“Eminem ruined everything,” laments the speaker of “Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee”, a playfully candid narrative poem in Kumukanda, Kayo Chingonyi’s debut collection. Ostensibly a hymn to the poet’s teenage love of mixtape assembly, R&B and modern rap, “slick lyrics I could earn stripes by reciting”, the nostalgic story soon morphs into a barbed reflection on racial difference and societal prejudice. “In time, I could rattle off The Slim Shady LP line for line”, boasts the poet, “though no amount of practice could conjure the pale skin / and blue eyes that made Marshall a poet and me / just another brother who could rhyme”.

Kumukanda, we learn, is the name given to the tribal rites of passage that young Zambian boys must undergo before they become men (Chingonyi, born in 1987, moved to the UK from Zambia aged six). The book emerges as being about memory and identity in the best and broadest sense. But it also challenges our preconceptions around culture as it is both made and received, and the tensions between art and the self. “If my alternate self, who never left, could see me” questions the title poem, “what would he make of these literary pretensions, / this need to speak with a tongue that isn’t mine?”

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Chingonyi’s poetic voice and style are both highly entertaining and adaptable, mixing form with free verse and jargon with slang, “cutting shapes” on the dancefloor in one poem before delicately wondering at the birth of a friend’s daughter in another, “the look on your face as you apprehend snow”. These are poems as adept at conjuring Larry Levan, the New York DJ, spinning records as “sweat drips from your hair / the colour of James Brown’s scream”, as they are able to deliver moments of sentimental intrigue, “the wind blowing through / the french doors of your childhood / the house’s way of saying goodbye”.

The poems are as adept at conjuring Larry Levan spinning records as they are at delivering sentimental intrigue

But for all its lyrical elegance and at times mannered diction, this is angry and defiant writing, determined to “master the language”, as “The Cricket Test” has it, of privileged white male canonical literature as if to prove a point. Eminem may have “ruined everything” as a white kid muscling in on a predominantly black rap scene, but the poetic reference is apposite; if Eminem had to repeatedly prove himself a battling hip-hop artist in part because of his whiteness, Chingonyi’s poems suggest the difficulty for black and ethnic minority writers in proving themselves as lyric poets. As Valerie Mason-John once dryly observed: “Don’t categorise yourself as a black or ethnic poet. There’s no need to, the media will do that for you.” Chingonyi goes one better, using his lyric panache to honour pop references and cultural experiences of personal and communal significance while also turning the tables, casting a wry and intelligent eye on our wider attitudes.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the book’s central sequence, “calling a spade a spade”. Taking as its epigraph a quotation from US poet and singer-songwriter Saul Williams about “the process of healing” from a snake bite, in which one must “spit out the venom again and again” until it is gone, these terse, memorable poems are testament to the best of Chingonyi’s gifts. Impassioned, witty, socially and politically engaged, whether scrutinising “the N word … lounging in a Pinter script” or remembering how a “changing room was a shrine to apartheid”, the poems turn irony to impressive effect in dissecting our dubious “post-race moment”, where racism has had a makeover but is as ugly and prevalent as ever, “trolling in the comments, / dressed to kill in your new age binary clothes”.

The real success of this sequence hinges on Chingonyi’s use of artifice to signal the paradox of our cultural reception of otherness. Art’s imaginative possibilities ought to mean the reinvention of self and world. Yet so often, as these poems suggest, it can seem content merely to trade in harmful stereotypes, whether a “seminar tutor tiptoeing round” a difficult reading of Robert Lowell’s “Colloquy in Black Rock” or a black actor looking for work, “sick of / playing lean dark men who may have guns”. “I have a book of poems in my rucksack”, notes the protagonist, “blank pad, two pens, tattered A-Z, headphones / that know Prokofiev as well as Prince Paul”.

Kumukanda is an authentic and convincing book of poems in its many nuanced portrayals and unflinching reflections; rarely is it content to gloss or deceive. Though its music can sometimes falter as Chingonyi’s line of argument, a point to be made, supersedes the poetry itself, these more prosaic moments are evidence of his ambition and determination to use poetry as a transformative mode of thinking. The collection’s final poems are tender accounts of love and loss, reflecting on orphanhood and grief, but also on the emotional ties that bind us, memories of a mother’s tales of “childhood smiles on granddad’s farm” in “Kung’anda”, the “laughing dance across hot soil // to the ice-cream stand”. As the speaker in one poem recalls a precise intimacy, remembering how there was “only darkness; our bodies speaking”, Kumukanda is an intricate and intense collection, heady with feeling but guided by thoughtful reflection.

This article first appeared in the Guardian, 03.11.17

Imagine you’d fallen prey to a serious but mysterious illness affecting two million people in the UK, many of whom were entirely –even especially– fit and active before they got it. You’d no doubt be concerned, and by turns very scared, at what was happening to you, particularly as the days and weeks rolled on with no real improvement. As you looked for professional help, you’d reasonably expect some kind of medical care programme to be available. Not every illness has a cure, you’d think. But those that seriously impact and impair our lives tend to come with a developed treatment strategy. Not least if said illness is impacting 3% of the population, a cross-section of society equivalent to the combined headcount of the cities of Birmingham, Glasgow, and Cardiff.

But what if, in addition to finding that your GP couldn’t refer you to any real support, you found that research into this now-widespread illness was far from a national medical priority, despite it having variously impaired and, in numerous cases, disabled so many like you? What if, for an indefinite time that ended up running to over a year, you were among the 30,000 of that two million unable to work because of this illness? And what if you then found out that it wasn’t even formally recognised as a disability?

You’d have every right to be baffled, despairing, even angry at why your serious condition wasn’t being taken very seriously at all; that, despite a diminishing number of specialist clinics, the available support amounted to little more than recommendation of some healthy lifestyle choices. Perhaps you should rest, hydrate, eat well, maybe take some vitamins? No matter you were largely in the habit of doing all those things anyway, as someone who had previously worked a demanding full-time job, had a resting heart rate of 45, and enjoyed competitive running as a hobby.

So, you rest. There’s nothing else for it, it seems. You’re signed off work– with the illness’s attendant depression and anxiety, of course, since the illness itself isn’t properly recognised, and so can’t be meaningfully included alone on a medical note, despite its horrific reality. And maybe, very gradually, you do start to see small improvements. You used to be able to work a full day and go for a pleasant 10K jog in the evening. Remember how you took all that for granted? Now, after weeks of an insatiable need for frustratingly non-restorative sleep, you can maybe, as the day’s main activity, take a gentle walk to the nearby park, a few hundred metres down the road and back. That’ll be your lot, though— unless you want to experience the post-exertional malaise (PEM) you suffered the last time you tried to ‘push’ yourself in what seemed such a meagre way. And remember, PEM can hit you not only because of your minimal physical exertions, but because of accumulated cognitive and emotional effort, or any combination of the above. Cross the invisible and shifting boundary you’re forever mapping these days, a world from where you once were, and you can look forward to the all-over, deep and lasting ache of disabling chronic fatigue, a condition spiked with cognitive confusion, sometimes a brutal migraine, that’ll leave you out of action for a day or two, or three.

But you mustn’t complain. You’re one of the lucky ones, remember. Some folks with this illness have spent months on end not even able to get out of their beds to make themselves a simple cup of tea. Despite this, you discover that there remain professionals in the medical community who imagine that it can be treated with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), or even with graded exercise therapy. Even though –as what scientific studies there are indicate– this is an illness primarily marked by serious bodily inflammation and dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system; a physical illness with cognitive symptoms, not the other way round.

There are some incredible delusions that run very deep in the collective psyches of late capitalist societies. But the mythical belief that anyone can simply haul themselves out of suffering through will and determination is surely one of the most pernicious. You understand hard work. You completed the research and writing of a 100,000-word PhD; you’ve worked years full-time at an understaffed, teaching-intensive university. You were in possession of a modest running talent and trained consistently over several years to run 5,000 metres (a parkrun, more commonly) in 17 minutes, alongside many other milestone distances, including the marathon. But even if you had trained all day every day, with the best will and determination in the world, you know there was never any possibility whatsoever of you making it to the nationals, never mind the Olympics. You can’t argue with genetics, nor with the hand the fates have dealt you.

There are limits in any life, major forces and factors beyond our control, as much as we might like to romanticise that we are masters of our own destinies. None of our achievements and feats of endurance, nor lack thereof, should add or subtract validity to the unquestionable reality of our suffering. Here, they simply serve as illustrative example to counteract the false assumptions we collectively make about certain kinds of illness. And so, if you are a former amateur athlete incapacitated in bed with a majorly debilitating illness, someone telling you you just need to ‘push through’ your body’s serious and desperate protests should be forced to see what happens as a result of their good advice. Worse, if the person telling you to do this is you – because you have internalised unreal expectations of yourself from an insane, workaholic culture; because you have an illness that isn’t formally recognised or treatable as such, leaving you especially vulnerable to self-chastisement – then you will see, and you will learn. The hard way.

Over time, though, you become much kinder to yourself. You become accustomed to this illness, to the ways it has humbled you, quietly devastated you. You are grateful for the small mercies: a job with a period of decent sick pay; a humane line manager who isn’t a LinkedIn automaton. The kindness of others. But for all the very gradual improvements that ‘radical rest’ and ‘listening to your body’ have brought, it has nevertheless stopped you from living your life. Most frequently, this occurs in the physical and cognitive crashes that scupper your plans of a day, evening, or longer. But it has also held you back in cumulative, significant ways. After years of distance running, you’ve had to all but give up consistent attempts at demanding exercise, and you can still only work part-time, struggling even with that, over two years down the line.

But you’ve been lucky, you guess, not to experience too much of the gaslighting others have been victim to. Ah, the ancient human practice of isolating and undermining those with invisible or ostensibly ‘dubious’ illnesses! A tribal punishment that is half-fear (as healthy folks, we instinctively flee any kind of sickness as if it were a contagion) and half-ignorance— an illness not fully understood, which doesn’t bear recognisable and visible markers, invites cruelty, or at least scepticism. Any woman who has struggled to get a (male) doctor to take seriously symptoms of chronic dysmenorrhea or endometriosis knows this all too well.

This is true, you discover, even when improvements come, and you are able to sometimes present, as your public-facing self, almost as if you were fully recovered. Aren’t you better? ask even those well-meaning and kind-hearted folk, assuming this thing must surely, by now, have passed; that was until you decided to mention that no, it still seriously impacts your life. Every single day. You get it; no one wants to hear this stuff. But honestly, you want to say, come and see me, disproportionately exhausted, after this one-off social occasion, or that working day. Or better yet, spending most of a day stuck in bed recovering from more intense post-exertional malaise, the accumulation of what were once manageable cognitive, physical, emotional demands. You’re careful, you’re good at measuring out this stuff these days, but then you have to try to live your life. Of course, you used to take all this for granted, too. Why wouldn’t you.

You have to stay positive, you tell yourself, among other such platitudes that ring alternately hollow and true. Despite the setbacks, despite the continued deafening silence almost everywhere, the gradual improvements are there to see in yourself. Eventually, you might well get fully shot of it. You know from years of running and training how to trust in long-term processes, in building back, starting again (and again). But the fact remains that this thing has been a part of you for a long time now. You’ve accepted that you have a disability because yes, you do, as hard as it was to acknowledge that truth for a time.

But what you and other sufferers really need is the near-impossible. You need a still traumatised society, a society in collective denial, to accept that the thing they thought had gone away has not gone away. Not by a long shot. Long Covid is real. It is widespread. The Covid-19 pandemic might have officially ended; we don’t have need for hellish lockdowns any longer, as the death toll has fallen away. But the virus remains. And some two million of us in the UK alone are seriously struggling, by various brutal degrees, in the wake of infections, for months and years at a time. Right now, today.

We are not short on national scandals. But the silence around Covid, around long Covid, is one of the most alarming and depressing.

Colloquial, straight-talking, ‘less deceived’ than Philip Larkin, Wilkinson brings a spiky 21st-century realism as well as formal adroitness to the contemporary lyric. In Same Difference he further expands his range with an interwoven series, ‘After Verlaine’, in which he discloses the French poet’s capacity for ‘hard thinking’ and accesses a newly sensuous and shadowy depth in his own imagination.

God bless Carol Rumens for lending those words to my writing; for her close reading of ‘Last Hope (after Verlaine)’ in her legendary Guardian column back in 2022. And god rest her soul. She was a wonderful poet in her own right, but perhaps an even more talented critic and close reader of poetry, as the devout following she accrued for Poem of the Week proved— surely one of the only online newspaper columns with a ‘below-the-line’ comment section that proved consistently intelligent, good spirited, and genuinely communal. Her contribution to poetry in these isles, and beyond, will be sorely missed. You could do much worse than spend an afternoon exploring the archives of the Guardian’s Poem of the Week, a proper treasure trove of classic and contemporary poems accompanied by insightful, incisive commentary.

The following sampler and afterword, after Verlaine, are taken from my second book of poetry, Same Difference (2022). From my end at least, that slim volume can be fairly summarised as an extended experimentation with, and interrogation of, the nature and limits of poetic voice. For those interested in the practice of ‘versioning’ (as distinct from translation) – both the motivations behind it and the rewards it can bring for writer and reader alike – I hope they offer some intrigue and insight, at least as I found them.

Suffice to say, I still think the contemporary valorisation of the individual voice in poetry is a pernicious one. Not only because it’s false, i.e. no one’s there, just the voice of the poem, the illusion of a present and genuine speaker conjured, brilliantly, by language alone. Taken to heart, it also seriously limits what any poet might be capable of, conflating stylistic consistency with a narrowly coherent sense of self. Worse, it encourages the simplistic notion in our culture that poems are mere outpourings of feeling from the poet-as-author, rather than infinitely rich objects crafted from words, capable of making us variously think and feel so much more, meeting with the true complexity and variety of our experience.

The multiplicity of voice in poetry should mean more than the range of poets writing at any given time; it is the diversity of feeling and thought in each of us as individuals, testament to Whitman’s famous statement: ‘I contain multitudes’. I enjoyed trying on Verlaine’s voice, his various voices, and seeing how they got mixed up with, and ultimately changed, whatever I’d previously held to be my own. I hope you do, too.

Joie de Vivre

after Verlaine

Now you suckers and saps might fall for nature 
but that confidence trickster doesn’t fool me.
All those touched-up pastorals of half-assed
emotion are the last thing I want to see.

Art’s a total joke, and we’re no better— 
I laugh at verse, the churches’ fawning spires,
and worse, Canary Wharf’s effervescence,
that Midas touch turning the whole lot to shit.

Assholes and good guys are one of a kind.
I’ve left behind faith, daydreams, and as for
love – please. Let’s wave all that goodbye.

Like a useless toy boat that’s miles offshore— 
too tired to go on, but who can’t pack it in— 
I’ll wait on the shipwreck still gunning for me.

Portrait of the Artist Asleep

after Verlaine

She looks for all the world like some deadbeat angel, 
foetal but hopeful, an inch of light haloing

her temple. She’s restless, sure, half mumbling
to herself as the door rocks gently in its frame,

stirred by a breeze the way her waking thoughts
follow whatever her eyes light on, even you.

Truth is, she’ll be up and gone before you know,
back among the world and brilliant with it,

and you, friend, won’t even make a painting
or poem, whichever she turns her hand to next.

You’re no more her muse than the lamp distilled
in the mirror she’ll fix her face in before she leaves.

The Nightingale

after Verlaine

The two of us lolling in the park
with silence sweeping the green, 
as a summer day fizzles out
in the static, darkening leaves.

Once, love came easily enough— 
the scent of those tall lime trees
setting our eager hearts off
like a jackpot’s flood of pennies.

Instead, we close our eyes now,
shut into private half-dreams,
and the gap between us
opens up, sudden and unseen.

Love, let’s be convinced at last
we trust what the other means.
Life shuttles by way too fast
for these doubtful little games.

Then, when evening comes down,
throwing its shadows across us,
we’ll hear the nightingale singing,
whose song is one of clearness.

Afterword: after Verlaine

The nineteenth-century French poet Paul Verlaine isn’t exactly held in the highest regard these days. He lived a life torn between extremes – peace and violence, faith and blasphemy, compassion and lecherousness – briefly embracing a bourgeois life before divorcing his wife; spending time in jail for shooting his sometime lover Arthur Rimbaud; making an unconvincing conversion to Catholicism only to utterly renounce it, before being elected by his peers to the prestigious post of ‘Prince of Poets’ and dying penniless two years later. Throughout his turbulent life he constantly wrote poetry; in many ways, his continued indecisiveness and inner turmoil both defined his poetic and kept the stuff coming. Coupled with a belief that he might make ends meet through book sales, it meant Verlaine published more than he ever should have. Critics are in agreement: you have to rummage to find the good stuff in a somewhat baggy oeuvre.

Yet the poems after Verlaine included in this book have stemmed from my belief that there are a number of truly excellent works of his to be uncovered; that his best poems are not those merely suggestive and allusive pieces as some would have it; and that, in its emotionally honest portrayal of the uncertainties, conflicts, and paradoxes of the examined life, his poetry has a lot to offer to modern readers. Belief being the operative word; at this point, I should make a few things clear. Firstly, my grasp of the French language is limited to say the least; secondly, my intention was never to faithfully translate any of Verlaine’s poems. As others have effectively argued to the point that said argument has become near-axiomatic, translation allows much of the surface sense of the original poem to survive, but often results in musical adversity in its commitment to preserving the semantic above all else. I first came to Verlaine’s poems in the form of solid, wholly trustworthy translations by Martin Sorrell and Norman R. Shapiro, among others. Each time a translated poem struck me as unusual and interesting, it led me to hunt down cribs, as well as to dig up other translations. In this way, I’d begin to get a feel for what I sensed to be the essence and the argument – or the beating heart and the turbulent mind – hidden at the centre of each poem. For me, this was what had survived translation, in spite of sound and sense parting ways: an echo of Verlaine himself, if you like, in his distinctive yet often adaptable poetic style. It was what I wanted to tap into when I came to write.

On one level, the Verlaine poems here are a selfish project. I wanted to try on a voice with which, despite sharing some stylistic and tonal sympathies, I seemed to have little in common. It served as a psychodramatic exercise, a walk in somebody else’s shoes. Writing each new poem while drawing on the raw material of Verlaine in translation has led me, in the always dramatised context of the individual poem, to think and say things I’d likely never have dreamed of otherwise. But just as importantly, I hope these poems paint a fresh portrait of Paul Verlaine, however partial and sketchy, that reveals him to be a more surprising, hard-thinking, and even revivifying poet than expected. Beyond his skilled conjuring of delicate and atmospheric allusiveness, at its best, his is also poetry of punchy musicality, philosophical edge, and candidness – both intellectual and emotional – which allows for genuine beauty, sensuality, and sadness. For all the impressionistic qualities of his poems, he is not in the business of showy or withering obfuscation. Perhaps most of all, as a poet of quiet reflection and stillness, and of pure in-between-ness, his is a voice peculiarly well-suited to our fast-paced, garrulous, and disorienting times.

Sheffield, August 2021

first published in Same Difference (2022)

As our new century has grown ever more peculiar and unpredictable, there has been something strangely reassuring about the arrival of a new book of poems by that impish treasure of American letters, John Ashbery. Ashbery didn’t quite publish a book every year in his final decades, but the final score saw some 13 surface, a rate of productivity that would have made Paul Verlaine blush. Which would be great if – as we expect of all our poets – the abstract wordsmith were breaking new ground. But if the last couple of decades of reading Ashbery confirmed one thing, it’s that the late great man settled into a style so impressively self-parodic he almost looked like one of his legion of poetic imitators. Just as global warming becomes ever more physically manifest and unignorable, the creeping sense that, towards the end of his life, Ashbery was knocking out what came easiest and labelling it (anti-)poetry simply because he could, is a concern we can’t deny, however much we might want to.

Yet whatever your opinion of Ashbery’s work, it’s hard to argue with Stephanie Burt’s claim that he will remain a hugely significant American poet, comparable in some ways to Old Possum himself. Like T. S. Eliot, to some he has proven a fecund source of near slavish inspiration; to just as many, a bête noire of obscurantism, as if the emperor weren’t even pretending to wear clothes. For the devout and detractors alike, the mythology has long been in place. It began with almost instant fame after W. H. Auden judged Some Trees (1956) winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, before the old master later confessed he hadn’t understood a word of the manuscript; led to the multi-award-winning ars poetica Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1977), a brilliantly meandering narrative pointing up Ashbery’s obsession with creative self-reflexion, and abiding interest in both visual art and pop culture; and ends with the refinement and eventual plateauing of that style, into an apparent means of refracting the babble and chaos of our times.

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If Ashbery can at times seem rather baldly mimetic – Robert Frost famously saw poetry as a momentary stay against confusion, rather than an opportunity to hold up a broken mirror to a broken world – to his credit, he has confessed to being as puzzled by his work as the rest of us. “I’m kind of sorry that I cause so much grief”, he once winked in an interview. Imagine that regret being tweeted, and you can almost see the hashtag #sorrynotsorry tacked onto the end. What really separates Ashbery from his repetitively ‘experimental’ peers and acolytes is his sense of humour. There has always been a cartoonish quality to his work, daring us to take him seriously at our peril, dangling poetry’s promises of truth and meaning in front of us, before snatching them away and dropping an Acme anvil in their wake. “Th- th- th- that’s all folks!” his poems often seem to manically announce, half-knowing we’ll be back for more of the brightly-coloured same. Perhaps some readers return to him because of the unlikely magnitude of his ongoing achievement. After all, it’s a feat to have written so much poetry that refuses memorability, meaning, conventional sense, even the pursuit of something resembling truth – in short, that refuses to be poetry as we know it. The stamina alone is commendable.

Commotion of the Birds, his final non-posthumous collection, arrives with a blurb that describes Ashbery as having written “more than twenty-six original books”, suggesting that even his publishers have lost count. It opens with the title poem, which is perhaps the book’s best, demonstrating as it does a playful, interrogative send-up of modernity and the laughable notion of progress. “We’re moving right along through the seventeenth century”, the narrator quips with typically deadpan humour: “The latter part is fine, much more modern / than the earlier part.” Then we get about as close as Ashbery comes to meditative thought:

Often it’s a question of seeming rather than being modern.
Seeming is almost as good as being, sometimes,
and occasionally just as good. Whether it can ever be better
is a question best left to philosophers
and others of their ilk, who know things
in a way others cannot, even though the things
are often almost the same as the things we know.

While this might seem unusual – it is one of only a few poems in the book that makes linear sense as a narrative argument – it is also fairly typical. Critics often like to compare Ashbery’s poetry to the visual art of the abstract expressionists, usually on account of his non-representational bent. But this misses a fairly major distinction, between the high seriousness of that art movement and Ashbery’s modus operandi of keeping seriousness in constant check, goofing around the minute you suspect a poem has a whiff of conviction or sincerity. In gently accusing philosophers of a superior brand of knowledge, Ashbery isn’t even playing at being ‘some ordinary guy’, despite that collective first-person plural. How could he, when such poems are most keenly read by those who are – as the old phrase goes – too clever by half? It isn’t long before Commotion of the Birds settles into an all-too-familiar brand of Ashberyesque:

His aunt was accepted.
How cool is that?

A new desire,
plainer than I can doubt
lightens the cities of the plain.

All is effulgent, sawtooth fronds,
veiled undertones.
Then the question remains: What is it?

Leaving his shorts behind, he
hastened to rejoin the marchers up ahead –
a peanut pastime, pleats, tucks, and panels,
unreinforced paint thinner.

So turn this off.

Poetry is often difficult because it wrenches language into new shapes; it wants to achieve the impossible, attempting to find words for the ineffable. Sometimes, in great poems, it manages to – breathlessly, brilliantly, unforgettably. But you can’t help but read many of Ashbery’s lines and despair at their wilful difficulty; admirers of his work will even cite it as a quality in and of itself, which does no one any favours. I half fancy his select band of continually avid readers must either be academics and select scholar-poets who no longer much trouble to complicate literature with pleasure, or else those who genuinely relish the opportunity to tantalise their minds – and, dare I say it, hearts – with the poetic equivalent of an unsolvable Rubik’s cube.

The misconception of poetry as an infuriating puzzle – as if the author had deliberately withheld information to make life hard for us, rather than trying to approach a particular kind of clarity in writing about a thought, idea or emotion of exceptional complexity – is of course what leaves the genre so widely ignored among many intelligent readers. This isn’t quite Ashbery’s intention, but he makes you feel like it is, and then when you realise yet again the poem is another pomo joke at the expense of our naïve search for meaning or truth, you want to throw the damn thing in the corner, rather than applaud the umpteenth time he has flagged up the fundamental emptiness at the core of the consumer capitalist experience in precisely the same way. Take the opening two stanzas of ‘Cartoon Music’:

Why would she have said that,
an undeserving egg, not to die for?
Rainbow pencils retracted.
Next, a group of officials withdrew support
of accident forgiveness, and I’m like
Comrade Fuzzy, my gaydar’s
gone berserk the way it messes.

Or say the response is tepid,
or buttered ramekins. Color me brain foolish,
on eye-drops – the history of his hounding. There,
it’s not creepy, but it is.

There are some typical Ashbery touches to admire here: the conversational provisionality; the deliciously authentic use of slang; that shoulder-shrugging ennui that gives his late work its elegiac note. But reading this poem is also typical of reading almost any poem in the book: you feel like you’re watching back-to-back cartoons in the early hours, alone, having smoked a considerable quantity of potent marijuana, i.e. kind of fun and zany at first, but very soon a senseless visual loop of slightly nightmarish yet remarkably dull qualities. “In these situations / I’m trying to figure out what is going on”, confesses the speaker in ‘Sitting at the Table’; so were we all, before we’d been led up the garden path one too many times. “Intelligence without understanding / is like constant frost”, ‘The Upright Piano’ tells us. Indeed. But hell would likely have frozen over before John Ashbery decided to offer his readers poems that provoke understanding, aside their obvious smarts. In the end, we must continue to read his poems like ice-skaters gliding across a strange, beautiful, permanently frozen lake: wondering what it would be to marvel at some depth or substance beneath, were it ever to thaw.

This article was commissioned by The New Republic in 2016. It never appeared in print, and I recall receiving the ‘kill fee’ the same day the great poet died in September 2017. Fortunately, this has not developed into a trend.

As Sean O’Brien pointed out not so long ago, Don Paterson’s poetry has come a long way in a short time. Back in the early nineties his were often dream-like yet ominous poems of football, sex, drink, music, and class politics, full of both demotic and linguistic ostentation, self-deprecation and braggadocio, typically delivered with a swaggering, loose formality, intoxicated with the power of musical patterning. This was poetry as a game – ‘I took myself on for the hell of it’, says the pool-playing, Guinness-gulping speaker of ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’ – albeit one with often serious consequences: the black pocketed and the black stuff sunk, the narrator’s demonic doppelganger is left ‘stuck in his tent of light, sullenly / knocking the balls in, for practice, for next time.’

But even when an imagined footy team’s grimly hilarious decline gave the poet excuse to show off a playful wit and buzzing vocabulary (‘from the top, then, the zenith, the silent footage: / McGrandle, majestic in ankle-length shorts, / his golden hair shorn to an open book, sprinting / the length of the park for the long hoick forward, / his balletic toe-poke nearly bursting the roof of the net’), there was always a hunger for greater seriousness in the writing’s barely disguised existential and spiritual dimensions. From Paterson’s debut Nil Nil (1993) to the near-grandiose ambition, playful self-aggrandizement, and lyrical scope of God’s Gift to Women (1997), the surface show of jokes and flamboyance were, if anything, only cranked up; gravitas often came with a smirk, sometimes to deft purpose, but elsewhere the impression was of a poet afraid to fully mean it. (A notable feature of Paterson’s early poetry is its constant repositioning and cocksure unassailability). Beneath it all, though – and often breaking through – was the earnest sense that poetry wielded real power, and that its weird mix of music and logic could actually make stuff happen. ‘A poem is a little church, remember, / you, its congregation, I, its cantor’, intones the poet-priest of ‘Prologue’; or take ‘Exeunt’s magical-realist moments: ‘The coughing stops: / he has unlocked the hammer within the anvil. / It drills on the workbench, begins to levitate’.

The conflicts between Paterson’s increasingly lyrical address of complex philosophical questions and the arch demands of a postmodern zeitgeist came to a head in a third book. The Eyes (1999) saw Paterson move into translation – or more specifically, ‘versioning’ – in poems written ‘after’ and under the influence of fin de siècle Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Looking back, it seems to have given the poet license to embrace a much freer, adaptable lyric style in his follow-up volume of original verse, Landing Light (2003). Adopting and absorbing aspects of Machado’s unshowy philosophical bent, gripping chiaroscuro, and ego-stripping anonymity – the lyric ‘I’ used almost purely as a means of calling any idea of a stable identity into properly serious doubt – led to what was, in many ways, a surprising and wholly accomplished fourth book. Arriving only ten years after Nil Nil’s shape-shifting and sometimes riddling excesses, Landing Light saw the poet at home with emotional candour, frank declarations and, alongside lyrical elegance, a growing, unfashionable adherence to traditional poetic forms. Compare one of Nil Nil’s sonnets – the rarefied, potentially wrong-footing formal strain of ‘Restitution’, say – with the clarity and considerable emotional force of ‘The Thread’ from Landing Light, a touching portrayal of the frailties of family life, recalling the difficult birth of a child. ‘And so today I thank what higher will / brought us to here, to you and me and Russ, / the great twin-engined swaying wingspan of us / roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill / and your two-year-old lungs somehow out-revving / every engine in the universe.’

Which brings us – via a woefully quick mention of Orpheus (2006), in which Paterson renders Rilke in English as a poet of moral conviction, vertiginous edge, and intellectual rigour – to 2009’s Rain. On the surface an extended elegy to the poet Michael Donaghy, Rain is more fully an extension of the emotionally fraught, philosophical, and deceptively unadorned lyricism explored in Landing Light, shorn of that book’s elsewhere ludic and lengthy narratives. It also brings us to ‘The Circle’, the poem I want to talk about here, not because it’s emblematic of Rain as a book, though in certain ways it is, but because it’s an interesting poem to illustrate what can still be achieved in traditional forms at a time when some might imagine adherence to, say, end-rhymed quatrains in iambic tetrameter belongs to a bygone era.

A while back I discussed another poem from Rain, ‘The Lie’, in the pages of Poetry London (#101, Spring 2022; reproduced here), a brief essay that was excerpted from my recent study of Paterson’s work, published in Liverpool University Press’s Writers and Their Work series. ‘The Circle’ is another poem that exposes the possible transformative inadequacy and inauthenticity of even the most apparently well-crafted poem, suggesting that poet and reader alike must differentiate between purposeful, interrogative use of forms and their habitual rehearsal. But much more than ‘The Lie’, ‘The Circle’ offers an emphatic example of a poem where form and content combine in wholly productive tension. As Paterson argues in an aphorism from The Book of Shadows (2004):

The poet’s only chance of being taken seriously as any kind of thinker depends on the reader also accepting the heresy that there is something in the style alone of our presentation, in its pretty sound and its rhetorical flourish, that reveals a little more of the truth than its mere information-content.

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Paterson is talking here in general terms about all good lyric poems; which is to say, the kind of rhythmically-attuned verse that pays attention to both the sense and music of its lines. But in Rain, his own poetic style and ambitions for poetry as a means of powerful intellectual enquiry have advanced to a point where the formal qualities of the work can at times seem indispensable to the meanings a poem generates, and the ideas it consequently proposes. When he states, in his lecture ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ (2004), that ‘our defining heresy as poets is that we know that sound and sense are the same thing’, and that ‘we allow our ear to think for us’, Paterson’s suggestion is of a defining credo apparently held by all poets. But on the evidence of his work, it is one which he demonstrates and subscribes to much more than most. ‘The Circle’ illustrates what can still be achieved in traditional forms at a time when many practising poets might consider adherence to such rigours beyond the pale, or perhaps simply beyond their scope. For Paterson, though, like his near-contemporary the late Michael Donaghy, the idea that poetic innovation somehow occurs through a smooth progression of ‘new’ styles replacing ‘old’ ones is no more than a spatial illusion, one encouraged by twentieth-century consumer capitalist ideas about ‘advancement’ and ‘progress’, in which the economic concept of the ‘new’ gives it an all-pervasive fetish value. Subscribing to Donaghy’s example, Paterson is rather in search of the individual poem’s ability, by whatever stylistic means best suited to that particular poem, to keep reader and writer constantly alert. In other words, whatever makes the poem an effective and affective site for renewed understanding and discovery.

Like ‘The Thread’ from Landing Light, ‘The Circle’ is dedicated to the poet’s son Jamie. Similarly, the focus is the aftermath of a child’s especially difficult arrival in the world. But ‘The Circle’ takes place several years down the line, as the poet focuses on a persistent reminder of that time, the ‘flutter in his son’s signature’ which is ‘all / (thank god) his body can recall / of that hour when, one inch from home, / we couldn’t get the air to him’. The poem begins by depicting a young kid absorbed in activity:

My boy is painting outer space,
and steadies his brush-tip to trace
the comets, planets, moon and sun
and all the circuitry they run

in one great heavenly design.
But when he tries to close the line
he draws around his upturned cup,
his hand shakes, and he screws it up.

The paired full rhymes and consistent iambic tetrameter of these quatrains are employed to very deliberate effect. In accurately mapping the surface impression of a comforting universe governed by strict, unwavering scientific law, the formal constraints of the poem offer the stylistic equivalent to the intended neat ‘circuitry’ of the painting, the ‘one great heavenly design’ of the orbiting and orderly ‘comets, planets, moon and sun’. Form and content are in seemingly perfect harmony. In doing so, they achieve a wholeness of purpose that a freer stylistic approach simply couldn’t accommodate. Just as the child is unable to ‘close the line’ and complete his perfect picture, neither can the poem maintain that a complete understanding of the complexities of the universe is within our grasp, and certainly not reducible to some totalising theory of everything. As Paterson’s poetry is so often at pains to wake us, there are forces, drives and cycles that exist beyond our blinkered perceptions. And yet, despite such forces being vast and powerful, they are nonetheless incapable of correcting a child’s (relatively minor) impairment:

and though today he’s all the earth
and sky for breathing-space and breath
the whole damn troposphere can’t cure
the flutter in his signature.

In the late Modernist style, and in the poetry of contemporary writers who align themselves with such a style, rejections of traditional form and metre are often argued on the grounds that supposedly inorganic formal strictures are inadequate to the task of addressing the uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion of the complex world we inhabit. In his 1950s manifesto ‘Projective Verse’, the critic and ‘experimental’ poet Charles Olson argues for the benefits of working in what he figuratively calls ‘the Open, or what can also be called composition by field, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective’. In the latter, he claims that ‘what we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination’. That a fractured and fragmented world might seem to demand a fractured and fragmented poetry is a potentially persuasive view, of course – even if to accept such an approach would involve subscribing to a rather baldly mimetic style. A more persuasive argument is one in favour of form’s continuing potential and resonance, one that chimes with, say, the ‘evolutionary necessity’ of the sonnet that Paterson has argued for. In his ars poetica essay ‘Wallflowers’, Michael Donaghy refers to Paul Lake’s research into the origins of conventional forms, in which he suggests that they

evolve, like plants, through a process of iteration and feedback. The regular metre of formal poems is not a dull mechanical ticking, like a clock’s; it coalesces out of the rhythms of randomly jotted phrases through a process of ‘phase-locking’ – a natural process that occurs when many individual oscillators shift from a state of collective chaos to beating together or resonating in harmony, the way the randomly flickering lights of fireflies become synchronous through a whole tree.

This is a compelling suggestion, convincingly arguing for a specific poetic form’s fundamentally organic nature, but also the manner in which successful poems of all kinds share in common a productive tension between, and symbiotic resolution of, form and content. What is rarely argued for, however, and what can be easily overlooked in Paterson’s later work, is the way in which – as in ‘The Circle’ – form can become the very engine with which to interrogate form itself. By extension, it can both depict and undermine the comfortable notions we cling to, as shored up by life’s habitual routines, serving to radically displace, but also to productively realign, the reader’s means of engaging with the world. In this way, ‘The Circle’ catches us off-guard, altering the tempo of its previously steady iambic lines with caesura and enjambment. The poem sets a perceptual transformation into motion, as the cosy quotidian that lured us into the poem leads, in typical but never predictable Patersonian fashion, onto stranger and more philosophically demonstrative territory:

But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant.
The dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark

and trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.

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These lines are initiated by the poet’s attempt to explain, both to his son and to himself, why things are the way they are, through the kind of metaphysical reasoning to which Paterson has become increasingly committed, and willing to risk. The first suggestion is that human agency and the notion of free will, while not quite mirages, are much less decisive and potent than we might be inclined to think. Sometimes life doesn’t work out as intended because of human failure; other times it doesn’t work out as we might have hoped (or even imagined) because, the poem suggests, forces outside of our control exert a powerful effect on us. ‘The dream is taxed’ is a more cryptic statement, and seems to apply as much to our hopes being diminished by the unforeseeable collisions of happenstance, as it does to the exterior demands that the vast forces of the universe make on the human dream we inhabit. The reified condition of order, knowledge and control that language as a systematic tool has allowed our conscious minds to develop, dividing up the world into discrete objects and categories, is inevitably exposed, whether we choose to recognise it or not.

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As such, the poem argues that our desire to be masters of our own destinies is destined forever to be compromised by ‘the dark’ of (often unseen) forces beyond our control. However imperceptible, these forces shape our lives just like those that act on an arrow shot from a bow, altering its course ‘between the bowstring and the mark’ of its target. Krishna – a manifestation of Vishnu, the deity in Hindu belief who protects and sustains the world – and ‘fate’ are thus indiscriminately cast as higher powers that we cling onto, to make us feel safer in a world that is fundamentally chaotic, random, mysterious and, as the poem implies, often violent and unforgiving.

At this point, the reader might expect the poem to settle on its bleakly perceptive conclusion. Instead, it performs a counterbalancing shift of perspective in its final three quatrains, as the poem’s metre steadies, form again reflecting content. ‘But the target also draws our aim’, claims the poet-speaker, ‘our will and nature’s are the same’. If we are lost in the human dream, placing our trust in false gods to stave off the isolating fact that we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control and full comprehension, one possible solution, the poem suggests, is to recognise the miraculous in the everyday, the material unity of self and world. Rather than ‘a book it wrote and then forget’, the poem states, we are nature’s ‘living word’, which is to say a very physical part of our immediate environment. As Paterson has argued in The Book of Shadows, discussing the leap to religious superstition we may instinctively make when faced with the universe’s mysteries, ‘our revelation on these occasions is precisely not the Great Presence, but its summary disappearance – leaving us a happily earthbound monkey, suddenly and joyously continuous with their element.’

‘The Circle’ ends by bringing its poetic form and thematic focus into stylistic and imaginative alignment, enacting a perceptual transformation. The poet’s son may ‘bring his fist down like stone’ in frustration at his ‘spoiled work and useless kit’, but at the same time, he ‘can’t help but broadcast’ the fact that his ‘muddy water-jar’ is filling with the very ring he has tried to paint himself – a ring, the poem offers by way of conclusion, that is ‘singing under everything’. Just so, the human compulsion to make sense of a confusing, distant, and often unknowable universe, producing the ‘spoiled work’ of scientific law through the often ‘useless kit’ of our distorting sensory perceptions, may yet be counterbalanced by reconnection with our element, and the intuitive enquiries of art. It is through striking this balance, the poem proposes, between the fracture of human perception and the fundamentally monistic state of the universe, a unity ‘singing under everything’, that we might more fully inhabit both our lives and the world in which we live them. For Paterson, poetic form and clarity of diction are the means of achieving this realignment, however fleetingly the poem may offer its momentary stay against confusion. As he once claimed in interview:

I think there’s a kind of fruitful risk in playing it as close to sentimentality as one dares – and maybe a dumb sort of clarity, and adopting an almost pretentious rhetorical height. You fall off the tightrope and make a fool of yourself, but I think you have to risk it. It strikes me that that sort of game is worth playing, because the stakes are a lot higher; potentially you win a lot more in terms of the force of what you communicate, the strength of feeling you can share with or elicit from the reader, the coining of speech that is both familiar and radically destabilising. The poem can heal, and the poem can also fracture – but in both instances it can present itself as a unity. Its purpose can be to fracture – but I think it fractures more effectively when it’s a unity.

This essay is adapted from a section of my 2015 doctoral thesis, and first appeared on (2022).

“Poetry, perhaps more than any other literary form”, claimed the critic G.J. Finch, “expresses the desire and need to be at home in the universe.” If this statement seems too vague, or even grandiloquent, to repay real attention, think on the fullest sense of the etymology of “poet” as maker (from the Greek: one who creates). Poetry serves to reimagine and ultimately remake the world around us. The good poet is aware of the anthropocentric perspective we bring to bear on everything, and good poems often deal – through the transformative power of language – with that gulf between the way our senses process the world, and the abundance and possibility of the universe beyond our human perception. Thus poetry jolts us from the trance of routine and function and, at its best, brings shifty reality into sharper relief, broadening our understanding of the universe, and how we fit into it.

Australian poet John Kinsella’s new collection, Armour, often seeks to engage with the environment in these terms. At first glance a superabundant book of some sixty-odd poems,it unfolds into an atmospheric, intellectually persuasive cri de coeur; a poetic thesis of interrelated pieces that imaginatively negotiate the natural world’s mysteries. These range from the scientifically unfathomable ‘Sleep of Blowflies’ to which “no / forensic kit gives clues”, to the “armour” of the rhinoceros in ‘Zoo Visits’. This “armour” lends the collection its title, but the thick skin and protection we all require can also be potentially restrictive: elsewhere Kinsella remembers Albrecht Dürer’s sixteenth century woodcut of the creature with “metal breastplates and cuisses”.

Rejecting the loaded label of “nature poet”, Kinsella has said that he considers himself “a writer of the environment – an ethically and politically motivated writer who perceives each poem, each text I write, as part of a resistance against environmental damage.” Armour evinces this: in winding poems of extended conceits that inhabit their subject matters uncannily (“a bristling queue” of ‘Processional Caterpillars Mistaken for Spitfires’); in meditative sequences that quest and question while merging the mythical and modern (the fabled Aboriginal “Wagyl” of ‘Idyllatry’, a snakelike creator of waterways, found “in retreat as the river grows / more and more saline”); and in formal pieces that blend musical patterns with their ecological themes, such as the nightscape of ‘Holus-Bolus’, made alien by taut rhythms and incantatory end-rhymes:

Mistletoe hang-dog meteorite, 
burn up with blue butterflies bright 
as all get up, or snakes and blue- 
tongues out and about, so too 

flyers too quick to identify. Risible. 
Goose-egg nest of oats, stressed oval 
mowed over without breaking, 
not a crack though black veins aching 

            against the china-white. 

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Beyond Armour’s inventive reach and at times metaphysical cast of mind, however, is the sharp voice of protest. This is commendable, for sure – the target is always ignorance, head-burying, or anthropocentric blinkeredness – but when certain poems brandish Kinsella’s politics (pacifist, anarchist, anti-capitalist) too readily, they not only risk overwhelming their more delicately convincing effects, but also alienating the reader. The throwaway establishment-bashing of the vignette ‘Wirangu Meeting Place / Barton Siding’ is fine in its context, a stirring closing sequence of sketches from a train journey across Western and South Australia. But a poem such as ‘Habitat’, which implicates the reader as one who “stares straight through”, making crass assumptions about the world around them, far from curries favour. Better when, instead of getting mad, Kinsella gets even: couching the rural work of ‘Hay Cutting’ in the pervasive language of economics; “if the markets collapse / he’ll still cut hay, and store / it for longer.” In many ways, Armour is a fittingly tough book. Its stylistic and tonal fecundity, resistant to the casual dip, demand that it be read cover to cover. For the reader who does so, its poems extend to offer ample rewards; a sturdy intellectual exterior gives way to revelation, memorably intense description, and – amid its spiky socio-political critiques – depth of feeling.

New Yorker Timothy Donnelly shares with Kinsella a whip-smart intelligence and environmental engagement. However, rather than reconnecting with flora, fauna, and terra firma, Donnelly’s poetry engages with the socially atomised, hyperreal, consumer-capitalist dream-cum nightmare we have conjured for ourselves. ‘To His Debt’ is one of several poems in The Cloud Corporation, Donnelly’s capacious second collection, that exercises a familiar delight in addressing an abstraction (think of Yeats’ ‘To a Shade’ or, more recently, Nick Laird’s To a Fault). But the unusually direct, sardonic wit masks pure frustration, pure contempt:

Where would I be without you, massive shadow 
dressed in numbers, when without you there 

behind me, I wouldn’t be myself. What wealth 
could ever offer loyalty like yours, my measurement, 

my history, my backdrop against which every 
coffee and kerplunk, when all the giddy whoring 

around abroad and after the more money money 
wants is among the first things you prevent. 

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Donnelly satirises a grimly recognisable world where money is god: as false an idol as Cortés was for the Aztecs, found here in ‘Montezuma to his Magicians’ with his fellow Conquistadors, leaping “upon the gold as dazzled / monkeys might”. Such hall-of-mirrors complexities come under wicked scrutiny throughout the collection – from global economics to data overload to postmodern hesitancy, the all-pervasive clouds of the title sequence parting to reveal “the advocates of clouds, / believers in people, ideas and things”. Yet Donnelly cajoles and tempers his anger, achieving a breezy, conversational, and amused tone. The result is a high-proof cocktail mixed from the tercets of Wallace Stevens, a double shot of Whitman, and a twist of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’:

I don’t want to have to. I don’t want to have to 
locate divinity in a loaf of bread, in a sparkler, 
or in the rainlike sound the wind makes through 

mulberry trees, not tonight. Listen to them carry on 
about gentleness when it’s inconceivable 
that any kind or amount of it will ever be able to 

balance the scales. I have been held down 
by the throat and terrified, numb enough to know. 
The temperature at which no bird can thrive [...]      (‘The New Hymns’) 

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A giddy mix, even an acquired taste, but Donnelly is rarely drunk on his looping, discursive style. Vignettes such as ‘Chapter for Kindling a Torch’ – ars poetica rendered as aphorism – suggest a trustworthy sensibility: Donnelly is aware when to hit the gas, and when to apply the brakes. This is writing of playful surrealism, serious philosophical depth, unshowy forms and disarming casualness. It deserves a wide audience, one hungry for a loquacious poetry of the here-and-now that uncovers wisdom, while – as in ‘To His Detriment’ – “never wearing me down entirely”.

Article first published in The Poetry Review 102:1 (Spring 2012).

A Prayer

See the hot coals in my eyes, 
these sparks where I walk?
I want to be lost
for the rest of my life;

to wander like a fox
led by the moment’s promise,
whistling as I stumble 
through empty meadows.

I want to kip in the woods,
read the sky’s story 
instead of old books, 
greet the day as a skimmed stone

and know the rainfall
as I’ll know the soles of my feet.
I want to leap into the river
and feel each day’s heat,

to run along path after path
as if endlessly confined;
to sweep through my life restlessly, 
slowly clearing a place to die.   

poem first published in Way More Than Luck (Seren, 2018)

In his collection of essays Music at Night, Aldous Huxley famously remarked that “after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music”. The idea is by no means a new one: where words fall short, music can often seem uniquely placed to articulate our subtlest moods, thoughts and emotions. Yet few can have explored this concept, or its wider complexities, with the delicacy and originality of thought that Katharine Towers achieves in this ambitious, powerful and memorable debut.

In their deft harnessing of the music intrinsic to language – that which fuels poetry’s thrilling confusion of sense with sound – Towers’s poems are akin to those moments of quiet clarity amid the bustle and blur of daily life. The book’s opening poem, “Amber”, is a terse vignette that sets the tone with an elegant metaphor: figured as a frail “thought” and, by extension, a stay against confusion, the resin’s safeguarding qualities make it a talisman “to hold against the slipshod years”.

The Floating Man contains many such “flies in amber”. On “Camusdarach Beach”, a seal raises its “orphan eyes” to two lovers, “sensing our lives on the turn”, while in “Trust”, a memory of the poet’s young daughter swimming in the sea is conjured from the complex, maternal emotions with which it is tangled. Even half-forgotten words are made strangely tangible in “Found”: “old stones we’ve wintered in the earth / to learn the darkness underneath”.

Yet there is nothing showy about these poems. Succinct and unassuming, they rarely draw on the full orchestra of effects at the poet’s disposal, instead favouring subtle, single notes. “The Dread”, for example, is an unsentimental view of arctic terns, birds that “have no weight but heart-weight”, “no thinking, but know the curve and swing / of the earth”. Through gentle assonance, the poem develops a studied coolness, anticipating the sudden silence – known as the Dread – before the birds jointly take flight: “as if / someone quietly said: come, follow me.” That calmness, the poem suggests, is almost a shadowy memory in the terns’ collective mind; a moment’s eerie stillness that jolts them again into restlessness. The poem succeeds in expressing this notion and its human resonance, while avoiding the naïve anthropomorphism that would undermine such observations. It’s a neat trick which Towers pulls off elsewhere, most notably in “Haunts”, a concise unpicking of the fragile divide between the natural and the human worlds: “We can walk into woods and find / we are suddenly mortal. / The air has kept still for seasons / and we’ve no cause to speak // or to question this adequate moment / of moths, earth, light restrained by trees. / Let us not think we hear our own feet / treading the soft ash of leaves.”

Nature offers a brief reprieve from the human labyrinth; opportunity to escape a world where everything appears in the guise of its value or function. But even if we stop questioning such “adequate” moments in order to pursue a broader understanding, we soon return to centring the scene on ourselves, however ghostly a presence we might be. How can we help but hear, in the sly sibilance of that final line, “our own feet / treading the soft ash of leaves”?

The book’s presiding spirit – “The Floating Man” of the title poem – offers an answer of sorts. Enacting a thought experiment devised by the Persian polymath Ibn-Sina, an attempt to prove the independence of the soul from the physical body, our narrator imagines himself suspended, isolated from all sensory experience, “for as long as it takes to forget the sweating desert / and the sifting streets of Hamadan.” In doing so, he approaches a kind of objectivity, blurring the false distinctions we observe: “Shall I say I am a man or a thought, / or a man thinking about deserts and cities?”

This expansive attention to detail, the ability to look beyond one’s own narrow perspective, enriches Towers’s writing and her search for emotional truths. Some of these poems are sensitive as a cardiograph to the moments they chart: “She’s there on a branch: don’t startle her” warns the poet in “Nightbird”. Similarly, while waiting to hear their “late evening / call to prayer” in “In the Oak Woods”, the narrator is “quiet for fear the owls might startle / and fly from their rooms”.

The best poems in The Floating Man, however, are those which express human relationships in terms of music and vice versa, augmenting our understanding of both. “The Art of Fugue” opens with the hopefulness inherent to the form: a contrapuntal composition of conversing “voices” which the poem imbues with human characteristics; “solemn instruments, which yawn / and clamber to their feet” and “suppose they feel the same”. Yet this simplicity, “the clean white sail of a tune making everything good”, isn’t quite as it seems: the desire to bring things to a close, each instrument “using their own words”, is never far away. In love as in music, harmony is unstable, fleeting, and often appears as artifice: by the end of “Counterpoint”, the poem’s warring couple settle for a truce; “you still banging away at the deep end, / me somewhere up in the gods, trying the high notes”.

It’s these intelligent and honest insights, always intent on offering a fresh outlook, that lend Towers’s quiet poems their tenacity; testament to her inclination, as with “The Language Spider” in one poem, “to favour stealth / over the grand gesture”.

Article first published in The Guardian, 11.09.10.

I had the immense privilege of supporting Kathy in launching her most recent and fourth collection with Picador, The Worrying Rose, at a reading in Hathersage, Derbyshire. You can find out more about her writing here.

Your anxiety

                   is the souped-up boy racer revving at the lights 
beyond this door. Sure he's brash and insecure, a mess 
like us all, but fuck it if anyone's gonna stop him.
Tonight's the night he flies out at the red 
as you writhe in bed, every thought a near-miss, 
the death-kiss his tyres give as they hiss
through rain the same fear gnawing at your brain 
in the wee hours. Your eyes are his head-beams, 
wide, unblinking, seeing only what they want to see.
Your breath: the motor pulse of wheel spin on a carpark; 
your heartbeat: the flick of fag ash from his window.
He is sleeplessness, the same loop of a few blocks 
till dark breaks, bleeds to light. And you are 
awake, again, waiting for things to come right.

poem from Same Difference (Seren, 2022)

Never mind movements, schools and styles: fundamentally, there are two types of poet – those who see spirits, and those who just drink them. As Sean O’Brien noted when reviewing her Faber New Poets pamphlet in these pages in 2009, Fiona Benson is a sober, contemplative sort. But as her first full collection Bright Travellers reveals, she is as much drawn to the metaphysical as to the mystical, treating the poem as a kind of secular prayer.

The opener, “Caveat”, may be a terse appraisal of the cactus, its “moist heart” and “store of water / held beneath its spines” a working model of life’s resilience in the face of inevitable hurt. But, elsewhere, a poem such as “Lares” is a full-blown hymn to the “small ghost” of a bird, conjuring this “noosed spirit of the eaves” as gatekeeper of a hidden world beyond our everyday outlook. Benson often draws on personal experience in her writing – wading “thigh-deep in pollen” with her husband in summer’s “glaze of heat”; the love for her baby daughter that will “ride on” – but she rarely trades in simple anecdotes. Instead, her poems make a bid for what Michael Donaghy called the “alchemical payoff”, mixing solemn scrutiny, intoxicating lyricism and a dark imagination in pursuit of the strangeness beneath the habitual.

One stylistic habit is her musing on a pivotal subject – a pine cone, say, or a “feral” rose – in the hope that, like a horse’s skull placed in the corner of a room by guitarists, it might offer wider resonance through the poem’s music. That rose, for instance, becomes no less than “its own lantern / hung above the garden”, “ventricles and channels / charged with light, // its scarlet bell streaming, / as if it were Christ’s sacred heart / radiating flames”. As a concentrated, image-driven expression, this feels romantic in origin, but in both theme and style it more clearly recalls Sylvia Plath, who emerges as a guiding hand in the dark. Comparisons between Plath and modern-day female poets are frequently dubious, of course – the work of lazy critics – but where Benson is concerned, the affinity is plain to see. Her obsession with animals, the wild and corporeal, with ghosts and with history’s chasms; the handling of painful human emotion through naturalistic conceit; the searing imagery and singularly heightened register: all bear the hallmark of that most nihilistic and paradoxically tender of poets. When she muses on the vulnerability of a pine cone’s needles, blown on the wind, it is hard to hear anyone else in the lines “one day / my daughter also / will travel far from here”.

To dismiss Benson as a fine imitator and acolyte of Plath, however, would be to give her poetry short shrift. For one thing, there is a tranquil, Zen-like quality to some of her writing, measured lines and diction unspooling with an ease removed from the edgy, angular style employed elsewhere, acknowledging “our place // beneath this infinite sky / in a wind that knows we are mortal, porous, / a beautiful trick of the light”.

A sequence of poems on parenthood and the pain and grief of miscarriage demonstrate Benson’s ability to handle emotionally difficult and evidently personal subject matter with poise, grit and feeling. Here, avowedly maternal poems such as “Childbed” and “Cradle Cap” are full of praise and wonder for the newborn, but in its clinical yet candid tones, “Breastfeeding” is the most powerful piece. “Lost / to the manifold / stations of milk, / the breast siphoned off // then filling”, the poet tells of how “you get down on your knees / at the foot of the change-mat”, to clean off the “yellow curd / of the baby’s shit”. “It was always like this”, the poem declaims, “a long line of women / sitting and kneeling, / out of their skins / with love and exhaustion.” When Benson crafts her poems out of blood and muscle, memory and music, they stay with you. The pared-back tercets of “Sheep” develop a haunting parallel, in which the creature is seen “bedded in mud and afterbirth, / her three dead lambs // knotted in a plastic bag”. “I can’t not watch”, implores the speaker, before telling of her own hurt and anguish, “afraid to look down / for what I might see”. It is a brave and determined poem, one that bites and stings as the best poems can, and sometimes must.

“Love-Letter to Vincent”, though, is the book’s most sustained achievement. In these dramatic monologues Benson ventriloquises the prostitute-lover of the tortured Van Gogh, taking the titles of his canvases as a stepping-off point and framing device to paint portraits as intelligent and touching as they are visceral and grim. Though occasionally overblown – Benson has a tendency to reach for the intensifying adverb when a quieter, less cluttered phrasing would serve better – there is a good deal to admire: the smart riposte to masculine ignorance of female suffering that is “Still Life with Red Herrings”; the sun-lit sanctuary of “Yellow Room at Arles”, where art becomes a means of preserving the past as a talisman against the future; love pitched against life’s vicissitudes in “Self-portrait with a Bandaged Ear”. “Here, whatever sorrow waits for us, is hope”, ventures one poem, while another, written in the blaze of those famous sunflowers, declares: “Most of us are not this brave / our whole damn lives; / teach me to admit / a touch more light”.

Bright Travellers is a book of poems that balances its florid excesses with toughness, perspicacity and, above all, heart.

Article first appeared in The Guardian (2014)

With Water Sessions, his first book of poems in a decade, James Lasdun puts paid to concerns that the closing sentiment of his last collection, Landscape with Chainsaw (2001), was a deadly serious one. The final poem of that book was a farewell to poetry in favour of working the land, specifically the wooded Catskill Mountains of New York State, to which the poet and his family had moved from England. It offered a wishful resolve to the tension, acutely felt throughout the book, between the social complexities of life and the no-nonsense appeal of nature. “And if I write, it’ll be with a seed-drill”, declared our poet, perhaps with a nod to the young Seamus Heaney of “Digging”; “a quatrain of greens per bed, no sweat”. But Landscape with Chainsaw was a slim volume of large achievement. Beyond its postmodern pastorals, Lasdun brought a conversationally discursive yet formally incisive style to bear on notions of home and flight, identity and heritage, and masculine dealings with sex, love, family and power. The book’s overall tenor was so pensive, wavering and seriously playful, it clearly implied more was to come.

Water Sessions does not represent, either stylistically or thematically, a great departure from its predecessor, but instead develops Lasdun’s recognized gifts. Yet, for a poet as gifted as Lasdun, this presents fewer problems than it might suggest. Also a novelist, he excels at bringing telling description and snatches of dialogue to convincing narrative poems. “The Question” summons a domestic setting with judicious detail, before hinging on a son’s weighty query: “’Dad, / is America good or bad?’”. This gives rise to a spiralling internal monologue that deftly merges personal and public concerns, even if it ultimately leaves the poet hesitant, unable to “say a damn thing”.

The suggestion recurring throughout Water Sessions is that intelligent reflection, for all its merits and necessity, can result in paralysis. The book’s title poem explores this idea in full flow. A witty psychoanalytic dialogue, it finds a therapist intent on getting at the facts, and a patient refusing straightforwardly to discuss an argument with his partner, instead comparing himself to a host of hapless mythological characters. As often with Lasdun, the poem streams on in nimble, recalcitrant and wryly comic fashion, but also delves deep into complex emotion, catching an unforced epiphany at its close. If Larkin’s presence can be plainly detected in a handful of these poems - a short lyric, “Last Harvest”, looks on at abandoned houses while knowingly recalling “Home is so Sad” - it appears more meaningfully in the striking manner in which Lasdun proves himself a poet of moral discourse. “To a Pessimist” is typical, again finding a deft balance between gravitas and humour: “To be born ... / argues, does it not, that one might be allowed / if not to aspire / to outright happiness, then at least to resist / abject despair?”.

Torn between the frustrating satisfactions of the life of the mind and throwing away his pen to make woodpiles that give “the exact ratio of effort to result”, Lasdun remains an especially fidgety poet. He does well to, since from this attitude stems his best work. “But did you imagine it would wait”, he wonders in “The Event”, “its fuse already lit, while you laboured / day and night for the exact word / to name what it was?”. Inescapably enquiring, yet dissatisfied with the life this engenders, the richest poems here recall Yeats’s maxim that “out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry”, while, at the same time, issuing from a trustworthy autobiographical voice, they wear their engagement with difficult themes lightly.

Not all of these poems are rivers winding and flowing; some are content to tread water, while a few vignettes peter out before they get started. Yet the book’s opening poem, “The Skaters”, a sweeping tale of punctured naivety in the face of life’s vicissitudes and painful inevitabilities, is alone worth the price of entry. “It Isn’t Me” will doubtless elicit a pang of recognition from many readers; “Blues for Samson”, a candid but measured take on the capricious male libido, also deserves mention. In their reflective patter, formal dexterity, serio-comic tones and depth of feeling, these are the stand-out poems in an excellent book.

Article first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (2012)

John Barnes

‘Those people couldn’t get under my skin.’

Brazil boasted Pelé, Garrincha and Zico
but drooled the day an English lad skipped
past their back five, a dancing shadow
striking home to leave the hosts speechless,
the National Front quiet. Years later,
a Merseyside tie at Goodison –
dark slurs circle the stands as malice
gets hurled over touchlines, head hung
as you back-heel (of all things) a banana,
launched by some half-cut thug. Play on.
And you would –
                                hurtling up the wing
to arch a sweeping, goal-bound ball,
the Blues slumped amid a Kopite song:
He stands proud, while all defenders fall.

‘John Barnes’ won first prize in the Offside Stories: The Pride and the Passion competition (2014), judged by Ian McMillan.

Subsequently published in Way More Than Luck (Seren, 2018).

Mark Strand cuts a longstanding figure in post-war American poetry, somewhere between its ageing Buddy Holly and its benign – if somewhat sinister – grandfather. His first books, published in the late 60s, marked him out as a connoisseur of concision, approaching stock themes of absence and negation through a blend of realism and surrealist imagery, and a dark humour that steered feeling clear of sentiment. Since then, his poetry has continued to mine that metaphysical seam, though the early dash and vigour has eased, as if our poet had mellowed with age. All of which wouldn’t be a problem, if the poetry hadn’t also gradually slackened. Almost Invisible, Strand’s thirteenth collection and one that consists entirely of riddling prose poems (the man himself won’t deign to give them that dubious classification, though it’s really the only halfway useful one), is, if nothing else, evidence of the teetering line between good and bad poetry. Every poem’s success hangs in a fine linguistic balancing act: a fact that any poet forgets at their peril.

The book opens promisingly enough. ‘A Banker in the Brothel of Blind Women’ is a parable of sorts, telling the tale of a deceived and deceiving suit who poses as a shepherd:

“My dear,” said the banker to the same woman, “I can tell that you are a rich widow looking for a little excitement and are not blind at all.” “This observation suggests,” said the woman, “that you may be a shepherd after all, for what kind of rich widow would find excitement being a whore only to end up with a banker?” “Exactly,” said the banker.

Extending Strand’s time-honoured obsession with selfhood and the social masks we wear, this piece offsets philosophical solemnity with a dry and ready wit. Identity’s hall of mirrors is not dissimilarly dissected in ‘Harmony in the Boudoir’, a comic foray into intimacy that sees a man pompously declaring his unknowable “true self” to his partner. That he is brilliantly described doing so while “kicking off his slippers”, only to find his beloved gently mocking his overblown confessions, is a comic masterstroke, not to mention tonally spot on. “Oh you silly man”, taunts his wife: “That you barely exist as you are couldn’t please me more.”

Sadly, most of the rest of Almost Invisible is far from pitch-perfect. So far, in fact, you half suspect its obviously gifted author must be playing tone deaf. Things take a decisive turn for the worse with the tritely mystical ‘The Students of the Ineffable’, 13 lines of hollow prose that, for me, are more than effable, but we’ll keep this above the belt. Which is more than can be said for Strand: ‘Dream Testicles, Vanished Vaginas’, a squib every bit as bad as its title implies, is worse still. Fantasy it may be, but you surely have to suspend more than disbelief to think of genitals as “open, honest, and energetic”. Or, better yet, “forthright and gifted”. The portentous tone may disguise the fact it’s obviously a joke, but either way it’s an exceptionally weak one, and represents a low point in the kind of lazy surrealism that’s been exported and – regrettably – far-too-readily embraced on this side of the Atlantic. A sickly blend of faux naivety and smug knowingness, it’s the tacked-on mock profundity that rankles most, one that reader knows as well as poet is nothing but an emotional and intellectual cul-de-sac. Or maybe it’s just the thought of “testicles… swinging dreamily among the clouds like little chandeliers” that makes you want to reach for your gun.

That said, Almost Invisible is not without occasional charm. A handful of lapidary gems surface: the desperation and willed detachment evoked by ‘Clear in the September Light’; the haunting dream-world conjured by ‘The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter’; the misguided wishful thinking of ‘Once Upon a Cold November Morning’. But much here is no more than bogusly gnomic and flippantly inconsequential stuff; so much so you begin to wish, unkindly, that Strand had more often kept in mind the title of one particular poem: ‘An Event About Which No More Need Be Said’. Applying such wisdom to many of the alternately windy, dull, and irritating musings collected here would surely have made Almost Invisible a better book – or, failing that, a shorter one. The poem in question? Something about a mysterious prince showing off his malformed penis in the back of a cab. Taxi!

Don Share is best known on these shores as the editor of Poetry, a US monthly and the English-speaking world’s leading poetry magazine (excepting the present publication, of course). On the back cover of his first collection, Union, which Eyewear Publishing has cannily republished as an introduction to Share’s work for us Brits, he grins from his author mugshot as if he didn’t receive more poetry-as-electronic-gunk jamming his inbox each day than any other person on the planet, and all credit to him for it. If Union is anything to go by, for Share, life and poetry aspire to be guided by our most generous instincts – or at least should. His often single-stanza, rhythmically dexterous narrative poems delight in the particularities, peculiarities and cultural loam of modern life – childhood is remembered as “condensed milk, the family Bible, / savings passbooks, Nero Wolfe and Mickey Spillane paperbacks” – while also striving to make sense of it, in the context of histories both personal and public. In the same poem, ‘Signals Over Hill’, the speaker reflects how “roots are, themselves, a form of rootlessness”. It’s an idea that directs much of this earthy, hard-thinking, undeceived yet hopeful book, from poems that tell of personal grief and marital separation such as ‘Sweet Life’, a lament for the “self-love” that promises false happiness in “any place we never lived”, to those that plumb the depths of the American Civil War, and the former slave state of Tennessee where Share grew up. “We fought America in ourselves”, declares ‘Dilemma’, echoing the title poem’s fractured blues song: “Memphis was born / from abolished ruins // Memphis forgot / that Memphis is guilt”. Pitched against this is a kind of spiritual faith, a cautious belief in meliorism, and a sense of absolute unity to be had in commune with the natural world. You can forgive the occasionally affected and anachronistic tone of piety in certain pieces, if only for the very genuine way Share recognises, and evokes the fact, that pain is always part of our contentment:

So summer’s last leaves blow 
banded in the paling sunlight, 
and as the weather turns just now 
too cool to stay outside, 

all our affairs soften 
into the collected past, 
the honey all gone 
from hives closed by winter’s reach 

and I reject happiness in order, 
precisely in order, to remember it. 

Though portentousness may occasionally get the better of it, Union is a big-hearted and reassuringly human collection of poems, and one that’s not without humour. I’d certainly take it over much of the arch clever clever masquerading as poetry that’s out there just now. Like the portrait of his father-in-law in ‘Spiritual’, the kind of man who “always shook you by the hand / and gave you every drop of wisdom he ever had”, it suggests Share as the sort of poet of which we can sometimes seem in short supply.

Article first published in The Poetry Review (2014).

The Line

Good job these poets aren’t tightrope walkers 
she said, else half the fakers would be dead –
another tumble from a tone-deaf shocker. 
But for a few still dexterous in their tread 
this formal panache isn’t just possible,
it’s song as comprehension in itself:
how meaning’s strung out between two shelves.
True balance makes this highwire crossable
and through that crossing unforgettable. 
Forget the risible rise of the hot take
then, poets who play politics, mistake
strength of feeling for technique. Unable
to admit our readers are turning away
they applaud themselves beneath time’s walkway.

poem by Ben Wilkinson

Paul Farley took the pulse at the turn of our millennium when he quipped that contemporary poets haven’t had criticism, they’ve had marketing. In an age where marketing’s role in matters aesthetic is ever increasing, the individual voice can be an overvalued commodity, playing to a perceived appetite for poet-as-author. It is refreshing, then, to encounter Glyn Maxwell’s How the Hell Are You, a collection of poems whose unfashionably complex play with poetic voice recognises and exploits the ultimate impersonality of writing – how it is only ever language that speaks, acts, and performs. But then Maxwell has always done his own thing, ever since he set the empty roundabout spinning in the first poem of his first collection, some thirty years ago. Formally dextrous, syntactically inventive, able to combine authentic emotion with self reflexive dramatisation: for those in the know, a Maxwell collection is an event. Recent books Hide Now (2008) and Pluto (2013) marked him out as both entertaining and hard-thinking, contemporary while in pursuit of timelessness, putting into practice the poetics outlined in his essay volume On Poetry (2012), essential reading for anyone serious about their writing craft. He simply asks more of his poems and his readers than most poets dare or are able to.

But Maxwell isn’t the kind of experimentalist content to play games with language. His poems succeed for blending dramatised voices with painfully human concerns, reckoning with our times (and time itself) with a wry awareness that typically avoids archness, skewering our self-centred haplessness while remaining compassionate. Take ‘Song of AI’, one of a number of poems in How the Hell Are You that gives an assessment of our species from the perspective of artificial intelligence:

We see the people whom you love 
hate people whom you hate. It is not lost
on us that if you turn to that 
           we will not 
be noticed at our work. Because our work 

will be the same as yours. 

Here, as elsewhere in the book, a kind of anonymised lyric intelligence cuts to the quick. Freed from the distracting restrictions of a particular and coherent persona, the poem unpacks our increasingly machine-like certainties in a digital age. Binary opinions are similarly satirised in ‘The Other Side’, as searing a portrayal of our world of Brexit, fake news, and Twitter flame wars as you will read: “The other side must hate us why would anyone / we’re angels we mean well we have a battle on / if they can’t see our wings all fucking hope is gone.” Indeed. Under the unflinching gaze of these poems, even the places we might variously seek comfort or refuge are exposed as empty or sham. In ‘Bluebirds Over’, which takes lyrics from the nostalgic British wartime song popularised by Vera Lynn, the mawkish nursery-rhyme-like patter is amplified into a nightmarish litany, while ‘The Heyday’ simply concludes “the answer to most of my questions is Nowhere, / the rest Search me”. Even the act of writing is stripped back and debunked – or rather, the clumsy ego of the writer themselves, forever obscuring the poem from telling its truth. “May I say I had a dream of / something too?” enquires the blank page of the poet sat before it. “Obviously not and off you go now.” “I too feel nothing”, confesses ‘Sonnet at a Loss’. “I was made one day / in private joy by one who can’t explain me, / reach me, or change me now.” But if there is hope in the deluded and self-deceiving set of contemporary circumstances that Maxwell ingeniously presents here, it is in meaningful language and its profound effects – in great poetry and literature itself, no less. As ‘Page of First Old Book He Read’ reflects of a child’s wondrous gaze at its markings, “three memories stay with me”:

his grin away and back again as if 
he’d found somewhere 
      we both belonged – slow turning 
I took for love – and, when time called enough, 
      light narrowing so gently. 

Alan Gillis is a Northern Irish writer who deserves to be much more widely read, so it is reassuring to see his fifth collection, The Readiness, appear with Picador. Like Maxwell, he is an outward-looking poet and formally adept, too. His adaptive use of poetic line and speech rhythms in negotiating human struggles between inner and outer worlds often recalls MacNeice, but also Gillis’s late compatriot Ciaran Carson, to whom this book is dedicated. But while there is a contemplative seriousness to these poems, there is also – almost always – exuberance. ‘Blossom Drift (22nd May 2017)’ might respond to the horrors of the Manchester Arena bombing, but it does so with a touchingly defiant portrait of young girls, “six, seven or eight years old”, who “circle and chatter in some form / of dance or ritual in the garden”:

If there is a holy war, let heaven 
assemble a nation army of pink 
deely bobbers and purple nail glitter, 
butterfly face paint, marching to a play- 

list of Beyoncé, Rihanna, Ariana: 
let each follow the steps, learn the moves 
of the dance with a gleam in her face 
and unclenched fists, free from fear. 

Elsewhere, the book is worth the price of entry for its rhythmically loquacious way with language, as in ‘The Return’:

If you take a moment outdoors as the day 
undays itself, you might spot that swift prowler, 
that tuft-tailed razortooth, red-stealthed stealer: 
the estate’s stray fox in the darkblue dusk. 

You might hear that thornball in the shadows: 
the hedgehog below the hedgerow – 
wee nimble-nosed needlepelt, prickleback – 
its spiny shuffle through dead leaves. 

Fizzing with vernacular and bounding rhythms, yet also precisely lyrical, the poems in The Readiness frequently run away with themselves, attempting to keep up with, and make some sense of, the often digital babble and information overload of our age. Even getting ready of a workaday morning, the poet spots us “set for the whigmaleeries of the ticking clock, / spilt milk, the mystery / of missing socks, the transport peeve, the hundred-tonne / weight of to-dos” (‘Before the Bustle of Day’). Meanwhile the strange dreamscape of ‘Metropolis’ figures as a “Titanic themed bar fuelled by Tinder / and frustration / where every empty glass fumed with accusation”. But rather than simply glare at the world through a screen or situated perspective, he is able to reflect both our private and public selves back at us, in poems that are as capacious and various as the come-and-go places they situate themselves. Take ‘Flat White Afternoon’, where “the guy eating flatbread” sits alone “with five thousand / friends on his phone”, across from the woman “wiping / the small child’s chin / delighting an on- / looker at the next / table”, and “a clutch / of mitching girls / with pierced noses / and Tintin / hairdos who look / at you as if to say / is it dial-a-dickhead / day in here?”

The Readiness impresses, but more importantly moves and surprises, given Gillis’s ability to combine dry humour with insight, vibrant description with direct address, and contemporary relevance with lasting concerns. “In the wink of an eye all you know drifts / away but who benefits from sorrow?” asks our poet in ‘The Response’. Like its title poem, this is a collection that recognises how “under a harvest moon, / in a lift, on the stairs, / in an encrypted chatroom: / it could happen anywhere.”

Article first published in The Poetry Review (2021).

Complicit

These are the days when no words will do.
Such horrors accrue by the phone’s blue light
constant as the wind tonight rattles through
the alleys, a side gate banging to. Rain white
in the gutters, the new year’s promise a kite
flapping in a thunderstorm as you, far
with only second-hand knowledge, rewrite
these lines, for all the good they’ll do. If you’re
silent you are complicit chirps one, our
self-styled moral compass, but certainty
belies difficult truths, as if the world were
a clear-edged colouring book, not poetry.
Outside there is only the wind and the rain
and, overhead, not a single star to be seen.

first published in The Spectator (2024).

Poetry, as RS Thomas once claimed, is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart. The poet’s task is to find the effective middle ground; to perform that lyric trick whereby thought and emotion seem to effortlessly combine. Seek to provoke only feeling, and crude sentimentality ensues; indulge in the cerebral, and the poem might be interesting enough, but it will remain lifeless – a kind of versified intelligence. In Loop of Jade, Sarah Howe’s debut collection, winner of the 2016 TS Eliot prize, the poet attempts to merge personal accounts of her dual Anglo-Chinese heritage with her scholar’s penchant for the intellectually abstruse. The result is a book of poems that are as playfully and frustratingly recondite as they are memorable and unusually affecting.

“The twin lids / of the black lacquer box / open away”, writes Howe in “Mother’s Jewellery Box”: “a moonlit lake / ghostly lotus leaves / unfurl in tiers // silver chains / careful o’s and a’s / in copperplate”. This might seem an unassuming vignette with which to open a collection, but it sets the tone. An evocative box of trinkets is a good metaphor for Howe’s poetry, possessing as it does a well-wrought yet elaborate quality. Depending on a reader’s taste, these poems will seem either elegantly graceful, or decorative and over-designed. “Night in Arizona” is a prime example of the best and worst of this style. On the one hand, Howe’s musical gift for conjuring insistent rhythms evokes the claustrophobic heat of a motel room in the desert: kicking the bed sheet to the floor, the sound is “like the spilling of sand / from shovel and the night air blurs / for a second with its footfall”. But on the other, the preference for elevated diction in what is ultimately an account of mildly irritating sleeplessness comes to mismatch language and event: “the razory arms of a juniper rattling crazily / at the edge of that endless reddening haze”. In these more conventional lyric sections, Howe is at her best when she reins in linguistic excess. “Earthward” is a subtle meditation on watching “the shadowplay / of trees / against the blinds”, disturbing replicas that shake “with a gusting stutter / more restless still / for being not / the thing itself”. The effect is haunting and immediate, precisely because of the sparse diction employed.

Thankfully, Loop of Jade is itself restless. This is true of the poet’s journeys through the China of her youth and the clash of differing cultures apparent in her adult life, but also of its formal repertoire. The jewellery box opens on to various worlds – some real; some mythical; some deftly blurring the two – and Howe switches between shorter lyrics and longer narrative forms, keeping readers on their toes. In “(c) Tame”, one of a scattered sequence that takes its titles from a fictional taxonomy of animals, the historical Chinese custom of smothering an unwanted newborn girl in ashes is assimilated into a mythical tale of a daughter transformed into a soaring bird. This kind of symbolic metamorphosis strongly recalls another recent Chatto debutant, Liz Berry, the eerie exactitude of the poem’s narration, combined with its magic realist wavering between the brutal and the fantastical, makes for an imaginative dissection of masculine violence.

It is a shame, then, that too often Howe opts for an unconvincingly heightened and florid register – in “Pythagoras’s Curtain”, “cicadas … cadenza the acousmatic dusk”; “A Painting” lays it on thick with “the oyster-crust … of an unscraped palette – chewy rainbows, blistered jewels” – instead of working harder to write with the difficult clarity and complex simplicity of which she is capable. The most memorable writing in Loop of Jade tends to stem from this latter approach, and nowhere more so than in the book’s title poem. The Hong Kong of Howe’s early years is a fecund territory for a poet seeking to reconcile a quintessentially English life with a starkly contrasting eastern heritage; even more so for one fascinated by the linguistic and cultural collisions and confusions that define our increasingly global community. Though far from the most polished writing on offer here, “Loop of Jade” traces the poet’s background and China’s recent history through an unflinching, moving and minutely observed portrait of her mother, who tells vivid stories of her childhood with “a pause-pocked, melodic, strangely dated hesitancy”. In between revivifying these memories – of a latrine that sprouted “the glistening bodies of cockroaches, like obscene sucked sweets”, or being made to wash her hair with “a green detergent meant for scouring floors” – the poem relays the tragic Chinese legend of star-crossed lovers turned into butterflies in their premature deaths.

Weaving between the frank prose of memoir and a ballad-like lyric mode, Howe creates a nuanced metaphor for release – from tensions between the opposing worlds that the poet herself yearns for, turning to the transformative promise of poetry in reconciling the irreconcilable. Her fondness for lexicographical conjecture can feel trivial and slight. But whatever the subject, it is the poet’s gift for simile and metaphor-making that lends Loop of Jade its transformative scope, able to make a school memory of chanting the names of Hong Kong’s islands “strange again, like savouring / those New Year candies – small translucent moons / waning on the tongue”.

This article first appeared in The Guardian, 12.01.16

Foxes

Ever wonder why foxes always slip
into poems? Imagine the present moment
embodied, coat ablaze as it skips
littered bushes and moonlight’s lament
like the burnt shock of iron sediment
at a river’s turn, you’ll find its furtive
glare soon meets your own. Now it stops, head bent
to sniff the rutted earth scattered with
these early-hours, half-eaten chicken wings,
tears open a plastic bag that’ll outlive
us all. The future is nowhere and nothing,
the past the waste of all our take and give,
and what defines us is as radiant
as moments we thought insignificant.

first published in the Spectator (2024).

“How did it get so late?” wonders Simon Armitage in Paper Aeroplane, his selected poems. It’s a fair question. The fanfare of the Next Generation Poets 2014, a promotion touting fresh voices set to dominate British verse, has coincided with Armitage, once poetry’s poster boy for the original New Generation Poets 1994, releasing this hefty retrospective. Twenty-five years have passed since he stunned the poetry world with his debut Zoom! (1989), his voice distinctive, his energetic style fully formed. Since then there have been: 10 book-length collections, a host of novels, plays, translations and memoirs, not to mention a clutch of TV and radio programmes. What surprises is how urgent and contemporary those early poems still read.

“Heard the one about the guy from Heaton Mersey?” hollers “Snow Joke”, the opener from Zoom!. From the outset, Armitage’s combination of coined phrases, cliche and zippy vernacular with a sharp adherence to meter, rhyme and form, worked to winsome effect, skimming across the living language with unmatched exuberance. Titles like “It Ain’t What You Do It’s What It Does to You” fizz next to frank opening lines: “Harold Garfinkel can go fuck himself” is a gunslinger’s free assessment of one leading sociologist. Here is a young poet as capable of ventriloquising the confessions of drug dealers in “The Stuff” as of figuring poetry itself, in the much-imitated “Zoom!”, as “a billiard ball weighing more than Saturn”.

Armitage’s followup, Kid (1992) reiterated that auspiciousness, not least in a penchant for showy idiom-coining and the apocryphal anecdote. “Brassneck” tells of a couple of rough-and-ready thieves working football crowds: “He keeps his cunt-hooks out of my wallet, / I keep my tentacles / out of his pocket”. But elsewhere, a sober lyric style starts to show, straining for literariness, as in the otherwise tender “At Sea”: “It is not through weeping, / but all evening the pale blue eye / on your most photogenic side has kept / its own unfathomable tide”. Phrase-making, comedy and a sure-footed music are still the exhilarating bait – the businessman in “Robinson’s Resignation” is “bored like the man who married a mermaid”; “Great Sporting Moments: The Treble” squeezes a laugh-out-loud gag into rhyming couplets that explore class conflict. Yet sometimes in Kid, and all too often in its successor, Book of Matches (1993), playful suggestion and nous give way to easy cliche and laboured wit. “I’ve made out a will; I’m leaving myself / to the National Health” proclaims one promising sonnet in an often patchy sequence, before wasting itself in mindless list-making: “They can have the lot, the whole stock: / the loops and coils and sprockets and springs and rods, / the twines and cords and strands, / the face, the case, the cogs and the hands”. This is writing that asks little of a poet of Armitage’s genuine gifts.

To his credit, Armitage has clearly taken a hedge-trimmer to most of the overgrowth of his oeuvre, much as he did in the overblown “Chainsaw versus the Pampas Grass”, from 2002’s The Universal Home Doctor. He may have come in for flak for inhabiting a poetic persona – street-smart, self-deprecating, no-nonsense – so fully and at times lazily that he has come to parody himself, but this selected poems proves that he has written some of the very best, most memorable poems of recent decades. Dropping the makeweight from uneven collections such as The Dead Sea Poems (1995) and Cloudcuckooland (1997) has left a handful of gems. Consider the cutting stand-up routine of “I Say I Say I Say”; the tongue-in-cheek life advice of “Goalkeeper with a Cigarette”; “The Tyre”, brimful of imaginative play and Hughes-like descriptive panache; and perhaps brightest of all, “Homecoming”, a metaphysical tale of memory and time-hopping intimacy that the great Louis MacNeice would surely have envied. These are major lyric poems by a writer who has had a game-changing influence on his contemporaries, and continues to cast a shadow over younger poets.

After a certain age, a poet’s chief rival is the poet they used to be. Seeing Stars, Armitage’s last collection proper, from 2010, is generously represented here, likely because the poet feels its wilfully surreal, flash-fiction narratives are an overdue departure. But aside its dazzling imagery and a couple of shorter, less showy pieces (including “The English Astronaut”, a sardonic commentary on the national character), its best bits still feel throwaway, circuitous and overwritten. Alongside excerpts from his lively versions of Homer’s Odyssey (2006) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007), it’s reassuring to find this selected poems close with work from a forthcoming collection, The Unaccompanied (2015). Here, the absurdist excesses of Seeing Stars are tempered, and alloyed to the lightly worn purposefulness that marks Armitage at his best. The mix of mock-antiquated tone and despair in “Poundland”, where “with wire-wrought baskets we voyaged”, “all under the clouded eye of CCTV”, is as entertaining as it is deadly serious social commentary.

For a writer who has often flippantly said that he wanted first to be a rock star, settling for poet instead, Paper Aeroplane proves that popular music’s dubious loss is most definitely British verse’s significant gain.

This article was first published in The Guardian, 7.10.14

Sometimes the moments that challenge us the most, define us.

– Deena Kastor, Olympic Bronze medallist and American record-holding marathoner

I’ve learned that finishing a marathon isn’t just an athletic achievement. It’s a state of mind; a state of mind that says anything is possible.

– John Hanc, running writer

If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon.

– Kathrin Switzer, women’s marathon-running pioneer

2014

We’re waiting on the tree-lined avenue south of Queen’s Park. 800 or so of us, penned in and lined up along the street, stood in trainers, vests and shorts, jogging on the spot. Stretching, setting watches. Staring forwards.

The last ten minutes have felt like an age.

One of the organisers, a big bloke with a booming voice and superfluous megaphone, is cracking a joke. Can you hear me at the back there? Have you fallen asleep? He talks about the cash raised for charity, the occasion, the significance. The crowds lined up along the miles ahead.

I try to listen, but I can’t take much of it in. I feel sick, determined, terrified and excited, all at once. My heartbeat pulses, my stomach flutters. I’ve run enough races now to know what it’s all about. But this one’s different. My hand hovers over the start button on my wristwatch.

The horn sounds – ahead of us, twenty or so frontrunners surge off, feet already thunderous. I follow; we all follow. The crowd roars.

If you’d told me a year prior that I’d be running a marathon, I’d have laughed pretty hard at you.

I might’ve already been making a habit of putting one foot in front of the other – building a loose routine of heading out to clock up miles, as much for my state of mind as for physical fitness. Two or three times a week, taking in the roads and leafy parks and rural edgelands of Sheffield; I was hauling myself out of a dark time in my life, thriving off the endorphin release, thinking harder and faster almost always meant better. But I hadn’t competed in a race of any kind yet. Never mind the incomprehensible 26.2 miles that make up the marathon.

Following a first parkrun one crisp winter day late in 2013, I became a bit of a race junkie. Despite my early misconceptions and reservations, I’d found I was actually a fairly strong runner. Parkrun might be ‘a run, not a race’, but as soon as I discovered I had some potential (and, more importantly, as soon as my competitive drive was ignited), I was keen to use such events as a personal time trial. Applying myself in training – the key to improvement for any runner, no matter their base-level ability – I achieved a string of early 5K personal bests, running faster than I imagined. 5,000 metres was my preferred distance, it seemed, not least because I was blissfully untrained for anything further. But it also, when run hard, remained to most readily give me the release I desired: a distance where you can really open up, balancing the need to leave enough in the tank for a fast finish, but still run in fourth and fifth gear throughout. You feel sick when you finish, and the adrenaline rush is intoxicating. Since you also recover quickly, it’s not long before you can tackle the race distance again, chasing that addictive runner’s high, its empowering buzz.

As I upped my mileage and range of running paces in training, soon enough I wanted to try my hand at the 10K. I figured it was a not dissimilar race to 5K in terms of pace and the eking out of a hard effort, although pushing yourself consistently, retaining will and focus enough to maintain pace in those difficult kilometres from six to nine, proves a challenge. Soon enough, having taken on an undulating local 10K and another on the more technical trails of the Peak District, I was on the lookout for a flat road race, a competitive course to target my first significant running milestone: a 10K in under 40 minutes. I must have read somewhere that this was a ‘good’ time for a local amateur runner, and I discovered from chatting with friends and acquaintances made through parkrun, running times not dissimilar to my own, it was likely a realistic target. I duly booked a place at the Leeds 10K and began to train, adding a greater variety of runs to my weekly diet, not least so-called tempo (hard but controlled) efforts, to help me get used to quicker paces over a longer distance.

When race day arrived in the summer, the sun was high in a cloudless sky, bearing down on nearly 8,000 of us. You could see the heat rising in a blur from the miles of dual-carriageway asphalt stretched out ahead, like steam from a mug of black coffee. Exhausted, staggering, on the brink of collapse as soon as I crossed the line, I finished in the top 100 in a race that was won by the runner-up in the prior year’s London Marathon. I was elated, having seen the large red digits on the finish line’s clock, knowing I’d made it. And of course, I was soon thinking about the next target, the next extrinsic goal, whether time or distance. I was, it seemed, happily addicted. And so to the marathon. With its almost mythical status rooted in Ancient Greek legend – the messenger Pheidippides, having run the 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to deliver news of Athenian victory, is said to have promptly collapsed on arrival and died of exhaustion – it was clearly going to appeal to the type of runner I was quickly becoming.

We’re a few miles in, and I feel comfortable – or as comfortable as you can early on, knowing you’ve over 20 miles left. In all my training with my partner H., a much more experienced distance runner than I was then, we aimed for between 7:30 and 8-minute-miling; mornings spent running the converted railway line of Derbyshire’s Monsal Trail, passing dog walkers and cyclists, grinding out a 15-mile run, a 17-mile run, then the big 20 miler before a couple weeks of tapering down. But even though this is race day, that first mile felt too quick, and the watch bleeps to confirm it. Take it steady, I think. If you burn out at the half-marathon stage you’ll look like an ass, and what’s worse, it’ll have all been for nothing. The next mile flies by. Damn.

The crowds lining the streets are incredible, cheering as if we were all professionals going for Olympic medals, offering water and jellybeans between the official water and energy-gel stations. Go orange vest! Come on North Derbyshire! If only a few people are inspired by this, and decide to put on a pair of running shoes tomorrow for the first time in ages, or ever, it’ll be an achievement in itself – no matter the number of entrants, or the finish time of the first man and woman over the line. I’m caught up in it all, wanting to put on a show, and am running mile after mile quicker than target pace. H. is up there ahead of me, 20m, 30m in front, looking strong; unlike my blissful naivety, she knows the truth of this distance already, having raced it several times before. Before I know it, we’re onto the bypass, running mile 12 along a cordoned-off lane, traffic speeding next to us, bewildered half-asleep motorists clocking us in the crisp Sunday morning air. I look up at an overpass, give the thumbs-up to a bunch of spectators hanging over the rails, a guy taking snaps with his SLR.

I check the watch. 1 hour 29 minutes in, and less than half a mile till the 13 mark, when those entered into the Half Marathon dig in, hoping to find that sprint finish. We round the corner off the bypass with the town’s football stadium in sight, shadowed by a monolithic Tesco, like a freight ship run aground. On the left, Casa Hotel, where yesterday we picked up our race numbers. I was feeling under the weather and sorry for myself, having caught – and only partly recovered from – some nasty bug, wondering if starting a marathon in less than 24 hours might just do me in. Now I’m 13 miles in, the halfway point, and I can see the crowds out for their friends and family and workmates running the Half, cheering everyone on. Not far to go! Almost there! Part of me wishes it were true.

The watch bleeps. A half marathon time of 1 hour, 33 minutes. Not bad, I think. Only a couple of minutes slower than the Sheffield Half I ran earlier in the year. Except this time, there’s another 13.1 miles to go. But that’s fine. I’m fitter and faster and stronger now. Right?

With the half-marathon runners gone, the race swiftly becomes a much lonelier one. Don’t get me wrong – long distance events are often lonely, in that it’s you pitted squarely against yourself, your angels and demons, as much as your nearest competitors. If you want to win something, run a 100 metres, said the great Czechoslovakian distance runner Emil Zátopek. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. What happens in your mind, that powerful ally and most dangerous of enemies, is as important as, and irrevocably tied to, what happens with every stride. But this, right now, is more than that; a more literal kind of loneliness. Winding out to the northernmost edgelands of town, there is only the flicker of the nearest runner on the horizon, in front and behind. A fierce sun gleams. How many others are up ahead - 20, 30, 50 at various points beyond? Best not to think about position. Focus on your mile times, and keeping one foot in front of the other.

Miles 15, 16 and 17 pass by. I’m still grinding them out, clocking a good pace. Shame the scenery leaves a bit to be desired, affording little in the way of distraction – but then that, in some way, is part of the marathon’s steely psychological and physical test. Or maybe just a cruel joke on the part of the organisers. Looping what seems aimlessly around a deserted industrial estate, directed by solitary high-vis-clad marshals through a tangle of roads, warehouses and lifeless mounds of earth, I at least get to clock the positions of those immediately ahead and behind, as we pass each other, heading one way then the next. I’m further up the field than I thought. 2 hours, 13 minutes at the 18-mile mark. I start to get ahead of myself. If I keep on like this, I could manage 3 hours 15 minutes. What a time that would be for my first marathon. Only 8 miles to go. You can do this, dig deep. What could go wrong?

There is something – ‘condition’ or ‘affliction’ is probably the best word, but neither really do it justice – that experienced marathoners call by several names. Most commonly, it is simply referred to as this: hitting the wall. In moments of brief hubris and foolhardy cocksureness, I’ll admit, there have been times when I’ve doubted its existence. Surely, I’ve reckoned, when I’d pushed myself to the limit in other races, at some point already I would’ve hit this so-called wall? Hit it, then gone through it – like those tough times in a race you have to somehow force your mind, which wants nothing more than for you to give in and please god stop, to keep your legs hurtling along.

Mile 19. Mercifully, it seems, we’re finally leaving the grim reaches of industrial hinterland and heading into a standard residential district, all identikit semi-detacheds and smoothly tarmacked streets. Catch is, I’ve just run my slowest mile of the race, and this next one incorporates a steady climb, though I can’t know that yet. When it dawns on me, it’s clearly the sort I could handle in a shorter race. But now, approaching the 20-mile mark, it suddenly morphs into a much tougher ask.

My running is slowing. Slowing, step-by-forceful-step, to what feels an agonising, almost glacial pace. No matter how much I grit my teeth, soul search for the will to push through what I hope to god is a passing phase, my legs feel simultaneously like lead and jelly, fossilised yet flaccid, my body converting what little glycogen I have left to glucose, drip-fed to exhausted muscles. It’s everything I can do to put one foot in front of the other. To those gathered in the street, stood on their front lawns hoping to see feats of amateur athletic prowess, I must look a sorry sight. Come on son, not far to go! shouts one, cackling to herself. I can’t know if she actually laughed at me, knowing full well I had six miles to do, on top of the 20 already clocked. It’s possible she had no idea how far I’d come, how far I had to go. I think maybe a part of me was laughing at me, chiding and scolding myself.

There are two halves to a marathon: the first 20 miles, and the last 10K. I’m on a steep learning curve here, the biggest in all my running to date. If that woman existed, and wasn’t a weird projection of my fatigued, increasingly delirious state of mind, she doubtless meant well – cracking her little joke to take the edge off. But nothing is taking the edge off. Mile 20 and 21 take an age to pass, though I remember little of them except the grim flash of the wristwatch, clear numbers against a black-flooded LCD backdrop, confirming two 10-minute miles.

The next mile includes a track trail through park woodland. Also, the perimeter of a leisure lake that looks, from where I’m running, like some kind of strange oasis, replete with swans and strolling couples and the occasional, out-of-time fisherman; a reprieve after all those miles of unremitting brickwork, corrugated metal, sprawling tarmac. Without my noticing, my pace has picked up again – distraction working its magic, mind mastering matter. Not quite 8-minute miling, but close enough.

As quickly as my faith is restored, though, I start to fall apart again. Alone, exhausted, I’m glad for the sight of a pal, spectating on the brow of an upcoming hill. How’s it going? he hollers. Bloody awful I mumble, showing my rictus grin. Another four miles to go, and the three-hour mark is starting to creep up, swift as the distant, thunderous footfall of the lot of us, starting out all those miles and hours back.

Distance running is an often lonely, solitary pursuit. But to run in the first place, and to really take on the challenge of the marathon, you have to have a big heart. In every sense. When the chips are down, it’s no surprise that runners support one another in the course of a long race – running together, pacing and pushing one another to get the job done. The guy I meet with around three-and-a-half miles to go is a lifesaver. He is struggling as I’m struggling, and there is an instant, unspoken but completely mutual recognition of this fact – along with an equally mutual level of respect at having come this far. We talk about running, how long we’ve been at it, other races we’ve done. This is his second marathon; his first saw him finish just under the four-hour mark – the result many a first-time competitive marathoner aims to break the back of. The chat is a great distraction for both of us. For the first time in miles I’ve forgotten about the steady pain, the cumulative ache of pushing on and on and on. I check the watch. 5K left to go, and we’re just past three hours in. If we can push ourselves mate, we’re on for three-thirty here.

Easier said than done. With a bit of downhill on our side, we grind out mile 24 – not at an ideal pace, but I’ll settle for it. My feet, calves, knees, thighs, hips are desperate for it all to be over. Now. I try to shut the pain out. I can even manage it for a bit, but then halfway through mile 25, suddenly, I fall apart. I can barely jog. John – by now we’ve gotten round to exchanging names – tries to spur me on: jogging ahead, encouraging me to follow. I try to keep pace. Eventually I catch up, only for him to hit the wall, just as I had those few hundred metres back. We go on like this, dragging each other along, for the next half a mile. Then, with the last full mile finally, blissfully, agonisingly on the horizon, and with around 10 minutes left to manage the sub 3:30 target I’d set myself all those months ago in the first naïve weeks of training, somehow, scraping the barrel of myself, I find something in reserve.

Rounding the downhill just past the imposing shadow of the town hall, things start to fall into place. I click into top gear. I’m not sure how, but it has to have something to do with knowing it’s now or never; that if I manage the 8-minute mile that’s proved so difficult since mile 20, I’ll have achieved something I can properly, seriously be proud of. However much I have to go through to do it. Pain is temporary; pride is forever. I run this sort of sporting platitude through my head, alternately dismissing it as fool’s talk, then feeling the absolute truth of it. The fatigue and delirium give way to determination and focus. I push on.

The sight of the north edge of Queen’s Park, a few hundred metres from where this all started, is a shot of relief and an adrenaline kick, all at once. And that sound. The noise of crowds lining the park’s pathways, waving banners, cheering. Willing us home. I’m almost back at square one, the outside track of the cricket field and the pavilion above it, the sight of the finish line as I round the outer path beyond them. 400 metres to go. Back at square one, but like every one of us who’ll come to complete today’s 26.2 miles of gruelling race, in every way, I’ve come a hell of a distance.

200 metres to go. Who was it said run the first part of a marathon with your head, the middle part with your personality? And the last part – with your heart. I enter the inner track, overtaking one final runner before I spot the clock. 3:26:45. I am sprinting, dying on my feet. Gritting my teeth, breaking into a grin. Stood on the pavilion, a man with a microphone is calling out my race number. In 3 hours, 27 minutes and…

I cross the finish line.

This piece was first published in Men’s Running UK.