Gregory Leadbetter, "The Infernal Garden"

 

Gregory Leadbetter’s new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025). His previous books and pamphlets include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023), a New Statesman Book of the Year 2023; Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021); Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021; The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). Recent work for the BBC includes the extended poem Metal City (Radio 3, 2023). A song-cycle featuring poems from The Fetch by the composer and pianist Eric McElroy has been performed internationally, and a recording with the tenor James Gilchrist was released in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.

About The Infernal Garden, by Gregory Leadbetter
In The Infernal Garden, Gregory Leadbetter’s poetry leads us into dark and verdant places of the imagination, the edge of the wild where the human meets the more-than-human in the burning green fuse of the living world. This liminal ground becomes a garden of death and rebirth, of sound and voice, in poems that combine the lyric with the mythic, precision with mystery.

Responding to the intricate crisis in our relationship to our planet and the life around us, the garden here assumes a haunting, otherworldly aspect, as a space of loss, grief and trial, which nonetheless carries within it the energies of regeneration and growth. At the heart of this bewitching book is the force of language itself – at once disquieting and healing – through which we are drawn to the common roots of art, science, and magic, in exquisite poetry of incantatory power.

You can read more about The Infernal Garden on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Infernal Garden

Alchemy

To separate the subtle from the gross

without injury either to spirit or body

I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts

that rise through the stem in green alchemy:

take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,

prune further, into late Greek and Coptic

to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:

the dark root of the art of elixir.

Sceptical of the power of language

to convey the quintessence of wisdom,

language itself learned how to speak hidden –

to sound both the word and its umbrage:

a darkness conducting the central fire:

a form, like a flower, for its signature.

 

Wight

A soft body rises from a forest litter

floor, damp with crumbled leaf – rises from the morning

in skins of light too cold for a sun to enter.

A body, out of place – a mushroom in the spring.

Naked, still unknowing, it wakes to naked things

in splayed and hanging shapes that people from the trees.

Their hard silence loosens: a shadow flies and sings.

The startled body moves – the thing the shadow sees.

It shivers like a man, as if the first to feel

this earthen air so close – a wound that will not heal.

Maybe a man can grow like mould from fallen wood.

He takes a step, almost – breathes and sends a pale mist

that writhes and disappears: he sees himself exist.

If someone asks, say he is born. Do not say dead.

Jayne Stanton, "Have they marked you with arrows?"

 

Jayne Stanton’s poems have appeared in print and online at Anthropocene, Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip, Pennine Platform, Skylight 47, The Amphibian, Under the Radar and other print and online magazines and anthologies. Her first pamphlet, Beyond the Tune, was published by Soundswrite Press in 2014. She has written commissions for a county museum, University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing, UoL poems for International Women’s Day 2018, and a city residency. Jayne runs Soundswrite, an East Midlands network for women who are enthusiastic about all aspects of poetry. Her latest pamphlet, Have they marked you with arrows?, is newly published by Poetry Space. 

 

About Have they marked you with arrows?, by Jayne Stanton
This strongly narrative and deeply personal body of work is the poet's creative response to living with uncertainty following her diagnosis and treatment for primary breast cancer. The poems give voice to the cancer patient's lived experience and its psychological and emotional legacy. 

The opening poem is a swift dispensing with the "journey" word, though a journey this undoubtedly is. The poems are unapologetic in their honesty, defiant in their asking of questions to which there are no easy answers, and naming and shaming those oft-pedalled platitudes. Hope is to be found waiting in the wings, still learning its lines when it takes the stage.

You can read more about Have they marked you with arrows? on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Have they marked you with arrows?

Many-feathered 

Hope is a scalpel in a steady hand.

There’s a point, somewhere

along an incision from axilla to areola

where Hope (who doesn’t know the lyrics) 

starts humming the tune on a loop.

The patient is too far under 

to appreciate the sentiment.

Hope is an evicted ductal carcinoma, 

the rose that grows 

in a pathologist’s petri dish.

Hope has clear margins. 

To what’s left, it delivers

high-energy beams from a linear accelerator.

James Nash, "Notes of Your Music"

James Nash is a writer and poet. A long-term resident of Leeds, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs, was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines (Enitharmon Press, 2007), among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe. Since 2012, his poetry has been published by Valley Press, beginning with selected poems, A Bit of An Ice Breaker, and his first collection of sonnets, Some Things Matter. Cinema Stories, celebrating the history of cinema in Leeds and written with fellow poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard, came out in 2015. A Bench for Billie Holiday was published in 2018, followed by his third collection of sonnets, Heart Stones, in November 2021. Notes of Your Music, a collection of sonnets bookended by two older-free verse poems, was published in June 2025. James's website is here.

About Notes of Your Music, by James Nash
In his fourth collection of sonnets – bookended by two free-form pieces – James Nash sets out to celebrate what may be gone, or flag up what might be celebrated before it goes. From the simple music of the bottle bank (a favourite task), to the biggest questions of the human experience, the poet's gentle, perceptive gaze illuminates all it surveys, delighting and moving in equal measure.

You can read more about Notes of Your Music on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From Notes of Your Music

Petals – a preface

Remember the music we used to play?
The instruments still hang on the wall,
a trellis of brass roses
or an exotic vine with bugle flowers.
Like plumbing but not joined up,
and silent now.
And the lid of the piano is down

The tunes still prickle in my blood,
and though blooming less
each successive year,
have kept a scent of you.
And the truth is
that I have grown older and loved others,
but I shall always carry some notes of your music
in my pockets, like petals,
wherever I go.

1: This Resolution

This resolution to write more, to chase
Away the shadows, comes with fear.
I hope for a kindly, creative space
Where I can heal myself, where I can dare
To think and write again, to cast off
The fractures of the past, or celebrate
Their complex patterns, the tightly woven stuff
Of a lived life, that can chafe and fret.
For it comes with dangers, the possibility
Of a dark alley mugging, the bruised skin
And the traps of a past life that I can’t foresee
That might not free but chain my nightmares in.
But I will try to keep this promise that I give
And explore the life I’ve had, and now live.

 
2:  The promise

The parrot says, "Good morning," from its pen,
The menu is open in front of us
And I am in the world of choice again,
A solace, and all its promises.
If I were a doctor I would harness more
The power of self-prescribing, it brings
A sense of autonomy, of growth, the core
Is stimulated again and my tired heart sings.
It gives my self a chance to recalibrate,
To sift through what I feel and what I know,
Let melancholy in and then what fate
May choose to find for me, to show.
I rattle like buttons in a toffee tin,
I need to sort them. So let me in.

Ruth Bidgood, "Chosen Poems," with a memoir by Merryn Williams

By Merryn Williams 

I first met Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) when I was a struggling new poet and she was one of the most eminent Welsh poets in English. We shared a love of the "green desert" of mid-Wales – ruined cottages, ever-changing weather, high hills you could ascend into a "cold kingdom of black bog and rock." She had retreated to the tiny village of Abergwesyn, where she lived quietly, after several silent years in the Home Counties and a painful divorce.  

Her language was always plain and clear, what Wordsworth called "the real language of men." Here is a short poem which expresses piercing sorrow through the simplest images:

Elegy for Sarah

Bitter apples load the tree

by a girl’s grave

in a tangle of summer weeds.

Small wet apples glow

through summer rain.

"My days are past"

she cries from her stone,

"my purposes are broken off" –

apple bough broken,

fallen in dripping weeds.

"even the thoughts of my heart."

My thoughts, my purposes, my days

broken among weeds,

and summer rain falling

on wet stone, bitter apples.

That’s exactly how it feels, standing near a crumbling Welsh church in the rain thinking of the lives that have ended. She was interested in exploring, not so much the hilly country itself, as landscapes of the mind:

Acquaintance

It was from a border county of my life

you crossed into another country, 

having never settled. Smoke rose one dawn

from the overnight house for which

your thrown stone transitorily defined

a patch of my waste land; but soon

the hut was derelict. Acquaintance ending

seems not to warrant uneasier weather

than a fraction of wind-change brings;

yet over my moors the sky sags now,

black with irrational certainty

of departures. From your hasty thatch

rushes loosen, blow east. The heartland may be next

to know depopulation.

A relationship which never became a close friendship is described through images of the sparsely populated land around Abergwesyn. And next thing you know, her family is about to break up.

 Ruth immersed herself in local history and wrote wonderful poems about obscure and vanished people - servants, small farmers, a man who emigrates to Australia and a man who doesn’t ("Emu’s Egg"). She wrote too about the great subjects of darkness and light ("Driving through 95% Eclipse"), about the threats to, and from nature ("Slate Quarry, Penceulan"), and restrainedly about her deep love for a man who died ("Voyage"). She never talked much about herself, so after her death and with the permission of her children, I explored her previous life as a girl in Port Talbot (where Richard Burton was a schoolmate), a Wren in wartime and a 1950s housewife. The poetry came late, coinciding with her move back to Wales, and although she went on writing well into her nineties the great poems belong to the Abergwesyn years. It turned out that this little patch of earth yielded an inexhaustible subject, and I find myself re-reading her poems constantly and with growing admiration.

You can read more about Chosen Poems by Ruth Bidgood, with a memoir by Merryn Williams, here. 

Rhian Elizabeth, "maybe i'll call gillian anderson"

Rhian Elizabeth is a trainee counsellor and a writer. Her debut novel, Six Pounds Eight Ounces, was published in 2014 by Seren Books and is currently being adapted for TV, and there are the poetry collections the last polar bear on earth, published in 2018 by Parthian Books, and girls etc, by Broken Sleep Books, which has been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2025. Her prose and poetry have been listed in various competitions and prizes and appeared in many magazines and anthologies worldwide, recently being longlisted for the Plaza Poetry Prize and winning Verve Press’ poetry competition, as well as being featured on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. She was named by the Welsh Agenda as one of Wales’ Rising Stars - one of 30 people working to make Wales better over the next 30 years. She is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and was previously Writer in Residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival in Tranås, Sweden. maybe i’ll call gillian anderson is her latest collection of poetry, published by Broken Sleep Books.

About maybe i'll call gillian anderson, by Rhian Elizabeth
Rhian Elizabeth's maybe i'll call gillian anderson is a raw, darkly funny, and deeply affecting collection that navigates the liminal spaces of love, loss, and reinvention. With a voice that is both unguarded and sharply observant, Elizabeth crafts poems that move through heartbreak, motherhood, memory, and self-destruction with biting wit and aching tenderness. Whether tracing the ghosts of past selves, confronting absence, or yearning for connection, these poems refuse sentimentality, instead offering something braver-an intimacy that is as unsparing as it is humane.

You can read more about maybe i'll call gillian anderson on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From maybe i'll call gillian anderson

the winter the murders stopped 

i went to the christmas party dressed as a reindeer, 

           top floor apartment by the river, 

spilled my manhattan over her and her couch, cold collarbones, 

           cold leather, walked home 

through the glacial streets drenched in stars, coat slick 

           with sleet and regret, 

           i feel like a photograph yellowing.

           i miss hearing the creak of my daughter’s bedframe

in the middle of the night, miss being summoned 

           for glasses of water she could easily 

get herself, and now my house is filled 

           with spiders, since there is

no one here afraid of them,

           asking me to kill for them, anymore.

Nuala O'Connor, "Menagerie"

Nuala O'Connor, photo by Úna O'Connor

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. Her poetry and fiction have been widely published, anthologised, and won many literary awards. Her sixth novel Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Eason Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times. She won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House in late March 2025. Her website is here. 

About Menagerie, by Nuala O'Connor
Menagerie is Nuala’s fifth poetry collection, and her first since 2011. It is a book that centres on casting a compassionate, language-loving eye on the animal world, on neurodivergence, on writing, on marriage and familial love, and on art and politics. Carl Phillips, writing in the Irish Times said Menagerie has ‘a warm feelingful generosity of vision and a distant, diagnostic eye … a collection which is at once involving and clear-sighted.’

From Menagerie

Plum

         

          A poem can’t take the place of a plum. 

- Sylvia Plath

Your glaucous bloom is easily wiped away,
one thumb stroke and you are ruby-skinned again,
a firm bed for lips to wrap around.

But you are a frightening prospect;
your skin might make teeth ache, your flesh
may pull a stripe of bitterness over my tongue.

Still, I am willing to plunge in.
I take you in my mouth,
for better, for worse.


Psychopomp

Desire stretches, elongates, it is cat-paw dogged
and I give in, allow my fingers to scroll and tap.
I want more basalt and gold, seed-pearl and jet,
more hair wefted through its own warp, the strands
of the inscrutable dead, snapped behind back-glass.

My treasure box is a tomb of sepia strangers
but I dreamt my mournful trinkets were stolen,
all gone, those turquoise and vulcanite sarcophagi
meant for lapels and bosom-nesting chains –
grim thieves mocked and saw me off, empty-handed.

So here I am again, haunting online marketplaces,
a banshee keening unknowable but felt losses,
a reaper in search of fresh souls to stack,
in order to stuff my communal vault,
with memento mori, with memento vivere.

Lisa Marie Basile, "SAINT OF"

 

Lisa Marie Basile is an NYC-based author, poet, and journalist. She is the author of a few collections of poetry, including SAINT OF, Nympholespy (finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal, and Andalucia. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Narratively, Entropy, Tinderbox Poetry, Spork Press, Best Small Fictions, Best American Experimental Writing, and more. She has also led workshops or spoken in panel discussions at Manhattanville College, Columbia University, Emerson College, Pace University, The Moon Studio, The Author’s Guild, Stanza Books, and more. She holds an MFA in writing from The New School in New York City. She is an advocate for chronic illness awareness and foster youth, and is the founding editor of Luna Luna. Her website is here. 

About SAINT OF
SAINT OF is a gilded exploration of hunger—the hunger for the erotic, the ancestral, the forbidden, divinity, and reclamation. With themes of grief, illness, and generational trauma woven alongside sensuality and beauty, this collection is both sacrament and defiance. It traces the contours of longing, ruin, and transformation, blurring the boundaries between the carnal and the celestial. These poems are not only an invocation of saints—they are a declaration of self.

You can read more about SAINT OF here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From SAINT OF, by Lisa Marie Basile

Maggie Brookes-Butt, "Wish: New and Selected Poems"

Maggie Brookes-Butt has been writing all her life, starting work as a journalist and a BBC TV documentary producer. Her books include six poetry collections as Maggie Butt and two historical novels as Maggie Brookes, published by Penguin Random House. She taught creative writing at Middlesex University for 30 years, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent. As well as being a writer she is a compulsive reader, hopeful gardener, dreadful cook, besotted grandmother and a Londoner to the bone, though she loves to swim in the sea.

About Wish: New and Selected Poems
Wish contains 50 poems from Maggie's six previous collections, about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love. They are gathered here alongside 21 bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world. The new poems are addressed to her young grandchildren, to be read by them when they grow up.

You can read more about Wish on the author's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the poetry collection. 

From Wish, by Maggie Brookes-Butt

Murmur

My heart is whispering – this faint back-wash
is slush and suck of waves over shingle,
tumbling the stones which will lie underwater
when storms rage far above their flooded world.
 
My heart is whispering – a breeze turns
over leaves, its shivery message passes
from branch to branch at the far-off crackle
of forest flames and thudding feet of animals.
 
But whispers lullaby your sleeping form,
your peaceful unknowing, sharing secrets
of here-and-gone, here-and-gone. Listen
to its echo: love ... love ... love ...
 

Eyes
 
Mine have seen first breaths and lasts,
the beginning and end of everything,
 
green shoots and heaps of rotting leaves.
They've seen horses pulling coal drays,
 
milk bottle tops pecked by blue-tits,
peace camps, walls torn down, glass
 
ceilings cracking, gay weddings,
but children slippered in class, life vests
 
washed up beside migrant boats, turtles
choked by plastic bags, smoking ruins.
 
Mine are hooded now, the teal and amber
marbled irises surrounded by crinkled deltas
 
of skin, but still see clearly thanks to small
acrylic miracles and astonishing dexterity.
 
Yours are wide and bright, the whites whiter
than paper, almost blue, the irises two shades
 
of grey, dove grey circled by wet-slate grey.
They can spot the smallest dot of crumb,
 
bending to retrieve it, or point to the woods
where a squirrel is camouflaged against a trunk.
 
I can see what's coming, my vision unclouded
by the twin cataracts of helplessness and dismay.
 
Polar bears claim abandoned villages. Tanks roll
in again. Together we watch the leaves fall.

 

Julian Stannard, "New and Selected Poems"

Julian Stannard has written nine volumes of poetry including Sottoripa: Genoese Poems (a bilingual publication, Canneto, 2018). His last single collection was Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother (Salt, 2023). In January 2025  Salt brought out New and Selected Poems. He has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize for Poetry and nominated various times for the Forward and the Pushcart. In 2024 he was awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize for his contribution to  Ligurian/Italian culture. He has written critical studies of Fleur Adcock, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, Charles Tomlinson and Leonard Cohen. He co-edited The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB editions, 2013). In 2024 Sagging Meniscus Press (USA) brought out a campus novel called The University of Bliss.

About New and Selected Poems, by Julian Stannard
This new book brings together some twenty-five years of writing. Julian Stannard moved  to Italy in 1984 and worked  at the University of Genoa  for many years. He started teaching at the University of Winchester in 2005. Many of these poems draw on his experiences of living in Genoa / Liguria, though he also writes extensively about contemporary Britain and further afield. New poems represented here have appeared in The Spectator, The Dark Horse, Bad Lilies, Wild Court and AN Editions.

You can read more about New and Selected Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.  

From New and Selected Poems

The Pool

The chief leaf man rises early.
A breeze in the banyan tree.
The water laps.
Skink lizard on the prowl.
 
Perfection. Blue. Perfection.
No leaves on the water.
Miles Davis - his ghost -
becoming the banyan tree.
 
Chief leaf man sees a leaf
in the corner of the pool
and shouts in Vietnamese.
Leaf man number two crouches, 
picks it out.
 
The apprentice leaf boy,
conical hat,
takes a broom from the storeroom.
Sweeps.
 
The hotel dog – a Saigon mongrel - watches.
 
Eternal – mythological – war of leaves.
The frangipani quickens.
 
I watch its petals drop upon the water.
 
A stiffening breeze from Saigon River.
The palm trees writhe and thrash.
 
 
Gigi Picetti

Actor, Genoese Activist, Molotov Cocktail 

1939-2022

I lived in the caruggi, lived in the Sottoripa
the streets pushing deeper and deeper.
 
I lived in the vicoli:
lamentation, catastrophe, chicory.
 
Ubiquitous Gigi would come and go.
He once knew Dario Fo.
 
I seem to remember Gigi Picetti
had a machete.
 
The day – in question - was hot and hazy.
He swirled it about
 
to frighten the piccolo borghese.
 

David Briggs, "The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems"

David Briggs has published four collections with Salt Publishing. The Method Men (2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize, and Rain Rider (2013) was a winter selection of the Poetry Book Society. His third book, Cracked Skull Cinema (2019), was a Poetry Wales pick of the year. David received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and since then his work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies from The Poetry Review to the generational anthology edited by Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010). A teacher of English in Bristol since 2005, David founded and currently chairs the Writers' Examination Board, which offers the Apprentice of Fine Arts (AFA) in Creative Writing - a post-16 qualification that is currently live in twelve UK schools. David has been poet-in-residence at Bristol University, and from 2019-2023 he was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme. In 2023 he completed his practice-based PhD research, The Odyssey Complex: Reading and Writing Midlife Poetics and Middle Style at the University of Exeter.

About The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems
David’s fourth collection, The Odyssey Complex and Other Stories (Salt, 2024), offers a midlife counterpart to the poetics of both youth and late style, exploring themes of family ties, nostalgia and retreat, ageing and mortality, acts of memorial and the impulse towards hospitality. 

You can read more about The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems, by David Briggs

Cointreau

 
          in memoriam Avril Henry 
 
I love its boozy citrus hit,  
how in licking my lips post-sip  
it sharpens that extra-temporal bit  
of self that’s able to taste  
the past in the present,  
taste two moments co-eval 
in its sweetness. 
          And it puts me in mind of Avril 
placing a bottle of Harpic, and Marigolds,  
on the shelf to the side of her bathtub – 
ever considerate of others,  
of those who might find her  
many days after – 
and climbing in carefully  
in her best purple kaftan; 
diluting the poison  
in a brandy-glass measure  
of blood-orange Cointreau  
to smother its foulness.  
           And I like to imagine  
that she had a book, 
perhaps her translation  
of Guillaume de Deguileville’s  
Pilgrimage of the Life of the Manhode, 
from which I also imagine her  
reading aloud while Death inched closer, 
put one cold hand on her heart. 
          There’s just enough of the past 
swilling around in the present, 
like just enough barbiturate  
in a terminal glass of Cointreau;  
like there’s just enough barbiturate  
for the task, in a vial  
she’d hidden so presciently 
beneath floorboards,  
fearful of interventions, 
of untimely police raids,  
of cold-calling journalists.  
She taught me so much I’m grateful to know. 
           Each year, on this day,  
I pour for myself 
a chilled, double rocks glass  
           of Cointreau. 

Living with the Douglasses
  
Michael Douglas is renting our spare room 
again. It’s just temporary, till work picks up  
 
and/or Catherine takes him back.  
He’s an early riser, and on bright mornings  
 
we’ll find him out in the garden with  
black coffee and a Thai stick, looking  
 
so much like Sandy Kominsky/Grady Tripp  
we wonder how much acting was involved  
 
in these recent projects. But it’s still work I rate –  
notwithstanding the acclaimed roles he played  
 
in the 80s and 90s – since it feels  
as though he’s comfortable enough now  
 
in his accomplishments to take himself 
a little less seriously; as though he no longer needs  
 
some Nietzschean hero narrative to flatter  
an entitled sense of celebrity and is enjoying  
 
the opportunity to play gently botched characters  
with the (often unfulfilled) potential for redemption.  
 
As though he’s embraced his inner clown.  
Sometimes, I wonder if it really is Michael Douglas  
 
who’s living with us, and my wife’ll say, “Well,  
if he’s not Michael Douglas then who the hell is he?”  
 
And I’ll laugh and say: “You’re right. I’m ridiculous.  
Of course he’s Michael Douglas,” before knocking  
 
to see if he wants a cup of joe. I like the way  
he’s arranged his flamboyant neck scarves  
 
on his tailor’s dummy and, sometimes, I think  
Should I grow my hair out like Michael Douglas?  

Whenever I encounter a crisis of self-doubt,  
I’ll give myself a pep talk, saying things like 
 
“Michael Douglas may be going through  
a tough patch right now, but he’s got chutzpah 
 
and is a pretty good style model for the older man.” 
But then I’ll recall that much of his swagger,  
 
the élan that enables him to carry off that look, 
comes from years of Hollywood stardom  
 
and a foot-locker of great anecdotes featuring  
some of the world’s most glamorous people.  
 
And I’ll realise with a sigh that my three books  
with a small press and that time I shared the bill  
 
with Don Paterson don’t really compare,  
that I’m probably kidding myself.  
 
But then I say: “Fuck it. I’m Spartacus!” And laugh.  
And my wife says, “That was Kirk Douglas, knucklehead.” 

Polly Walshe, "Silver Fold"

Polly Walshe is a poet and painter. In recent years her poems have appeared in Acumen, Pennine Platform, PN Review, The London Magazine, 14 Magazine, Shearsman, The High Window and The Spectator. She was longlisted three times in the National Poetry Competition, in 2019, 2020 and 2022. In 2019, a selection of her poetry featured alongside Melissa Ruben’s paintings in the exhibition Night Vision(s) at the Atlantic Gallery in New York City, and in the same year she won the Frogmore Prize. Her novel The Latecomer was published by Random House in 1997 and won a Betty Trask Award. Silver Fold is her first pamphlet of poems.

The pamphlet is published along with Graeme Richardson’s Last of the Coalmine Choirboys by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by University of Leicester Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing, Nick Everett. Register here for the free online launch reading by Polly Walshe and Graeme Richardson at 7pm on Wednesday 27 November.

 

About Silver Fold, by Polly Walshe
We are always starting out – from ourselves and our pasts, from our own words and ideas. The poems in Silver Fold are preoccupied with how far from ourselves we can ever get, and with our struggle to make words say the fresh things we constantly need them to say.

You can read more about Silver Fold on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Silver Fold

Bridge Building

The day they came to take the phones away
Was a revealing one. Some threw devices

Into hoppers happily, lobbing them high,
Watching them fall with a whoop. Others tried

To bury, cancel, download, go AWOL. All
Pointless. The signals were dying

And the servers had combusted. Myself?
Loved it, hoped all the long-ago winters might

Return to us, the looking-at-faces, the nothing-
To-do, the night in our horses’ manes,

The bright law of the morning. We’d be
Building a bridge into space as we were meant to,

We’d laugh as we laughed once, like a river
Rising for no reason, scarcely contained –

For a few seconds fearsome, then drawing back,
Earth different, small stones rearranged.


Moving to the Coast

Don’t think of moving to the coast
Since everything you need is here.

Cars rushing by make an evening tide
And there’s something of the wharf

About these traffic lights. Gulls swarm
Behind our bin lorries on collection day

Then politely disperse.
Gulls by the sea are known to be worse.

However far you go you’ll never feel,
Sufficiently, there. Why trouble yourself?

Rumours of a better place won’t stop
But every halt has empty shops

And dummkopf men in secret clubs
And the lonely women they fear.

The painful laughter of those women
Clatters forever everywhere. They yearn –

The women and the men – for gestures
From an unconventional god

Yet find it hard to think
That Being’s bird might sing

Along this landlocked street
In preference to Scarborough or Deal

Or any flaking crust shored up
Against the indecision of the sea.

Coast is the ravelled edge of time.
It’s where you are.

Sarah Holland-Batt, "The Jaguar: Selected Poems"

 

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and critic. Born in Southport, Queensland in 1982, she grew up in Australia and the United States, and has also lived in Italy and Japan. She holds a first-class Honours degree in Literature, an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Queensland, and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was the W. G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar for 2010-2011. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, an Asialink Literature Residency, a Château de Lavigny Fellowship, a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

Her first book, Aria, was the recipient of several literary prizes, including the Anne Elder Award, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize and the Thomas Shapcott Prize, was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards, and was commended for The Age's Poetry Book of the Year. Her second book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Prize, and the John Bray Memorial Poetry Award. Her third book, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize, the Queensland Premier’s Award for State Significance, and the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, and was named The Australian newspaper’s 2022 Book of the Year. The Jaguar was also longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the ALS Gold Medal, and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize.

About The Jaguar: Selected Poems
With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt’s books of poetry up to her stellar prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia’s best-known and widely read poets to many readers for the first time.

Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batt’s cosmopolitan poems engage with questions of loss and extinction, violence and erasure. From haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua to the devastations and transfigurations of her father’s long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things. Her portrayal of a much-loved father trying to cope with Parkinson’s Disease touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry.

Her poetry is charged with a fierce intelligence, and an insistence on seeing the world with exacting clarity—as well as a startling capacity to transform our understandings of the familiar through the imaginative act. The poet’s piercing gaze is also frequently turned inward, offering a dissection of the self that is by turns playful and sharply ironic.

The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes of The Hazards (2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies of The Jaguar (2022), which challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. 

You can read more about The Jaguar: Selected Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Jaguar: Selected Poems, by Sarah Holland-Batt

Empires of Mind

Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks,
in the gardens, under a shade sail, 
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.
Midway through a lunch of cremated schnitzel
spoon-fed by the carer with the port-wine stain
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.

In the night he cries out for Winston Churchill.
During his morning bath he cries for Winston Churchill.
When the nurse does up his buttons he will not stop his weeping. 
When the therapist wheels him to Tuesday piano
my father ignores the Mozart and cries for Winston Churchill.

He cries not like a child seeking absolution, 
not like the mourner or the mourned, but free and unconstrained
as one who has spent a long time denying an urge
and is suddenly giddy and incontinent in his liberation.

The cleaners are unmoved. The woman 
who brings his hourly cup of pills is bright as a firework 
and goes about her round with the hardness 
of one who has heard all the crying in the world 
and finds in that reservoir nothing more disturbing
than a tap’s dripping drumbeat in a sink. 

But the night supervisor is frightened 
in the early hours when the halls ping 
with the sharp beep of motion sensors and my father’s crying. 
His longing for silence is fierce and keen
as a pregnant woman’s craving for salt and fried chicken, 
as my father’s crying for Winston Churchill. 

And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus
croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark—
unsettled, loud, insatiable—the unutterable fear 
rippling through them like a herd of horses 
apprehending the tremor of thunder
on a horizon they cannot see but feel. 

The Gift

In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair

garlanded by summer hibiscus

like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche.

A flowering wreath buzzes around his head—

passionate red. He holds the gift of death

in his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black.

He has been waiting seventeen years to open it

and is impatient. When I ask how he is

my father cries. His crying comes as a visitation,

the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderly

as a nurse measuring drops of calamine

from an amber bottle, as a teen at the car wash

wringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracle

to see my father weeping this freely, weeping

for what is owed him. How are you? I ask again

because his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate,

his moods bloom and retreat like an anemone

as the cold currents whirl around him—

crying one minute, sedate the next.

But today my father is disconsolate.

I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again.

I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade.

I hate myself for noticing his poetry—the triplet

that should not be beautiful to my ear

but is. Day, year, decade—scale of awful economy.

I want to give him his present but it is not mine

to give. We sit as if mother and son on Christmas Eve

waiting for midnight to tick over, anticipating

the moment we can open his present together—

first my father holding it up to his ear and shaking it,

then me helping him peel back the paper,

the weight of his death knocking,

and once the box is unwrapped it will be mine,

I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,

every day I will know it opening in me.