Tonight, from 7pm BST, I’ll be one of the guest poets, alongside Sarah James and Di Slaney, for the online launch of David Harmer’s excellent Crooked Spire Press pamphlet Before It’s Too Late. Details are available here.
-
On Sue Riley’s ‘Cats’ Meat Man’
I’ve written before – notably here – about much-missed John Foggin’s Covid-time project of asking poets to write a poem after Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘Swineherd’, which begins ‘When all this is over, said the swineherd’, but with a different occupation. 26 of the poems were chosen by Kim Moore for publication in a delightful Calder Valley Poetry pamphlet When All This is Over (2020), still available to buy here. One of the poems I enjoyed most was ‘Cats’ Meat Man’ by Sue Riley, which Sue has kindly given me permission to quote in full:
Cats’ Meat Man
When all this over, said the Cats’ Meat Man,
I’ll become a nomad and travel
where everyone goes wild about birdsong.
I’ll listen to the street cries of the sellers of birdseed,
where blue tits have remembered
how to pierce the tops of milk cartons.
I’ll learn to cook and savour the aroma
of a rich lentil stew, with never a whiff of horsemeat,
the gnarled leavings of a slaughterhouse.
I’ll lie in long grass, hear bees counting as they forage.
At the top of Lookout Hill, I’ll reach up
and feel like I’m touching heaven.
I’ll watch the breeze stroke the surface of a pond,
ruffle the wild thyme,
and I’ll think of waves travelling through air.
At night I’ll feel the breath of the Sphinx moth
as it flies by moonlight, sips nectar from evening primroses
that glow like yellow lamps.
I’ll lie in my tent, listen to the crooning turtledoves,
and there’ll be no unearthly calls of tomcats,
no secretive scratchings in the darkness.
I like this poem for two reasons: because, thanks to its sense of yearning (during lockdown) for the freedom of travel and its accumulation of sensory details in each stanza, it’s a very fine poem per se, and for another reason I’ll come onto later. Like the way in which the phrases of songs and tunes you really like click into place perfectly on the ear, so Sue’s language in this poem does the same.The phenomenon of the cats’ meat man is covered, and beautifully illustrated, in a fine essay by Kathryn Hughes, here, It’s pleasing that both Sue and John chose Victorian professions – he wrote, splendidly, about the ‘Night Soil Man’ – though Sue’s cats’ meat man somehow seems to me to be much more present in contemporary Britain than John’s excreta collector would be.
I love the specificity of the blue tits, Lookout Hill (the one in Greenwich?), wild thyme, the Sphinx moth, the evening primroses, the turtledoves – it’s exemplary in how these are deployed without seeming in any way fake or outlandish.
I love, too, how ‘a rich lentil stew’ will replace ‘the gnarled leavings of a slaughterhouse’ (and not just because I haven’t eaten meat since 1982). My 1978 edition of the Collins Concise English Dictionary gives ‘leavings’ as an alternative for ‘leftovers’, but I suspect it’s an anachronism now – I wonder if it’s still used in Wombwell/Barnsley where Sue is from, though despite the places’ close proximity, my Sheffield-native wife Lyn says she’s never heard it. Either way, it looks and sounds just right, doesn’t it? When I attended ‘Poetry from Art sessions at Tate Modern from 2008 to c.2014, Pascale Petit exhorted participants to ‘use all the senses’, and that’s certainly what Sue did in this poem.
Above all, I adore how Sue ends the poem so beautifully, with ‘the crooning turtledoves’ – one of our most extinction-threatened bird species – and invites us readers to hear their song instead of the tomcats on their night-time prowl.
The other reason why the poem speaks to me is a more personal one: as I mentioned on this blog just after Kim chose the poems for the pamphlet, my dad used to say ‘Quick, quick, cats’ meat!’ as a (no doubt vain) way of trying to get my brothers and I moving faster. I can’t remember any of us asking Dad where it came from or him volunteering the information, but now I surmise that it must’ve been used as a bogeyman threat against one or both my paternal grandparents, who were born in 1903 and 1904. Whether the streets of Eastbourne, where they were born and grew up, resounded to the cries of a cats’ meat man or two I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve occasionally said the phrase to my children over the years, but not without derision . . .
-
Recent and future readings and recent reading
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:
Me reading at Teddington 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 21st 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 wornhelmet, 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 pause 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.
-
On Ian Storr’s Late Light
This, Ian Storr’s second, beautifully-titled collection of haiku (and haibun), has been a long time coming, 16 years in fact, since Seeds from a Larch Cone. Ian is my friend, and was my long-time colleague at Presence haiku journal – he was the managing editor from 2014, following the tragic death of Martin Lucas, until last year, a stint in which he undertook much more than the lion’s share of the work involved in cementing its reputation as one of English-language haiku’s best journals, if not the best.
I know I’m biased but I have no hesitation in saying that Late Light, published by Alba Publishing and available here (scroll down) is the most important collection of haiku by a British poet since (at least) Thomas Powell’s Clay Moon (Snapshot Press, 2020) and the two collections by our late Presence colleague Stuart Quine (Alba Publishing, 2018 and 2019).
Ian hails from Sheffield and still lives there. He spent his working life as a children’s social worker, an immensely important and difficult job. The compassion, objectivity, resilience and intelligence needed for that profession shine through in Ian’s haiku. Take this one for example:
March winds
our old men talk of compost
and plants for shade
I first read this as an allotment scene, with the ‘our’ being an affectionate determiner for two or more regulars sharing their years of knowledge and generally chewing the fat at the start of an implicitly cold spring. Then I thought perhaps it’s a memory, or after a photograph, of Ian and his wife’s (or someone else’s) fathers finding common ground (pun intended!). Either way (or maybe in another reading), it’s that subtle ‘our’ which surely raises this delicate and precise haiku beyond merely good.
The collection is sequenced, as Ian says in a brief preface, ‘to follow the progression of the seasons, starting and finishing with late winter/early spring’. I’ll cite three more poems to exemplify Ian’s ability.
three yards a day
the dry-stone waller’s answer
. . . dusk on the moor
Like Issa’s daikon radish-puller pointing the way with a daikon, this haiku has both a drollery and specific local context of its own. We might intuit the waller’s pride or maybe boredom at repeatedly being asked the same question by passersby. The crepuscular isolation of the scene undercuts the gentle humour, thereby adding another layer.
And how’s this for a classic British haiku:
day at the seaside
she buys a thicker sweater
in a summer sale
We’ve all been there: tolerating the unseasonal lack of warmth on the beach or as we stroll around the resort until we reach breaking-point. In this case, there seems every chance that the thicker clothing will lead to more stoicism of the ‘We’re here and we’re bloomin’ well going to enjoy it whether we like or not’ kind. We might also note the ironic, and slightly old-fashioned use of the word ‘sweater’, rather than ‘jumper’.
Finally, here’s one from, I sense, the point in October when British Summer Time ends:
shorter days
red admirals quiver
where the wild plums split
This is the sort of haiku which could easily be dismissed as a nature note, but it’s a classic autumn haiku: the butterflies by now probably a bit ragged around the edges, seeking sustenance where they can, here at the opened windfalls. The relentless annual cycle of the butterflies and the tree(s) inevitably remind us of our own mortality, the haiku’s active verb denoting transience.
The collection ends with a five-haiku sequence, ‘Martin Lucas at Bleasdale’, which, for those of us privileged to have known and loved Martin, haiku/tanka poet, founding editor of Presence and much-missed friend, will be especially poignant to read. It’s Ian’s gift, though, to be able to make the specific universally resonant, which is what the best haiku do.
The fine haiku and haibun poet Sean O’Connor says in his introduction, ‘In these pages, we meet Ian Storr the writer, the poet, the person, with his unique and insightful perspective of the world as expressed through his outstanding and engaging writing.’ As respite from the warmongering, racist rhetoric and selfishness growing more prevalent today, Late Light is indispensable.
-
On poetry competitions and personal taste
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.
-
What news there is
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 dreadthat 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 dayto 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, resignedto 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.
-
Beetle in a box
I spent the weekend before last with my brother Adrian at his home in Bath, which is the longest period of time we’ve spent together for donkey’s years and was really lovely. I then caught a bus which travelled through the former mining areas of Somerset around Radstock and Midsomer Norton, before going through the Mendips, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon, and descending to Wells, the (self-proclaimed) smallest city in England. Wells has a lovely centre – mainly but not only the beautiful Gothic cathedral and the adjoining, fully-moated Bishop’s Palace.
Wells Cathedral by day 
Wells Cathedral at night 
Bishop’s Palace, Wells I got there early enough to go round and inside the cathedral, and then, up the High Street, to see a photo of my then-bearded mug on a small poster in the window of the King’s Head. Just as well I’d shaved the beard off at the start of this year, otherwise there would have been mayhem: a posse of citizens out to lasso the wanted man.
Wanted! Ama Bolton and her group of like-minded folk, the Fountain Poets, were very welcoming, and read – and, in Rachael Clyne’s case, sang – some fine pieces. I read from both my collections plus a couple of new poems too. Ama has kindly invited me back for another reading next March, so I’d better write lots more poems in the next 11 and a half months. I must add the not-quite-random fact that both Ama and I have had poems published about dental hygienists!
Much of my reading has again been for reviews, and, for once, of books which I enjoyed and admired without exception. Among the books I’ve read solely (or mainly) for pleasure are Dean Browne’s After Party (Picador, 2025), this month’s Poetry Book Club choice, and Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000). Two more different books you’d be hard-pressed to find, yet I like them both: the inventive verbal fireworks of Browne’s poems contrast sharply with Kooser’s quiet, weather- and nature-based short poems. In a preface, Kooser says he write the poems ‘during [his] recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer’, with a two-mile walk every dawn because he’d ‘been told by [his] radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity’. Even without that background information, Kooser’s poems would still have been very moving. I hope he won’t mind me quoting this one in full:
March 10
Quiet and cold at 6 a.m.
At dawn in the roadside churchyard,
the recent, polished headstones glance and flash
as if the newly dead were waving pink placards
protesting the loss of their influence.
But the soft old marbles, grainy from weather
and losing their names, have a steady glow,
like paper bags with candles lit inside,
lining a path, an invitation.
Earlier this year, I started getting a bit of pain in my right shoulder, but I thought little of it. It’s considerably worsened since then, with constant pain down my right arm and in my neck, to the point that each ordinarily simple task is a bit of an ordeal. After an x-ray a fortnight ago and appointments with a doctor and a physio this week, it seems that the top of my spine is the most likely source of the problem and that it’s all related to my nervous system – ‘my noives’, as Oliver Hardy would say. I might know more after blood tests on Sunday and more physio on Monday.
In #293 (et al)) of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein considers what we mean when we each, individually, talk about ‘pain’, and compares it thus;
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle s only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. [Etc.]
I like to imagine the beetle in my box is a shiny, metallic green. I think I have a fairly high tolerance for pain (for a man), but this is testing my patience to the limit. I’m also struggling to do things one-handed, and with the ‘wrong’ hand at that, and with not being able to run. I walk much slower too. These are intensely annoying things, but I realise many people live with much worse conditions. Dean Browne, via a character, defined pain as something else, in the opening of his poem ‘Quiche’, available here.
-
Reading in Wells, 2nd March
This coming Monday evening, from 7pm, I’ll be reading from both my poetry collections, plus a few newer poems, at Fountain Poets, in the King’s Head, High Street, Wells, Somerset. Details are available here.
I’m grateful to Ama Bolton for inviting me.
-
On Off the Beaten Track
2026 marks 10 years since Hamish Ironside’s Boatwhistle Books published Off the Beaten Track, a beautifully-produced and quirky haiku anthology with a difference, available to buy here.
Cover of Off the Beaten Track Twelve people (including Hamish himself) were allocated a month each, from February 2015 onwards, to write a haiku every day: six experienced haiku poets (Hamish Ironside, me, Michael Dylan Welch, Christopher Herold, George Swede and Bob Lucky), and six who were not (Hugo Williams, Matthew Welton, Sally Read, Momus, Fabian Ironside and Éireann Lorsung). Of the latter six, Williams, Welton, Read and Lorsung were, and are, very established longer-form poets, and one (Momus) was, and is, a musician and blogger.
The results were unsurprisingly mixed in terms of what might be considered traditional, high-quality haiku, but never less than interesting. Here are half a dozen examples:
A daddy-long-legs
crawling up Noël Coward’s face
on the television
Hugo Williams
lost in the rain
I smell the sheep reviving
in my jumper
Hamish Ironside
evangelicals:
their keyboard-player gives it
the full Rick Wakeman
me
car trip—
we add new harmonies
to a disco tune
Michael Dylan Welch
our shadows
ride home on
the shadows of our bikes
Matthew Welton
snowy owl
the moon slices pathways
through the woods
Christopher Herold
-
February update
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 . . .
-
Review of The Last Corinthians in Acumen
In these alarming, turbulent days, I was very happy to find out that a very kind review of The Last Corinthians has been published in the latest issue of Acumen, which can be bought here. My thanks to Hamish Ironside for writing it and to Danielle Hope for publishing it. As well as the focus on the collection, I really appreciate the wider context it provides, of my writing in general.
The issue also contains an excellent review by Edmund Prestwich of Robert Hamberger’s brilliant Nude Against a Rock and fine poems by Pippa Little, Peter Raynard and many others.
*
-
New Year resolutions
Belated happy new year to you. I’ve not really one for making resolutions, so it’s about time I did, so here goes: (a) I will not worry about how long some poems have been out there under consideration (including one since 26th May – that’s 2025, I hasten to add, though it feels a darn sight longer), and, more importantly, (b) I will not send poems out until absolutely every single word, every item of punctuation and the form is as good as I can possibly make it and is doing its job to the best of its ability. ‘Common sense, Matthew,’ I hear you say, but it’s all too easy to get impatient and het up about submissions and/or prematurely over-excited about shiny new poems, isn’t it?
I mentioned the latter the other day when I was talking to a poetry group in Sheffield who had kindly invited me to read some poems, relate my ‘poetry journey’ and set them some exercises. They were a lovely and enthusiastic group, mostly fairly new to writing poetry and yet to get anywhere near as cynical about the mug’s game as I am. My journey, such as it is, has been circuitous, and it often still feels, 43 years after I started, that I’m not even halfway there yet. There is, of course, always much room for improvement. I said to the group that, if they are using memories and other personal experiences as the basis for poems, that it’s perfectly fine to change details, and almost entirely fictionalise if need be, as long as a kernel of truth remains. How one defines that kernel of truth is up to the poet, but the reader will almost certainly be able to sense whether it is there or not.
I also talked about the importance of community, both the wider poetry community per se and small groups, like theirs, which provide mutual encouragement, and, hopefully, get to the point of being able to make constructive criticisms of each other’s work, so that they can improve as poets. Not everyone wants to hear, let alone act upon, criticism of course, which is fine if poetry is just a hobby, like playing badminton or something; but poets who are serious about their poetry have to be resilient as we know.
Among the new collections I’ve enjoyed and admired of late are Lady by Laurie Bolger (Nine Arches), In the Lily Room by Erica Hesketh (also Nine Arches), Lives of the Female Poets by Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe), and, at the moment, I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon). The latter consists of single-paragraph prose-poems. In their quirkiness, they remind me of the epigrammatical mini-essays by Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), which were really proto-prose-poems, I think. Here’s an example from his collection, More Trivia (1922), which I bought just before Christmas:
‘Shrinkage’ by Logan Pearsall Smith In a letter dated 21 My 1919 to Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf described Pearsall Smith thus: ‘I think there is a good deal of the priest, it may be of the eunuch, in him.’ As a young man, he was a friend of Whitman’s in the latter’s old age, and they used to take (horse-drawn) cabs round Central Park following ones in which lovers were passengers to see how far they got, as it were. That incident apparently sparked Robert Lowell’s line ‘I watched for love-cars’ in his great ‘Skunk Hour’, available here, the last poem in Life Studies. Who knew? Well, I didn’t until I read the notes in the very heavy paperback I have of Lowell’s Collected. I’ve been reading Lowell off and on since I first read his poems at school, in the first year of sixth form, way back in 1983, and many of them remain among my all-time favourite poems.
-
A Twixmas meditation
Lyn and I seem to have spent a large chunk of our Christmas evenings this year in the north of Ireland, Belfast to be precise, courtesy of watching Say Nothing (Netflix), the film Good Vibrations (2013, on BBC iPlayer) and Trespasses (Channel 4). All three are set during the Troubles; the series both star the brilliant Lola Petticrew; and Good Vibrations is a biopic of Terri Hooley, who founded the legendary Belfast record shop of the same name, starring the equally brilliant Richard Dormer, who was also so impressively fine in the first series of Blue Lights. It seems as though after years of neglect by television and film drama, aside from Kenneth Branagh’s dreadful Belfast, the Troubles have at last become a subject worthy of dramatic portrayal, and of exploring the question of whether all, or any, of that killing was actually worth it. Novelists, notably Anna Burns and Paul McVeigh, and poets got there first, of course.
Anyhow, all this got me thinking about – or, rather, even more about – my years, from 1985 to 1991, living in Portrush and latterly Coleraine. My first published poem, in Poetry Ireland Review in 1987 (I have eternal gratitude to the late, great Dennis O’ Driscoll), was set in Dundonald. My first collection included five poems directly, and two indirectly, about those times, and The Last Corinthians included three more. Of those 10 poems, one, ‘Pietà’, first published in Magma, dealt head-on with the killing of two RUC men in Portrush in April 1987. I’ve written others but never submitted them. I’ve got plenty more to say, if I ever bother to turn the tap back on – a visit over there would no doubt do the trick.
Perhaps the worst time, Troubles-wise, in those years was that fortnight in March 1988 when the SAS shot three IRA in Gibraltar, then Michael Stone, the UDA man, killed three and injured 60-plus mourners at the Milltown Cemetery funerals of the Gibraltar victims, and then, three days later, two off-duty army corporals were killed by mourners on the route of the funeral cortege of one of Stone’s victims. Thankfully, that cycle did stop, though there were countless other such reprisal attacks.
I found out about 10 years ago that my professor of Philosophy at university, Terry O’Keeffe, was one of the Catholic priests who tried to help and give last rites to some of the 13 victims of the Paras’ shootings in Derry on Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972. Terry gave evidence to the Widgery Tribunal whitewash about his arrest, beating and torture at the hands of the Paras at Fort George, and, years later, did so over again to the Saville Inquiry, who praised him for his courage and honesty. He died aged 79 in 2020, during Covid.
I’ve written elsewhere about the poet James Simmons, who taught at my university (before my time) and was the headliner at the first reading I gave, in 1987, in the Anchor Bar, Portstewart. He was the eldest of the great generation of Heaney, Longley and Mahon and is the most neglected, understandably, as much of his poetry hasn’t aged especially well; but the best has a poignancy and power which resonates across the decades. Heaney was a little uncharitable about Simmons in Stepping Stones. Simmons set to music and sang, here, his poem ‘Claudy’, about the IRA bombing in 1972 of the village of that name, coincidentally the home of one of my best friends at university, with whom (plus her sister) I spent the summer of 1987 in Berlin. Personally, I prefer Simmons’ heartfelt poetry to that of Longley, though both surely pale in comparison with Heaney and Mahon.
But I’ll close this brief bit of reminiscing with part of a poem by James (Jim) Caruth. I mentioned on here in the summer my admiration for Jim’s collection Speechless at Inch, available here. Jim hails from Belfast but has lived on the edge of Sheffield for many years. One of the many fine poems set in his homeland is ‘Milltown Sequence’ about the cemetery I referred to above. The last four of its six sections are as follows:
IV
Once, we heard a corncrake
in the meadows, watched
and waited for some sign of it,
the slightest movement in the long grass.
But only that intermittent ratchet call
as it sounded its own name.
V
Here is where we bury our Republican dead,
squeezed into this attended plot.
The killed-in-action,
the tit-for-tats and reprisals;
so many names we must remember.
Enough songs to last a lifetime.
VI
The poor ground,
three small fields of indigent grass,
few pennies to weight their eyes.
Over this shamed earth Divis broods,
its dark spine a horizon. A last frontier
before heather, bracken, bog.
For me these lines have a nobility worthy of Robert Lowell at his most serious.
My final, though far from original, thought is that it really is time that Ireland was united. Britain, or rather Norman England, began its imperial aggression by ravaging Ireland nine centuries ago and it’s high time that all vestiges of its empire in Ireland and elsewhere were removed.
Thank you to everyone who has read my ramblings on here this year and a very happy New Year to you when it arrives in your time zone.
-
Poems in The High Window – ‘The Postcard’ and ‘Record Breaker’
With thanks to editor David Cooke, I have two poems, available to read here, in the latest issue of The High Window: the first is a hybrid poem of sorts; the second is more in keeping with my usual style, I think.
It’s great to be in the same issue alongside, inter alia, friends Kathy Pimlott and Michael Loveday. David always does a terrific job in pulling the journal together.
-
Review of Andrew Neilson’s Summers Are Other
My last review of the year, of Andrew Neilson’s fine Rack Press pamphlet, Summers Are Other, has been published today, over at The Friday Poem, here. My thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie.
This week also saw the excellent news that Blue Diode Publishing will be publishing Andrew’s long-overdue first full collection, Little Griefs, in 2026.
I should also mention that I very much enjoyed Andrew’s essay on Seamus Heaney in the latest issue of The Dark Horse, which is available to buy here.
-
Recent readings and reading
The evening in York was a memorable one: Janet Dean and Ian Parks, whose new collection we were celebrating, read beautifully, and Jane Stockdale’s songs and tunes were delightful. I stuck to my usual set of poems from The Last Corinthians, tempting though it was to read different ones and even some from my previous collection and/or some new ones.
Five days after York, having been invited by Katie Griffiths to read in Walton-on-Thames alongside Sophie Herxheimer, I skedaddled down south for what was perhaps the most enjoyable gig for me since the one in Nottingham in September. Sophie is a force of nature, an artist as well as a poet, whom I could’ve listened to all evening. She got everyone making zines during the interval. Katie herself read a poem; it’s excellent news that Nine Arches will be publishing her second collection next year. There was also a short open mic, the readers including marvellous Jill Abram.
Photo by Cris Fells of Sophie Herxheimer, Katie Griffiths and me. As Walton is only a few miles west of Kingston, I tailored my set accordingly, with more locally-set poems than I would normally read, though I decided – wisely, I think – against reading one, ‘The Blue Bridge’, which features Sham 69, who came from the neighbouring town of Hersham. In all, it was a joyful evening, and a good way to end this year of readings, which has seen me appear in eight cities and towns in England within the space of six months. It’s been more of a meander than a tour, and two of them were serendipitous invitations at fairly short notice; nonetheless, it’s been lovely to read my poems out loud in front of attentive listeners, not all of whom are poets themselves. I’m thankful to everyone who’s come along, whether because of me, my co-readers or both. I’ll start again in 2026, with a trip to Wells in March.
Meanwhile, my friend and fellow native-Kingstonian poet Greg Freeman, wrote a kind review, available here, of The Last Corinthians for the Write Out Loud site, for which he is the news editor. I am especially grateful to Greg for this, for he not only also reviewed the first launch event at Doncaster back in June but was also the first person to review my first collection. Many congratulations are due to Greg for graduating yesterday from the Newcastle University / Poetry School MA in Poetry.
This last week has seen me join up with poet–friends for a residential in Cloughton, four miles north of Scarborough and just under a mile from the North Sea. Due east from there, there’s no landfall until Schleswig Holstein.
The track to Cloughton Wyke. Although there were intense mornings of drafting poems using prompts, there were also lots of laughs and games, including guess-the-mystery-poets, pool and table tennis, despite the games room (a big shed) being a bit flooded. There was also lots of that great British delicacy, fried bread, at breakfast, which was right up my strasse. I can’t say that I wrote especially well, and sometimes in such weeks the real pleasure to be had is in hearing how well others can draft fully-formed poems in under 10 minutes, and in the conversations at meal-times and in small workshop groups. I very rarely write well from prompts, and usually only if I go off on a tangent, but that’s not necessarily the point; it’s more about getting words down on a page and seeing what might emerge, either immediately or much later when the words are revisited. It is invariably amazing to discover what memories, thoughts and word salads appear.
In between times, I’ve been reading books and journals in a rather unsystematic manner. Here are my thoughts on some of them.
I very much enjoyed Amanda Dalton’s third full collection, Fantastic Voyage (Bloodaxe, 2024, available here), which riffs on the wacky 1966 film of the same name and also includes her moving meditation on grief, the two long poems which make up ‘Notes on Water’ (which I briefly reviewed, here, when it appeared as a Smith | Doorstop pamphlet in 2022), as well as a series of tremendous prose poems which are as funny as they are affecting, as in the opening and ending of this one:
Auntie Irene says that cousin John got a tapeworm from stroking the sheep. [. . .] Every time I see my cousin John I want to ask him if the tapeworm is still growing in his insides and every time he speaks to me I wonder will it come out of his mouth like words he didn’t mean to say.
Alan Buckley’s Still (Blue Diode Publishing, 2025, available here) was for me rather a disappointment after his sublime 2020 debut full collection, Touched (HappenStance Press): every (single-word title) poem consists of six couplets with seven syllables per line, a form which Buckley calls the ‘douzaine’, and most of them are about nature and were written during Covid times, though too many of them seemed like nature notes, inhibited rather than helped by the form, in which the thoughts he conveys aren’t quite brought sufficiently into focus and sometimes lapse into cliché, such as ‘May you burn brightly as long as you can’ (‘Glow’), or the obvious – a magpie described as having ‘piebald simplicity, / disturbed by metalline blue’). The paring-back dictated by the form, which he talks about in the book’s end-matter, lacks the powerful concision of haiku and doesn’t quite leave enough room to develop the plethora of ideas that he evidently has. However, I do, admire Buckley’s determination to try something different and at their best, these poems have a fine simplicity, as one would expect from such a talented poet: ‘As the final transport plane / leaves Kabul, here in Marsh Park // the Afghan boys play cricket. / They made their journeys on foot, // in trucks. Some don’t know if those / they left behind are alive.’ (‘Cricket’) Maybe a re-reading will prove more profitable.
At the age of 80, Peter Jay has collected his poems 1962–2024, as The Last Bright Apple, published by Anthony Howell’s Grey Suit Editions and available here. Jay was the founder and chief editor of Anvil Press Poetry from 1968 until it ceased in 2016, when some of its poets and back-catalogue were taken on by Carcanet. Jay had impeccable taste; as well as perhaps his most lucrative (!) asset, Carol Ann Duffy, I have on my shelves Anvil books by real favourites of mine, like Martina Evans, Michael Hamburger, Anthony Howell himself, Peter Levi, E.A. Markham, Dennis O’Driscoll and Greta Stoddart, and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s translations of Elytis, Seferis and others. As is often the case, Jay is better-known as an editor than he is as a poet, and this nicely-titled and beautifully-produced book will go some way to restoring his reputation as a poet. I say some way, because it’s not the most substantial of outputs and includes many translations from a variety of poets and languages. At his best, though, Jay’s poems are warm, attractive and cerebrally ruminative without being esoteric, as in the opening half of ‘Thoughts’:
There are days when the mind grazes,
Circling itself like an answer
Lazily guessing its question.
How fragile they are, thoughts,
How delicately to be hoarded!
When a white thought runs away,
It takes on the colour of air,
Of water. Unguarded thought,
Home thought in search of a heart,
Heartless though in search of a home,
Desert thought thirsting for an oasis,
Pale fractured thought, let me catch you,
Name you and give you a colour.
These lines, perhaps unsurprisingly, remind me of Levi and of the late collections of Hamburger. Elsewhere, Jay is a pleasing observer of what passes for natural wonder in nature-depleted England, e.g. ‘Swans on the tarn / move with the weather, / rain, wind or sun, / drifting together.’ (‘Little Langdale’), and is wryly reflective on his life’s work: ‘What can be done with poets? / Such awkward people. We know / They don’t matter at all; why then / Do they concern us?’ (‘Ars Politica’). In all, this is a collected poems which, despite being comparatively slender at 150 or so pages, contains the sort of fine, philosophising poems which are sadly out of fashion these days.
I’ve also spent time revisiting the metaphysical rococo wordscapes of Lucie Brock-Broido. The four collections published by Alred A. Knopf before her death in 2016 at the age of just 61were and are magnificent. It amazes me that, although Carcanet published a fine selected, Soul Keeping Company, in 2010, the individual collections are yet to be published over here. Maybe they’re waiting for Knopf to publish a definitive collected.
I have more reviews to write before Christmas, and one appearing next week. It has without doubt been my busiest year of poetry, and for that I am very grateful.
-
Reading in York tomorrow evening
I’ll be reading tomorrow evening as one of the guests at the York launch of Ian Parks’s terrific new collection, The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light (Crooked Spire Press). As well as Ian and me, there will be more poetry from Janet Dean, music from Jane Stockdale, and an interview with Ian by Tim Fellows, Crooked Spire supremo.
Poster for the event in York 
Another poster for the event in York
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 