by the terrific Griffin Books. I’m also very much looking forward to meeting in person several other members of the poetry book club which I’m a member of. My thanks go to Katherine Stansfield and Stephen Payne for inviting me to read. Tickets are available here.

On Sunday, I read for a lively crowd at poetry Performance in the Adelaide pub in Teddington. It was a very enjoyable evening, hosted impeccably by Del Bowen and with a diverse set of open mic readers, including the inimitable Heather Moulson. My thanks to Heather and Anne Warrington for inviting me. Here’s a picture, taken by Heather, of me in action:

On Wednesday, I was one of the three guest readers for the York Launch of Andrew Neilson’s excellent collection, Little Griefs (Blue Diode Press), alongside Andrew’s wife, the brilliant Seren poet Kathryn Gray, and Katy Mahon, fine poet continuing her father Derek’s trade. It was held at the new branch of the Poetry Pharmacy, which looked splendid. I’m grateful to Andrew for inviting me.

On Sunday 21^st June, I’ll be one of four readers at the Poetry Showcase of the Griffin Books Literary Festival in Penarth, alongside Bethany Handley, Tracey Rhys and Hilary Watson. My thanks go to Stephen Payne and Katherine Stansfield for their invitation. Details and tickets are available here.

I’ve read a lot of poetry lately, mostly books which have sat on my TBR pile for a good while. I enjoyed Mona Arshi’s latest Mouth (Chatto and Windus, 2025), or should I say I enjoyed two-thirds of it, as the poems based on Greek mythology left me cold as all poems about Greek (or Roman) mythology do, even when they were dealing with the most important of subjects, like the terrible ordeal and immense bravery of Gisèle Pericot. I realise that sounds rather Philistine, and that I ought to take the trouble to read the original stories which underpin such poems, but I just have an untreatable blind spot. (It might’ve been reading and studying Racine’s Andromaque for French A-level that caused it.) On a positive note, though, there were many lovely, lyrical poems that I liked and admired, not least ‘Driving’, the final four lines of which are these:

How carefully I drive now, so like my father,

into those powder-light memories where there’s
a sharp smell of foxes and a beetle is busy
in the twig-crotch scratching out its wretched sound.

I liked reading new poems by John Montague back when I subscribed to Poetry Ireland Review in the Eighties, so I was pleased last year to come across a copy of his 1999 collection Smashing the Piano (Gallery Books). There’s an argument to be made that he was almost as fine an Ulster poet as any of the famous ones, but, because he was a generation older than Heaney, Mahon and Longley, and left his native Tyrone long before the 1969-onwards Troubles, he somehow didn’t get mentioned in the same breath as them, except perhaps in the Republic. Smashing the Piano contains many reminiscing poems about his upbringing, translations of poems in Irish, poems of travel, and a sequence, ‘Civil Wars’ addressing the Troubles (and the years of IRA campaigns beforehand):

A RESPONSE TO OMAGH

All I can do is curse, complain.
Who can endorse such violent men?
As history creaks on its bloody hinge
and the unspeakable is done again.

One poem in the book leapt out at me as eminently anthologisable: ‘There are Days’, which begins thus:

There are days when
one should be able
to pluck off one’s head
like a dented or worn

helmet, straight from
the nape and collarbone
(those crackling branches!)

and place it firmly down
in the bed of a flowing stream.

I can empathise with that!

Having worked my way some while ago through the slab of a book which is C.K. Williams’s Collected Poems and much enjoyed the long-snaking-line style which he adopted in the mid-Seventies, I got round to reading his last collection, Falling Ill (Bloodaxe, 2017), published two years after his death. Each of the 52 poems was written in five, unpunctuated tercets. Alas, though, Williams wrote them throughout his cancer treatment, so the shadow of death understandably hangs over them to such an extent that they make for a grim, all but unbearable reading experience.

Much more enjoyable and intriguing was Lydia Macpherson’s new, highly-recommended collection The Heights (Calder Valley Poetry), available to buy here. It’s rooted in history, mainly of the area of West Yorkshire in which Lydia grew up and now lives again, near Haworth and the wuthering heights of Top Withens; encompassing the Cragg Vale Coiners, enclosure, domestic service and other issues of class and ownership which still resonate in our landscapes and society today. One poem I particularly liked was a partially-rhymed sonnet ‘Windows in Snow’, consisting of three elegantly-turned sentences, the middle of which is this:

Sometimes, a hint of a fly caught
like those in Baltic amber, or a tilt
across the diagonal, where some apprentice
knocked the frame in surprise
when they brought the news
of the death of the French queen.

Leontia Flynn’s Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2026) draws from all five of her collections and her book of translations of Catullus. I found many of the poems less engaging than I had anticipated and much less than the extravagant praise on the cover. That feeling reached its apogee when I (re-)read ‘Letter to Friends’ the rambling 11-page lowlight of Profit and Loss. I most enjoyed the seven sonnets from Drives concerning Casablanca, Beckett, Baudelaire’s mother, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hitchcock, Bishop and Orwell; subjects which somehow suit her good-humoured style. A sucker for poems about swimming, I also enjoyed ‘Saturday at the Pool’ and ‘In the Municipal Pool’; the former opens with an arresting image:

The boy pauses at the end of the diving-board
then dives: a broad sword
cleaving the water – there is parting! And rejoining!

Catching the Light (Fairfield Books, 2026), the anthology of cricket poetry edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard, contains, as it should, several poems by the doyen of cricket poets, Alan Ross, including ‘Watching Benaud Bowl’: ‘Leg-spinners pose problems much like love, / Requiring commitment, the taking of a chance.’ But among the great and the good (Agard, Arlott, Dabydeen, Hughes, Brian Jones, Kunial, McMillan, O’Brien, Rollinson, Selby, etc.), there are many individual poems which leap out, especially those by S.J. Litherland – one of only nine female contributors – and Matt Merritt; the latter’s poignant pair of portraits ‘Two Orthodox Left-armers’ celebrates two Yorkshire and England greats, Wilfred Rhodes (‘Every ball an interrogation, / every over a conspiracy of art and science’), and Hedley Verity, who died in an Italian hospital of wounds sustained from fighting the Germans in Sicily (‘Shell-bursts, a net of tracers closing fast, / but as upright among blazing Sicilian corn / as on any Scarborough dog day.)

Another of the fine contributors to Catching the Light, Rishi Distidar, has just had his fourth collection published: Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches Press, 2026). In it, his trademark quirky wordplay and use of form gets full rein – just a scan of the titles gives you the idea. At times, his wish to entertain occasionally spills into silliness, but that’s no bad thing in my book, and there are precious few other UK poets around – Selima Hill and Mark Waldron come to mind – who seem to remember that poetry can be something to enjoy as well as be moved by. Those familiar with Rishi’s oeuvre will know that he also writes poems on the most important subjects, like ‘On board the ‘Tynesider’’, concerning Martin Luther King’s visit to Newcastle in 1967, which ends with these beautiful lines:

But actually he was at his best
when he was harried, harassed –
by time as well as the times –
at 1am on a slow train to somewhere
he would never go again, minting
coin as easily as he breathed, currency
we still spend in the realm of hope.

It feels apposite that Rishi’s books should sit on my shelves between the Dickman brothers and Michael Donaghy. (Curiously, for me, one of the three dedicatees of the collection is the brother of a very sadly deceased schoolfriend of mine whom I mentioned in the title-poem of The Last Corinthians.)

*
In other news, my elder son, Conor, got 459 votes for the Greens in the ward (Surbiton Hill, in Kingston) he was standing in – the party went from nowhere to come second, in terms of votes, to the Lib Dems, meaning, obviously, that they beat the Tories, Labour and Reform (in that order). A win was never likely against a party who won almost every seat in the 2022 election, but still a good and encouraging effort. Under a PR system, the Greens would be the opposition; under first past the post, there is no opposition, which is very unhealthy for democracy. Anyway, well done, Conor; I’m very proud of him for standing and proud of his result.

As much as the first cuckoo ever was, the (almost) annual brouhaha over the choice of winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition (NPC) is a sure indicator that spring has sprung.

The week before last, Hilary Menos, poet and editor of The Friday Poem, and Victoria Moul, poet–critic, chewed over and pretty much spat out the poem by the splendidly-named winner, Partridge Boswell, here; as did many poets, both good and not-so-good, on social media. I found the poem to be neither as bad as has largely been made out nor especially deserving of being plucked out as the best of 21,000 poems. However, I wasn’t privy to reading the rest of them, so what do I know? I can only surmise that it’s a thankless task which somebody has to do.

This Friday just gone, Hilary and Victoria, discussed more generally, here, the challenges of judging competitions. Victoria acknowledged the truth that, ‘Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool.’ They are indeed; but really, as we all know, a poetry competition is principally a money-making exercise upon which the financial health of the organising outfit usually depends, so they are intrinsically vital for the flourishing of high-quality published poetry.

The issue, if it is one, that none of the top three poems was written by a British poet, is, for me, wholly unimportant. I’m not at all convinced by Victoria’s insistence that she, ‘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’, given that the globe has never been as closely linked as it is now. Using the UK’s most prestigious poem competition as a means to discern some sort of set of British poetic values seems to me as futile as the coalition government’s witless introduction just over a decade ago of the requirement that ‘British values’ in general – as itemised in guidance here – be taught in schools. Aside from the fact that many serious and good poets rarely or never enter competitions, it would be rather ‘Little Britain’, wouldn’t it? Has the Man Booker Prize been devalued or enhanced by the widening of its eligibility from novels in English by British and Commonwealth writers to novels in English by writers of any nationality as long as they have been published in the UK or Ireland? Surely the more internationalist readers become, the better that is for their general outlook on life and for the health of a diverse, tolerant and culturally-enriched society?

Moul’s additional argument that, ‘In literary matters as in others, America is, we might say, a rather dominant and aggressive colonial power’ is more than a little insulting to the thousands of American poets who, presumably more so than the average American citizens, oppose their government’s warmongering foreign policy within their poems, pronouncements and protests, as many of their predecessors did during (and since) the Vietnam War. American poets, like British poets and poets everywhere, tend to be among the most compassionate citizens within any society. Beyond D’Annuzio, Marinetti, Pound and Campbell, how many well-known avowedly right-wing poets have there ever been? I can’t think of any contemporary ones. In the current political climate here in the UK, restricting the NPC would play into the hands of far-right politicians and voters who, I strongly suspect, are, in the main, highly unlikely ever to be able to recognise a good poem, let alone articulate why it is good or, moreover, how it is distinctively British.

British poetry is diverse in many kinds of ways, and I’m very glad that it is; attempting to nail down any common features would be well-nigh impossible. Even decades ago to argue, perhaps, that a certain emotional restraint and traditional forms were broadly more common features of British poetry than in its American counterpart would have been undermined by the poetries of those many poets influenced by Modernism and all shades of Post-Modernism. Even a poet such as Philip Larkin, often misleadingly described (including by himself in his later, heavy-drinking years) as an archetypal Little Englander, was open to, and very clearly influenced by, the work of French Symbolist poets throughout his career, as much as he was by, say, Hardy. And would he have written a poem like ‘This Be the Verse’ without the liberating impact of the poems of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats, as later filtered into British poetry by the Children of Albion crowd, the Mersey poets et al?

As for evaluating an individual poem, it shouldn’t be too hard to come to a consensus about how this should be done, or should it? When he chaired the Booker Prize panel in 1977, Larkin outlined, in his winner-announcing address, his own process in considering any of the novels he had had to read:

I found myself asking four questions: Could I read it? If I could read it, did I believe it? If I believed it, did I care about it? And if I cared about it, what was the quality of my caring, and would it last?

(From ‘The Booker Prize 1977’, collected in Required Writing, Faber, 1983.) Those questions, as Larkin implied, could, and would, equally apply if he were reading a poem. Unconsciously, don’t we all go through that or a very similar kind of process? Sometimes, though, I wonder if enough importance is attached to Larkin’s second question. What Larkin also implied, and elsewhere stated unequivocally, was that a poem without emotion, and incapable of arousing something other than indifference or hostility in the reader, wasn’t worth reading. If it were up to me, the four questions might be amended/updated as follows:

1) Could I read it?
2) If I could read it, did I believe it?
3) If I believed it, was its impact conveyed without the sledgehammer emotional approach of a sad-backstory act on Britain’s Got Talent?
4) If so, did I care enough about the poem to want to read it again?

Then again, it’s all too easy to over-think these things, and better, maybe, just to trust one’s instinct.

As the world goes to hell in a handcart again, it seems perverse to be saying anything about what I’ve been up to, but then again, why let the fascists win? Alas, though, I’ve been up to very little this last month; I haven’t gone further than my local park except to see two films – Midwinter Break (excellent adaptation of an excellent book) and La Grazia (also excellent, as it should be since it involves one of the most fruitful director–actor collaborations). It’s been difficult to concentrate on, or get excited by, much. I know I’m not alone in having those sort of feelings at the moment. Had I been up to it, I would’ve joined Conor, my eldest, at the massive anti-racist march in London last Saturday, which the BBC saw fit not even to mention in their news outlets. One thing which has really lifted my spirits, though, is that Conor will be standing for the Greens in the upcoming local elections – I couldn’t be prouder of him. The ward he’s standing in has been a Lib Dem stronghold for the last eight years, so it would be an upset were he to get elected, but he knows his stuff and everything is possible now.

I’ve been cheered, too, by the imminent publication of a cricket poetry anthology, in which I have five haiku and four longer poems: Catching the Light, edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard and published by Fairfield Books – details are available here. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make the launch for it, which is doubly annoying as it’s next to the Oval, where so many of my formative cricket-watching days were spent with my dad, and where the ghostly echo of Robin Jackman’s LBW appeal will forever resound . . .

Further cheering was an invitation from Andrew Neilson to be one of his three guest readers (alongside his wife, Kathryn Gray, and Katy Mahon) at the York launch of his tremendous Blue Diode Press collection, Little Griefs, on Wednesday 6th May. Details and (free) tickets are available here. Fingers and everything else crossed that I’ll be fit enough to make it.

Ditto for my reading three days before that, for Poetry Performance, upstairs at the Adelaide in Teddington, at 6pm. I’m grateful to Heather Moulson and Anne Warrington for the invitation.

I’ve recently ceased, for a second and final time, my involvement (except as a contributor) with Presence haiku journal, not, I hasten to add, as the result of any falling-out with the members of the Edinburgh Haiku Circle who took on management of the journal last year, and are doing a fine job, but because it made sense for them also to take on my role as website editor. It’s 22 years since Martin Lucas asked if I’d like to help with the journal, and it feels like a lifetime ago. I have mixed feelings about stopping, which are inevitably wrapped in my missing Martin still.

My recent reading has been a mixture of systematic and otherwise. The former concerns the centenary, later this year, of the polymathic genius that was John Berger. I’m writing an essay to coincide with it, so I’ve been  re-reading Keeping A Rendezvous (Granta, 1992), the most diverse of his essay collections, which even includes one called ‘A load of shit’, triggered by his clearing out of the communal waste of his Haute-Savoie home:

In the world of modern hygiene, purity has become a purely metaphoric or moralistic term. It has lost all sensuous reality. By contrast, in poor homes in Turkey the first act of hospitality is the offer of lemon eau-de-Cologne to apply to the visitors’ hands, arms, neck, face. Which reminds me of a Turkish proverb about elitists: “He thinks he is a sprig of parsley in the shit of the world.”

In ‘Lost off Cape Wrath’, Berger summed up his uncompromising approach:

The writer should be informed to the maximum about what he is writing. In the modern world in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither produce utopian trash.

I’ve read too one of the few novels of his I hadn’t read before, To The Wedding (Vintage, 1995), concerning the lead-up and individual journeys to the beautiful set-piece wedding, near the mouth of the Po, of Gino and Ninon, who has AIDS, as narrated by an omniscient blind Greek tamata seller. (Tamata, you ask? Yes. Some examples can be seen here.) It’s one of Berger’s most pan-European and passionate books. Berger always wrote with passion, which is a major reason why I like his writing so much. It’s almost hard to believe that he was born and spent most of the first 36 of his 90 years in England, before he went into his permanent exile.

On the poetry front, I enjoyed Jane McKie’s slim pamphlet, Mine (Cinnamon Press, 2025, available here). Her poems are quiet, mostly short, and dream-like, often reflecting her upbringing on the Sussex coast. It’s a brave poet who successfully tries to depict starling murmurations in words: ‘Like the flinch of a dreaming / eyelid, two harpooned / whales of iron filings / scatter’ (‘Starlings in flight’). The comparison to iron filings is an obvious one, but that of the whales is far from being so, and all the more effective as a result. ‘Fool’s spring’ begins,

The hawthorn is athwart with cream, its petals, tiny pink
and white panes through which sun breathes, palely.

The archaic preposition ‘athwart’leaps out of course, not because of its appearance alone, but because it looks like a near anagram of ‘hawthorn’. Such close attention to how language works on the senses is what makes McKie a singular talent. Steadily, she’s built up an impressive number of collections and pamphlets over the years.

A poet friend of mine kindly sent me a copy of Peckinpah Suite by Paul Munden, published by the Australian publisher Recent Work Press last year, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. Nearly every poem consists of six stanzas of seven lines each, largely concerning the work of Sam Peckinpah’s film-making career. Only the middle section, ‘Castaway’, differs: it’s a long poem, with lines tumbling across the pages, about Peckinpah’s unsuccessful attempt to get off the ground a film of a novella of the same name. Munden’s condensing of his research is admirable, but the poems too often feel as though the stories and incidents they are relaying are simply prose being shoehorned into stanzas against their will. Take this, as a random example, the first stanza of ‘The Wild Bunch’:

Three wilderness years
have made you plan
this believing your life
depends upon it, but
still you’re up at sunrise
staring into space as if
conjuring a miracle.

That placement of ‘this’ at the start of the third line is awkward – if it has to go there, then at least rescue it with a comma – and the use of the ‘life depends upon it’ cliché is less than pleasing. The best, i.e. most natural and therefore most appealing, poems are those where Munden explores his boyhood experiences of watching and reenacting Westerns:

We forget, perhaps,
what being dead was like
when we played cowboys
in the woods, counting
from one to a hundred
with a mounting
visceral dread

            that the bad guys—
            by which I mean everyone—
            moved on. But since
            our lives were mostly play
            back then, death—
            by which I mean our pretence—
            was how we got from day

to day, holding our breath
for as long as it took
to sense the danger.
[. . .]

I fear the book will have limited appeal beyond those extensively familiar with Peckinpah’s oeuvre and life. Endorsement-writers often exaggerate of course, and here the back-cover claim of ‘sophisticated formalism’ feels far-fetched.

Rather more enjoyable was Declan Ryan’s much-lauded debut full collection Crisis Actor (Faber, 2023). Threaded through it are 10 fine poems about boxers, Ali, Louis and Tyson among them; well-crafted and contextually set (against a backdrop of racism for example) though those are, an appreciation of the finer points of the ‘sport’ on the part of the reader would make them even more interesting than they might otherwise be. There are also poems about a number of other well-known people: Sam Cooke, Nick Drake, Alun Lewis. But I prefer the poems about Ryan and his milieu, particularly the ‘ordinary’ characters he knows or has invented. Here are the closing, knowingly self-deprecatory stanzas of the book’s opener, ‘Sidney Road’:

I was the future, for a week, a while ago.
At a summer garden party, I met
a looted favourite poet:
over his empty, one-use flute he wrangled
about the etiquette of ‘watering the foliage’.

A marginal constituent, I’m more witness
than antagonist to flourishing damp.
The months pile up since my last confession;
wheels spinning slowly, hazards on,

just low enough for running down the battery.

Although Ryan perhaps principally chose it for its rhyme with ‘flute’, ‘looted’ is such an interesting adjective, neatly suggesting that the poet in question has nothing left to offer except tedious, euphemistic chunter as ‘empty’ as his plastic glass. It’s an exemplar of how to sketch a character with a bare modicum of words.

Lastly, I must again mention Andrew Neilson’s Little Griefs. It includes all nine of the poems in his 2025 Rack Press pamphlet Summers Are Other, which I (very favourably) reviewed, here, for The Friday Poem. Like Ryan, more so, in fact, Neilson is a technically adept poet, with an easy command of form and register. It seems incredible that it took him so long to find a publisher willing to take on his poetry, especially with endorsements from poets as celebrated as Rachael Boast and Sean O’Brien. We are living in odd times. ‘Casualties’ opens with a quick question then a 10-line sentence across two and a half fully-rhymed quatrains, with lines alternating ten and eight syllables, thus:

Ever felt like this? You’ve gate-crashed yourself
        in the manner of Banquo’s ghost,
now shaking thy gory locks at thyself
        even as you open the post,

or brew a coffee or take the meetings
        (in body if not quite in mind),
or any of a million other things
        you do for no reason, resigned

to do it this way because that’s the way      
   you have always gone and done it.

It takes a hefty amount of skill and practice to write like this. The opening query is reminiscent of the opening of Michael Donaghy’s poem ‘Liverpool’(‘Ever been tattooed?’) – though I should confess that I used that poem as a model of sorts for one of mine (‘Kingston’, in my first collection). The long sentence is beautifully controlled across its fluid enjambments – read it aloud and hear how it rolls. There’s plenty more terrific poetry in the book.

The next book on my pile is a novel I’ve been looking forward to starting: The River Brings the Sea by Ali Thurm, published by Lendal Press.

This coming Saturday I hope to make it to the Unitarian church in Doncaster to be one of the 20+ readers at the launch of the Fig Tree Anthology 2025, edited by Tim Fellows. To mark the centenary of the General Strike, Tim has just put out a call for poems about the strike and the union movement more generally. Details of both the reading and the call-out can be found on the Crooked Spire Press website, here.

January was a blast, despite the year’s first rejection winging its way to me on only the 5th: I’ve been far more productive, poems-wise, than usual. That may in part be due to reading the long, elegant, syntactically-gorgeous lines of C.K. Williams’s poetry at bedtime, which seems to have unlocked a part of my brain hitherto securely bolted. I’ve been to two fantastic weekend workshops, at both of which the other participants wrote amazing, inspiring poems. In editing my own, I’ve found, not for the first time in the last year or two, that I’ve spent at least as much time adding to the poems as I have deleting or tweaking phrases and lines; for me, that’s a very happy place.

I’ve been delighted to see some poetry pals buoyed by recent successes, a reminder, if one were needed, that the poetry world has room enough for everyone with flair, imagination and a willingness to work hard at their craft.

Something else which has made me think a lot about the use of language is learning Italian: I’m in the second year of evening classes and I’m at the point now where I relish the challenge of rendering Italian into idiomatic English. (Or even idiotic.) I can’t say that I’m speaking Italian with great confidence, but I like having a go and I enjoy how the words flow into one another more seamlessly than English words do.

Two recently-published anthologies each include a poem of mine. Firstly, My Ear is Full of Milk: An anthology of writing for Laurel & Hardy, edited by Simon Barraclough and Aaron Kent, Broken Sleep Books, available here. As my (not brilliant) contribution relates, Stan and Ollie enlivened my summers, because, back in the ’80s, the BBC used to show one of their short films every day before the test match coverage. Stan Laurel surely deserves to be ranked among the greatest Britons of all time. I’m itching to read it, but my TBR pile has much more pressing candidates. Secondly, I’m very proud to have a poem in The Poems: Forty Years of The North – published by Smith|Doorstop and available here – which contains a whole heap of wonderful poems first published in my favourite poetry journal.

Books and magazines I read in January included: Will Birch’s excellent and suitably lively biography of another great Briton, Ian Dury (Pan MacMillan, 2010); No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain by Paul Addison (OUP, 2010); Andy Beckett’s Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980–82 Made Modern Britain (Penguin, 2015), based on interviews he conducted with many major and minor players in the first years of Thatcherism, including some excellent stuff on the GLC administration led by Ken Livingstone and how revolutionary and influential they were, despite much right-wing press opprobrium (which I remember well) and still are; the latest issues of Acumen, The Dark Horse and PN Review (hurray for a terrific new poem by Roger Garfitt); a re-reading of Jonathan Edwards’s fine Gen (Seren, 2018) for poetry book club; and more of Richard Siken’s prose-poems.

I’m currently reading Ken Worpole’s Brightening from the East: Essays on Landscape and Memory, Little Toller, 2025, available here, the first essays of which rambled about rather and contained little new for anyone, like me, who is already familiar with the coastline and countryside of Essex and the edgelands of north-east and east London. It’s also let down by a lack of footnotes or references of any kind other than a long list of source material. But where the book really comes alive, and beautifully so, is when Worpole starts to reminisce about his grandmother, his childhood and his teacher training and practice at a time when folk traditions still featured strongly in English primary education. Another essay concerns Essex-based Tolstoyan and other model communities, ground covered to an extent by the genius that is Jonathan Meades in his BBC4 programme The Joy of Essex (2012), but happily it includes the Othona community, at Bradwell, next to the seventh-century church of St Peter-in-the-Wall. I stayed there in 2003 at a British Haiku Society conference, at which Brian Tasker got us doing Playback Theatre, which involves acting out stories or incidents recalled by audience members, and probably wouldn’t have been sanctioned by the network, details here, that started and oversees it. It was a strange experience, not least because someone from another, Christian group staying there watched us doing Playback and wanted to defect from her group to ours . . .