There are few fine haiku poets who also write fine longer-form poems, in the UK anyway, but Stuart Handysides is one of them. His first collection of poems, The Last One Picked, won the Indigo-First Poetry Prize 2024 and was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2025. It’s available to buy here.
I’ve written previously about my sense that haiku and longer poems come from different parts of the brain; how haiku, the best ones, distil the collision of two sensory experiences in one moment to produce a spark, a connection or contrast, which the reader has to intuit, whereas longer poems, with their wider canvas, can move backwards and forwards through time in a manner rarely possible in haiku. The Last One Picked benefits from having a lifetime, and a whole career’s worth (as a GP), of experience and thought to draw upon.
Handysides writes ruminatively about his upbringing, and its strict morality, in a very religious household, impacting on even the joy of collecting, as in ‘History of the Motor Car in Fifty Picture Cards’ where ‘you felt ashamed for asking’ the ‘elderly or uncommitted friends’ if you might have ‘the cards we saw on mantelpieces’, only to be told ‘in no uncertain terms: / those are for my grandson, nephew[,] / someone who means more to me than you. That ‘uncommitted’ is satisfyingly ambiguous as to its meaning.
There’s an encounter with a horse in ‘A Solitary Mare’ which is reminiscent of Larkin’s ‘At Grass’ in how it sympathetically regards the animal’s age, but it feels much more real than Larkin’s deskbound speculation. It ends thus:
At night she nears my caravan.
I hear her snort, tear off the grass
I feel her presence, weight of hooves nearby
and next day when I sit to wire a plug
she comes to see
her long head reaches over me
hot jets of horse breath on my hands
she rubs her mighty forehead on my back
her fellow feeling floors me.
The absence of punctuation other than the two full-stops is irksome at first, but adds to the fluidity of the action, as does the alliteration at the end.
Handysides is very good at finding intriguing titles for his poems, none more so than for an excellent edgelands poem, ‘Stopping for a Slash’, in which the poet-persona might ‘choose a lay-by with trees’ and ‘break down brambles, trample nettles, tissues / half-crushed cans of Stella and Red Bull’, and then get happily distracted by the unexpectedness of nature: ‘the wind you’ve missed / in the car’ and a well-observed litany of avifauna and flora.
For me, the book’s finest moments arrive in the pleasingly thoughtful and melancholic ‘Spring Morning in the Surgery’, the opening stanza of which brilliantly imparts information to the reader in a condensed sensory fashion:
My hand palpates an abdomen,
but though I meet my patient’s eyes
to reassure and look for pain
my own are drawn across the way
where, up a tree, a harnessed man
swings out and sounds his chainsaw on a branch
that duly falls, scooped up by his mates below.
These lines have a lovely rhythm and music to them, with several unexpected but apposite words: the perfect ‘palpates’; that ‘sounds’; and ‘mates’ which conveys a more intimate togetherness than, say, ‘colleagues’ would have done. The poem goes on to explore the nature of a working life, the doctor–patient relationship and mortality itself, all with a skilful delicacy which shows Handysides at his very best – and his best is very good indeed.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 