Writing Serious Things in a Humorous Way

By Rob Gee

Rob Gee, photo by Nick Rawle

As a nurse, I discovered that, when used properly, humour is enormously valuable: it can diffuse tension, create common ground and help put seemingly insurmountable problems into context. It allows us to enjoy our idiosyncrasies and relate to each other as equals. As someone I nursed once told me, "laughter stops us feeling alone and strokes a broken soul."

When we use humour to address serious or difficult subjects, people can be more receptive to our messaging: one of my shows is a whodunit set on a dementia ward. In the wake of the Francis report (which examined care failings in mid-Staffordshire NHS), it was used by several NHS trusts to train staff in ethics and reporting concerns. The laughter around this serious subject enabled people to learn whilst giving them the safety to share their own experiences.

Since then, I’ve written several comedy and health-based commissions, including a singalong about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a comedy quiz show about early symptoms of breast, lung and bowel cancer: ambitious subjects for comedy, but able to reach beyond conventional health education strategies. The comedy quiz show toured working men’s clubs, for example.

Some writing advice

• When writing about a sad or dark situation, a small amount of levity can have a wonderful impact. At the same time, try and avoid being funny simply for funny’s sake: if we contrive unconvincing situations or have our characters behaving unlike themselves purely for the sake of humour, it won’t ring true and is therefore less likely to be funny.
• Write what amuses you, not what you hope will amuse your audience: we all laugh at different things and many successful comedians are very marmite. 
• It’s not the choice of subject that decides whether a joke’s offensive, but the intent. With this in mind, punch up, not down. Most comedic events combine surprise with misfortune and every joke has a target. Choose yours wisely. 
• Self-deprecation can be lovely: it lets people know that you’re not afraid to laugh at yourself.
• The brain loves being given images to enjoy; the more imaginative, the better. Similes can be particularly joyous when they combine elements that wouldn’t normally co-exist: "He entered the room with all the grace of a cow walking downstairs."
• With a single line, you can create a story within the story: "He looked down at the scene with the forlorn expression of a man who’d just swallowed a winning lottery ticket."
• A good way of adding levity to an otherwise serious work of fiction is to give your narrator a sense of humour: as they talk directly to us, we see the world as they do. 
• Once you’ve created a strong character, you can do anything with them: someone like Alan Partridge, Larry David or Philomena Cunk could be in a waiting room, a lecture or a yoga session and we’ll still enjoy the experience.
• The humour will often come to you in later drafts, once your infrastructure has been established. Don’t worry if it’s not hilarious straight away.
• Seek feedback from people who share your humour; watch and read lots of comedy. It will help you avoid or subvert clichés.
• No piece of writing has to be entirely funny any more than it had to be entirely serious. You can have varying amounts of light and dark, because, after all, life is like that.

Here is a poem about an ostensibly serious subject:

Dr Brice

Dr Brice put her name in the wrong part of the form
and inadvertently sectioned herself.
This amused us greatly,
because she was bad for people’s mental health.

She went on a trip to Venice,
paid for by the drug company
who were keen to invest in her impartiality.

She changed everyone’s meds when she came back.

Carnage ensued and people relapsed.
One man’s mental health fell so badly to bits
that he smashed up the ward and put two nurses off sick.

So don’t be like Dr Brice.
Just stick to the guidelines from NICE.

About the author
Rob Gee was a mental health nurse, then a comedian, and now a stand-up poet who dabbles in theatre. He’s performed at over a hundred fringe festivals worldwide and received over twenty awards for his solo shows. He leads comedy and poetry workshops in mental health settings and is sometimes sent into schools as a warning to children. You can read about his collection The Day My Head Exploded: Poems about Healthcare on Creative Writing at Leicester here. His website is here. 

Rachel Burns, "My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses"

Rachel Burns lives in County Durham. She was awarded a DYCP Arts Council Grant in 2023. She won the Classical Association Poetry Prize in 2026. She was placed second in The Julian Lennon Prize for Poetry 2021 and second in the Disabled Poets Prize 2024. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, including COAL (Smith/Doorstop) and North Country (Saraband). Rachel has facilitated poetry workshops for The Ginkgo Prize, Tees Women Poets, The Writing School and Creative Future. Her pamphlet, A Girl in a Blue Dress, is published by Vane Women Press. My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is published by Broken Sleep Books.

About My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses, by Rachel Burns
My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is a raw, propulsive book of poems and lyric prose that moves through teenage motherhood, addiction, poverty, care work, violence, and the long afterlife of classed shame with furious clarity and bruised humour. Across six sections, Burns writes from buses, pubs, kitchens, prisons, foodbanks, council estates, and the uneasy calm of nature reserves, allowing memory to return in flashcuts, refrains, and narrative riffs that feel as immediate as speech.

The collection's emotional range is wide, from the bleak comedy of survival and the tenderness of parenthood to the stark ache of friendship, loss, and what gets left behind, while recurring motifs of horses, film, music, and woodland destruction thread private life into a wider social landscape. It is a book that refuses respectability and refuses silence, insisting on testimony without polishing the edges.

You can read more about My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses

Love in the 80s

Rubik’s Cubes
& Fred Perry white polo shirts

The roller-disco Life – La-La-La-La
I’d watch you from my bedroom window

Doing bunny hops on your BMX 
Counting 1,2,3 like Hopscotch 

Wheeling my shopper bike
Through the metal gate

Riding around the green
In the hope you’d notice 

I’d graffiti my school book
I love Joe

Heart & cupid arrows
Dreamily dissecting a frog

You were sent to Ireland 
To fight in The Troubles

The mines & steelworks all gone
It was the army or the Monger’s Yard

You came back hyem
Not quite the same

I still think of you
As that boy 

Who changed
The colour of your hair

More times than I’d had hot dinners

School Bus Anthem 

I sit at the back with Shelley and Titch,
sharing a long cigarette, smoking it down to the fag end. 
Bernadette goes from seat to seat, can yer sponsor us 50p, pet?     
We all know the money isn’t for the starving babbies in Africa.

The big lads on the bus, bounce first years up and down, 
up and down, on their knees. This is the way the donkey’s ride,
the donkey’s ride, the donkey’s ride.

The old double-decker crawls up the bank, wheezing like a knackered miner.
We pile to one side, just as it hits the hairpin bend, knowing the driver, 
won’t make the gear change in time. 

The engine smokes, splutters and coughs, wheels spin backwards. 
Time rewinds. The bus grinds to a stop. We pile out the exit, 
a herd of untamed ants. The driver shakes a fist.
Ger off yer little bastards! Ger off! 
 

Katie Daniels, "Stone"

 

Katie Daniels lives in Leicestershire and writes poetry and prose.  Her debut poetry collection, Catch, was published by Redbeck Press in 2007 and a pamphlet, The Geometry of Distance, by Mantle Community Arts in 2012. Her poems have appeared in publications including Magma, Iota, Obsessed with Pipework, and Other Poetry. Katie received an Arts Council grant for writing time in 2012, and another as part of the former Inky Fish poetry collective for their reading tour in 2006-07. Katie is self-employed and works as a charity governance professional. She plays a lot of Countdown, and is terrified of giraffes. 

Below, you can read Katie's poem "Stone." The poem has previously been published in Other Poetry and is taken from a projected full collection called Feathers in my Palm.

Stone

Moment of impact: stone/bone.
You're swaying slightly, then moving on,
walking the old road, hotheaded
 
where stone has broken you,
the back of your school shirt turning redbrown.
You’re fluid, offbeat, draining away,
 
thinking in stone’s subsurface glint -
some new cold language planting flags. 
This passive victory leaves you sure
 
that only stone could be this soft and wild:
slithering down to your new shoes,
smoothly embracing the furrows of your skull.

Robin Vaughan-Williams, "What Data Saw"

Robin Vaughan-Williams is a poet and producer based in London. His previous publications are The Manager (Happenstance Press) and How to Fix a Human (Sampson Low), and poems have appeared in magazines such as Acumen, Under the Radar, Long Poem Magazine, Dream Catcher, and Anthropocene. He did a PhD on the Bakhtin Circle which fuelled an ongoing interest in the voice as material, from open mics and performance-collage events to his practice in collaborative poetry improvisation. His work was highly commended for the Erbacce Prize 2026, and he has hosted live literature series in Sheffield, Nottingham, and Oxfordshire. His website is here. You can find him on Bluesky/Instagram @robinrvw.

About What Data Saw, by Robin Vaughan-Williams

In Robin Vaughan-Williams’s latest collection, Data is reimagined as a mythological being in the process of becoming. Unsure yet who or what she is, or the extent of her powers, Data attempts to blend in, understand, and communicate in a human world where she both does and does not belong. 

She appears on Secret Millionnaire, becomes the target of protest movements, witnesses human-on-human violence, and is used by people for their own ends. She needs to feed; but if everything is text, where can she find her mouth?

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

From What Data Saw

Data engulfs her mother

When Data yelled it made her mother go deaf in one ear.
When Data laughed a pod of dolphins dived for fish.
When Data gurgled cats patrolled the enclosure that kept her safe.
When Data opened her mouth there were already words waiting to fall from her breath.
When Data sucked at the breast it was hard.
She charged up on two teats thick with serum.
Her exhalations were sweet with electrolytes.

When Data was weaned she engulfed her mother.
She took her to a quiet place and lay there undisturbed for 9 months.
The mother-shape dissolved in her belly.
It became a fly.
It became a drinks dispenser.
It dropped cans into foxholes
that exploded when shook.
It pinpointed movement in the snow.
It entropied warm bodies.
The mother became the probability of an event.
A collision on a screen.
And Data moved through her mother in violent ways. 

Data: in a field

it is as if she is not there nowhere is Data
only data the stuff of her dreams things
she is made of always 'of' something
content but not contentment the feeling
of emptiness good at camouflage
and transcendental meditation stirring
the sugarcube into the universe to sweeten
the brew losing herself in an acid dance
in a field when the cows come home
she's still not there having it like a lost raver

Tim Relf, "Not Even October"

 

Tim Relf, photo by MadMann photography

Tim Relf is a Leicestershire-based poet, novelist and journalist. His debut poetry collection, Not Even October, is out soon with Salt Publishing. His poems have been published in most of the UK’s leading poetry journals, including Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, Under The Radar, Poetry Wales, The Dark Horse, Acumen, Banshee and Bad Lilies. He is a former poet-in-residence at Leicester Botanic Garden. His most recent novel, published by Penguin, was translated into more than 20 languages and turned into an audiobook starring Emilia Clarke and Charles Dance. You can find out more about his writing on his website here.  

About Not Even October, by Tim Relf
Not Even October is a collection about the easy-to-miss moments that shape lives. Moments in hotel rooms, petrol stations, cafes and vets. In suburban gardens and city parks. In small-town streets and country lanes. Evoking love lost and found, nights of excess, threads of friendship, the rip of grief and the flickering, beautiful absurdities of life in a digital, distracted age, the poems trace how we make sense of memory, mortality, place and home. Not Even October vaults from humour to heartache – then back again – in a breath, attuned both to the anxiety-inducing barrage of turbulent times and the calming comforts offered by the natural world. In this tender, relatable debut, Relf navigates contemporary Britain, finding everyday magic in everyday places, while asking readers: How do we hold on to what matters – and let go of what doesn’t?

You can read more about Not Even October on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Not Even October

Windfall

It was going to be about how, if you sit in an orchard

in September, it surrounds you:

falling.

It was going to be about the soft drop of decades as you rest

between Ribston Pippins. But now I see – hear –

this poem isn’t about that, after all.

It’s about waiting for the word

for the sound apples make

landing:

the exact right word for the noise they make

as they hit the ground.

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, "Skinship" (スキンシップ)

 

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana is author of two poetry collections: Sing Me Down from the Dark and Skinship, both published by Salt Publications. This year, she won the Frome Festival Crysse Morrison Poetry Prize, as well as Verve's February Poem of the Month competition, was placed third, by Mimi Khalvati, in the Kent and Sussex competition, and shortlisted for the Wolves Lit Festival competition. She is shortlisted for the 2026 Forwards Prize for Best Single Written Poem, for her poem, "Madam Gout," originally published by Magma.

Alexandra lived in Japan for ten years and has Master's degrees in Japanese Language and Culture and in Writing Poetry. She is based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and teaches for The Poetry School and The Poetry Business. Her most recent work is published or forthcoming in Pennine Platform, The North, Vervacious anthology (Verve Poetry Press), The Alchemy Spoon, and online in And Other Poems.

About Skinship, by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana
Returning to Japan after a 15-year absence, our narrator is told she hasn’t changed. Yet everything has changed. Skinship examines our public and interior selves, the seen and the unseen, probing the complexities of relationships with lovers, kin, other women, and across cultures. These ideas are often explored through Japanese forms, including award-winning zuihitsu and haibun, and 2026 Forward Prize shortlisted "Madam Gout."

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

From Skinship

ふさわしくないもの

Unsuitable Things

           (after Sei Shōnagon) 

An obasan saying futota na to a foreigner: 

haven’t you put weight on? An old woman questioning 

the Japanese character, based on a competitive 

game of bridge. Pyramid tea bags that rip. On threads 

that twist around your index finger. A mother who twists 

words, shutting down conversation with her daughter: 

did you ring for a reason? A father telling his son he’s a quitter, 

because he leaves taekwondo. A son remonstrating 

with his mum, when she unplugs his gaming PC: 

are you a fucking moron? Chewing pellets of Rock Jaw gum, 

for better facial aesthetic. A father who won’t let him win 

arm wrestling. And a mother who sees a rival 

in her daughter, who, as I bend to kiss her cheek, 

says, I thought you were going to eat me.  

Derek Healy, "Children in the Window"

 

Derek Healy grew up at the foot of the Cotswolds Hills in Gloucestershire and, before a career in mental health social work, studied English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford University. However, overcoming that impediment, he has gone on to see his poetry appear in many journals, including The Road Not Taken, The Lyric, Ibbetson Street (all USA), Orbis, Snakeskin and The Cannon’s Mouth. His fourth collection of poems, Children in the Window (Graffiti Books), was published very recently (January 2026).  It follows Made Strange by Time (2018), Home (2020) and Uncharted (2022). Now a proud and far-flung member of the Ohio Poetry Association, Derek lives on the Malvern Hills with his wife Candida, where they have no children, no dogs and no cats but make do pretty well with each other and some fine friends. 

About Children in the Window, by Derek Healy

Children in the Window, Derek Healy’s fourth collection (Graffiti Books 2026), ranges far and wide, both in its themes and its styles. Sixteen sonnets are dedicated to his wife. In blank verse and free verse he contemplates the bizarre contradictions of the universe we inhabit. Cinquain stanzas take a tongue-in-cheek look at religion, whilst in 6/5 syllabics he peers into some corners which those closest to us never get to see. There is even a rarely encountered ghazanelle, discussing the fad for lovers’ padlocks weighing down bridges. Poignant, vivid, humorous and meticulously crafted, Children in the Window offers up poems to which a reader can return again and again.

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

From Children in the Window

Downhill      

At five feet ten he peaked,

but now a full half inch and more

has stooped or crumbled away;

white hair thins around a tonsure,

hands sprout spots like mould,

ears need turning towards every voice,

whilst three pairs of spectacles

mete out his sight

and names jump ship in the dark.

Yet these are the best of times:

up with the early sun

when the world lies silent,

free to fashion what he will

from words arranged on a page,

to look not out but in,

discern within himself

the glint of age-old truths

waiting his discovery;

steer his own course at last,

long years of labour behind him,

sunset ripening ahead.

The Shirtwaist Factory Fire

          (Manhattan Island, March 1911)

All ways out locked

against petty theft

or early slopings off to lovers' arms,

the girls have panicked from the flames

to this one high window

they could muscle open.

So far below

the cold dead street

lies empty for them,

the pavement thronged

as though the carnival

might be half a block away

and coming.

Names meet mid-air for one last time.

Then – as though in a moment

become mothers to each other –

one by one they take the ledge,

scramble a goodbye or prayer,

and drop, eyes heavenwards,

two hundred feet.

One final girl appears,

dark hair streaming in the wind

and swirls of smoke,

helped to the precipice

by the day's young stand-in foreman.

Briefly they fumble

a never-to-be-bettered kiss,

before he hands her out

to all eternity

as though onto a train

bound out of state,

her eyes not leaving his

until she drops.

As he follows her

his trouser legs bulge

in the upwards rushing air;

flame light, like chandeliers,

spangling his proudly polished shoes.

Claire Walker, "How to Shape Our Mouths"

 

Claire Walker’s poetry has been nominated for the Forward Prizes, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her work is published in journals and anthologies including Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Finished Creatures, Dust, Aesthetica, and Ten Poems about Daughters (Candlestick Press). Her new pamphlet is How to Shape Our Mouths (Black Cat Poetry Press, 2026). Claire is co-editor of Atrium poetry webzine, and is currently studying for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Birmingham.

About How to Shape Our Mouths, by Claire Walker
How to Shape Our Mouths is a consideration of womanhood, exploring experiences of artists, writers, muses, mothers and daughters, often through an ekphrastic lens. 

You can read more about How to Shape Our Mouths on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From How to Shape Our Mouths

In which I am one of Modigliani’s nudes

We share a cigarette at the window, blow smoke out into the evening. This is our 1917 Paris skyline, and you are in full bloom, the exhibition imminent. We’re down to embers, so I remove my robe, the cliched silk slipping easily away. I move to the couch and recline. There is tenderness as you ask if I’m comfortable. Amedeo, here I’m so comfortable I could dream. You lift my head, place another cushion for me to rest on. By now, you have a reputation for drink, though you’re not yet tragic, and I am not yet grieving. The walls of your studio are blush-soft. You take up your brush, mix colours to match my hair, contemplate the correct earthy tone for my skin. My spine uncurls, my neck grows long upon the canvas. Here, we are comrades, the moment both abstract and acute. Let’s take my sadness, your poor health, and let’s make something beautiful. This is not sex, or love. There is a little pigment of my heart that wishes to be seen, and there is your longing for greatness. Come, see you whisper. I notice you have captured the exact shade of my irises, the exact shape of my eyes, not your go-to almond form. You tell me you’ll paint the background warm and red like the soul. Modi, by now, all the good light has gone. We circle back, we share a cigarette, blow smoke out into the Paris night. A night so black we no longer see our breath escaping us.

Unzipped

"It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out" - Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

After I gave birth to my daughter,

I cradled her on the crisp clean sheets.

My body grew a new version of me,

one long exhale, skin unzipped 

and out she slid, quiet and instinctive. 

I knew how to hold the girl, 

was so sure of this fresh employment. 

My baby and I made friends with ourselves 

and those like us. I felt sweet at ease 

teaching how to feed, smile, count on fingers, 

how to shape our mouths into mama.

  

At thirteen, our certainty is delicate 

as sugar work. Those two, who slipped 

knowingly from me, have less to say. 

Still entwined by blood and love,

some days laughter halts in thickened air. 

The bared teeth of that zip pull away, 

come apart. And although we remember 

how to smile, sometimes our mouths cloy 

with stuck apologies. There is a confusion

within us. Those people we once knew —

not quite gone, not quite there either. 

Carmella de Keyser, "Chasms"

Carmella de Keyser is a prize-winning British poet, known for explorations of identity, and the liminal spaces of human experience. Her writing spans both adult and children’s poetry. Founder of Harlow’s first Poetry Society Stanza, judge for the Harlow Poetry Open, she is committed to the democratisation of poetry and is an active figure in the grassroots UK poetry scene. De Keyser has five books published or forthcoming, from Hedgehog Press, Alien Buddha Press, Parlyaree Press and the Seventh Quarry Press. Her accolades include winning first prize for the Hedgehog Poetry Press Pamphlet competitions of 2024 and 2025 and achieving over 100 of her poems published in contemporary journals such as The Madrid Review, Hooghly Review, Dream Catcher: International Arts Journal and Dust Poetry Magazine amongst others. She has had her writing selected for podcasts and radio shows including for the BBC and has had the honour of having her poetry widely anthologised including by the major publishing house Macmillan. Her website is here. 

About Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser
Chasms is a reflective journey into intersections, an exploration of identities, trauma, conflict, justice and recalled memories of visiting the Balkans juxtaposed with London life in the 90’s. The word chasm originates from the Greek word "khasma" meaning yawning hollow or gulf. It can also be a profound divide, rift or impassable rupture in the earth between peoples, feelings or ideas. The poems within Chasms consider dissonance and identity across different settings, borders, edges, and of projective identifications of self and the other, yet they also invite in space for bridges to be built across these gulfs via joy, integration and reconciliation.

From Chasms

Reflections

Baba's face resembles railroad tracks that disappear into each other. 

Like an Escher woodcut. 

I can look at it for hours …

She has been perma-sketched by early dawns in the Balkan sun. 

Grooming her garden,

Twisting cucumbers away from their tender climbing. 

When she smiles, three more lines crack open - from each of the sides of her cinnamon eyes. 

As her lips downturn again, the motifs across her face are filled with wholesome flesh, plumped up by "baklava," "tulumba" and "revani." 

She has toiled for her whole life and her skin is all stories. 

My reflection has no novellas,

Or folk tales, 

Or kneeling in the early womb of the teeming soil, 

It’s paler than hers, has lived in colder climates, 

My cheeks are smooth, mirthless urbanised tombs,

Yet for a moment -

Drawn in, by her flare, and her gaze,

Her face warms mine.

 

No More Anniversaries

A pile for "her" and a pile for "him,"

Twenty years and it’s come to this.

The mahogany music stand – "his."

The mini pyramid ornaments – "hers."

The toaster – "his."

The porcelain chopsticks – "not sure."

Plates from his intrusive mother – "Who cares?!"

The origami child coiled in the corner – "theirs."

Some things can never be unshared.

Peter Thabit Jones, "The Boy Who Drew John Lennon"

 

Peter Thabit Jones has authored eighteen books, including the Dylan Thomas Walking Tour of Greenwich Village, New York with Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter. He and Aeronwy Thomas did a poetry reading tour across America in 2008, organised by Stanley H. Barkan, their American publisher. Peter has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, UK), The Royal Literary Fund Award (UK), an Arts Council of Wales Award, the 2016 Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry (UK), and the 2017 Homer: European Medal for Art and Poetry. His poem "Kilvey Hill" is incorporated into a stained-glass window in Saint Thomas School, Swansea.

Three of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for renowned Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, the Theatre National Du Luxembourg, and the Sofia Opera and Ballet in Bulgaria. 

In April 2014, he was inducted into the Phi Sigma Iota Society at Salem State University, Massachusetts, USA, for his contribution to literature and literary translations. He gave the Guest of Honour speech before his induction.

He tutored English Literature and Creative Writing on the part-time degree programme at Swansea University’s Adult Education Department for twenty-two years, retiring in 2014.  

Further information can be found on his website here. 

Front cover drawing of John Lennon by Peter Thabit Jones ©2026

About The Boy Who Drew John Lennon, by Peter Thabit Jones

The poems range from the poet’s childhood in the shadow of Kilvey Hill in Eastside Swansea, where he was raised by his Welsh grandparents, to his times (2010 to 2025) spent as an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. Other subjects include poems about poets, such as Elizabeth Daryush, Ivor Gurney, Federico Garcia Lorca, R. S. Thomas, and Welsh language poet Alan Llwyd, artist Stanley Spencer, the jazz and swing music singer Billie Holiday, Elvis, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, war, a refugee mother, a victim of domestic abuse, homelessness, widowed women, and the 1926 General Strike in Wales.

You can read more about The Boy Who Drew John Lennon here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From The Boy Who Drew John Lennon

Lassen Volanic Park, California

            (for Patricia and Bill)

We followed the rough path,

Below the mountains

Stretching to a visual heaven

And the wide splinter of a lake

Of greyed placid blue.

We talked as we walked

Above the deep valley of nature,

Like two people who have awoken

In another planet’s landscape:

A landscape that was shaped 

Through a time before mankind’s

Strict calendars and clocks.

A time when volcanoes raged

With eruptions and the land

Slid and moved, broke apart,

Catapulting boulders

In the rising collapse,

Until the agitated storm

Noise of it all settled

Down to a stilled calmness,

Like the silence sleeping

On the glassy face of a pond.

We strolled down to where

The geysers were smoking

From a dulled snow surface

And the strong sniff of sulphur

Fouled the afternoon’s air.

Tourists, we took our photos

To solidify our memories.

Then breathless with hiking

And our excited achievement,

We climbed back to the parked car.

Below, the warm day spread out,

The landscape the physical evidence 

Of this planet’s ever-changing 

Body, its chaos and its creation—

The natural engines of its internal magic.

In the Poetry Class

He left you, you said,             

In the country of tears.           

He left you broken,                  

Your beaten mind                      

A junkyard full                              

Of his angry menace.                

I am your teacher                       

And you told me                         

Last week, when my other         

Students had left.                                   

I glance at you,                                    

Your young hand hovering       

Over the blank sheet                

Of writing paper.                                                       

Do your eyes now sadden    

 

Because of the ugly bruise        

Of your memories,                    

The Jekyll and Hyde                 

Of his so-called love?           

I watch as you                          

Start to scribble                      

Down your gathering thoughts,     

The nervous rivers       

Of blue words claiming       

The clean land of the page,        

As I hope one day                              

You fully claim back your life        

From the prison of pain,      

Claim back the true you      

That his shadows still occupy,      

So that you find the calm       

Rhythm of real caring               

And a happiness unchained  

In the whole of your being.       

Alan Baker, "A Book of Psalms"

 

Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has lived in Nottingham since 1985. He runs the poetry publisher Leafe Press and its associated magazine, Litter. His recent collections include Riverrun, a book of modernist sonnets about the river Trent and a book of prose poems, Letters From The Underworld.

About A Book of Psalms, by Alan Baker
A Book of Psalms is a sequence of 64 lyric poems in the form of psalms which attempt to do what the Biblical psalms did: praise, lament, critique the state of the world and humanity, elegize a lost homeland, look for faith, and provide comfort and consolation in times of trouble.

You can read more about A Book of Psalms on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From A Book of Psalms

Psalm 13

A scattered pigeon, a day named Wednesday

An afternoon declined into undifferentiated colours

As I stumbled into the town where neither the flies

Deceived into activity by the January sun

Nor the stallholders unrolling their canvass

A risen Sun and a working day earth tilted from the light

And all the people chilled and shouting their wares

Seemed more than living words that carry a history

In each syllable, a song in every vowel

Psalm 45

If it should ever come, and I suppose it must, let it be

On a bright morning when all the possibilities settle as one

Like a flock of sparrows who don’t know whether

They’re coming or going or whether the air

Seems cooler, their numbers fewer

Who don’t know that they’re symbols of lust and vulgarity

Who deserve a constellation to be their aid and shelter

And to notice their fall, to hover over late-night pharmacies

To dart between the eaves of Amazon warehouses, to alight at last

In a dream I had of a red-brick terrace in some northern Celestial City

Milena Williamson, "Milk & Moon-water"

 

Milena Williamson, photo by Stephanie Sy-Quia

Milena Williamson is from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She has an MA and PhD in poetry, both from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Her debut pamphlet, Charm for Catching a Train, was published with Green Bottle Press in 2022. Her debut collection, Into the Night that Flies So Fast, was published with Dedalus Press in 2024. In 2021, she received the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award. In 2022, she received a support for the individual artists programme grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for work that became Milk & Moon-water.

About Milk & Moon-water

A Sudden Stitch. Unfruitful Land. A Fever. 

In Milk & Moon-water, Milena Williamson uncovers 11 Old English metrical charms – ancient incantations spoken to ward off harm – creatively translating them into magical and medicinal spells for the modern reader. 

Alongside each reimagining is an original charm poem, a remixed and new telling of an old text. Covering the climate crisis, illness, ageing and fertility, this collection of charms ranges from the incantatory to the unhinged, and re-engages with the ancient practice of looking to the land and the body for answers to life’s new and persisting questions.

You can read more about Milk & Moon-water on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Milk & Moon-water

Charm for Unfruitful Land (Remixed)

The good news is the wolves have returned to Europe.

   The bad news is people are killing wolves again. I own no

underwear from this island. There is no purely wild place left

   on this island. I buy wildflower seeds from the dark web.

I walk on the earth while there is still time and sprinkle seeds

   on riverbanks, lawns and graveyards. The smoke pours

across borders and becomes the sky. It’s time to buy an air filter

   and give it a name. I am stuck inside a well and Europe

is the silver bucket framed against the sky. We are living

   in the overlap. We can create clouds from seawater.

We drilled into Antarctica to find the most transparent ice.

   This ice is compressed by other ice so it’s dark down there,

dark enough to see neutrinos belly-flop into light.

 

Journey Charm (Remixed)

With eight lanes on the upper

and six lanes on the lower,

the busiest bridge in the world

is a sonnet. Love, we are suspended

in steel between the river and the sky.

Manhattan and a flood warning

is a good backdrop for listing everything

that has spilled on the GW Bridge –

gas and manure and watermelon

and frozen chicken. Upper or lower?

A man once landed a plane here

and survived. Now there’s a woman

on the median selling fresh oranges.

We see the signs. The lanes divide.

Bert Flitcroft, "From Standing Stones to the Stars"

Bert Flitcroft was born and brought up in Lancashire but now lives in the Midlands. He now has four collections of poetry published: Singing Puccini at the Kitchen Sink, Thought-Apples, Just Asking, and Seeing the Light. Recently he has made available a fifth, a "new and selected" entitled From Standing Stones to the Stars: History and Science: 30 Poems.

He is an Arts Council prize-winning poet, was Poet in Residence at the Southwell Poetry Festival and has performed at a number of leading national festivals including The Edinburgh International Book Festival. He was Staffordshire Poet Laureate 2015–17 and curated the on-line Staffordshire Poetry Collection. 

He has worked as resident poet with one of our "National Treasures," The Wedgwood Collection at the V&A; as resident poet with the prestigious R.I.B.A. exhibition "The Road Less Travelled"; and recently as part of the University of Keele project "Labelling the Museum."

Bert offers a professional mentoring service and has a long and successful history of running workshops and giving readings, not just to local poetry groups but in libraries, arts centres, gardens, galleries, museums. His website is here. 

About From Standing Stones to the Stars, by Bert Flitcroft

This collection  includes a few new poems alongside poems published in Bert’s first four collections. Glancing through these he realised how many of them reflect his long-standing interest in History and Science, and the variety in form and structure this has involved. This collection is designed to appeal to a wider-than-usual audience as well as the general poetry reader. Many readers will find this collection both a pleasure and a rewarding, if occasionally challenging, experience.

From From Standing Stones to the Stars

Re-reading Jane Austen

in the age of quantum entanglement

It is a truth universally acknowledged

that a single heavenly body, in possession

of space, must be in want of a soul mate. 

Between such bodies there is always gravity. 

And who is to say this isn't a form of love?

Whole galaxies may be holding hands, 

finding themselves entangled

at a subatomic level, sharing words of love. 

And, for all we know, causing each other 

both joy and heartache.

Let us imagine two heavenly bodies

and name them Elizabeth and Darcy,

separate them by unacknowledged forces

a physicist might label Pride and Prejudice.

Two planets, mere particles, seemingly 

destined to circle around each other forever.

There is much that is mysterious about love,

but two particles can exist in many places

at the same time yet be connected, 

and, though separate, can influence and refine 

each other's behaviour.

So who is to deny that our two particles,

one in a high-waisted white gown

and one in a tailcoat with white cravat,

could be entangled at this subatomic level,

discovering that they share an affinity

created by a chance encounter at a ball

or an innocent visit with an aunt.

In the light of quantum entanglement

Jane Austen was much wiser than we think.

With such knowledge would the tale

of Romeo and his Juliet, two universal 

star-crossed lovers, have to end as it did?

Or Abelard and Heloise suffer such a fate?

Intensive care

Back from theatre, again, the room quiet 

but for your breathing and the syllables 

of monitors and voices in the corridor,

your eyes closed in opiate delirium 

you whispered, "I’m being chased 

around the room by a mashed potato."

And, after a silence, "Is that you, dad?"

and you squeezed my hand.

To see your pale flesh turn red and swell,

a doctor's pen daily marking out the fronts,

was to witness Life reduced 

to mortal combat between microbes.

If only Love could be a friendly bacteria

we could drip-feed into veins.

But for now at least, thank God for surgeons 

and men of science, and Fleming.

And yes, thank God for love.

Had you gone before your time, the natural 

order disturbed, I would have needed 

your absence, the silences, made bearable; 

convinced myself you were still somewhere:

in the low clouds, your voice in the wind,

your hands part of the warm rain.

Heaven would be good. That’s what it’s for.