Matthew Paul, "The Last Corinthians"

Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025, following The Evening Entertainment (Eyewear Publishing, 2017). He is also the author of two haiku collections – The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008) a Guardian book of the year, all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew is a regular reviewer, co-edited Presence haiku journal, has contributed to the Guardian’s "Country Diary" column and blogs here.

About The Last Corinthians
In a variety of forms and voices, the poems in The Last Corinthians veer psychedelically through personal, family and wider social history, pausing for quieter moments. The poems’ themes include: art, particularly by Edward Burra; class; childhood and youth; work; sexuality; fauna and flora; domesticity; sport; suburban nightlife; gardening; end of life; and, above all, the ghosts which insist on interrupting thought. 

You can read more about The Last Corinthians on the Crooked Spire Press website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Last Corinthians

Half Board at the Alum Sands Hotel Again

My brothers and I comb the whole, brown edifice,
like Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators, uncovering 
clues in a haunted house. The birdcage lift grumbles 
and judders its Meccano heave, while the intercom 
mumbles cryptic instructions for "Lemonade Doreen."

In the TV lounge, we never watch what we want to—
residents are hooked on Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm. 
We get sucked in too. At dinner, Mum orders us to stop 
fidgeting, pipe down, and not use our forks as shovels. 
The Brylcreemed, Italian waiter teases me, the youngest, 
by asking, every evening, if I’d like "some jelly ice."

Back from the beach one baking afternoon, we gawp 
as a luxury coach swings into the car park: top-flight 
Middlesbrough F.C., managed by big Jack Charlton, 
in town for a pre-season friendly versus Fourth Division 
Bournemouth, who’ve ditched "and Boscombe Athletic" 
since the printing of my bible, The Observer’s Book 
of Association Football. Takes us all week to click
 
her name is Room-maid Doreen.


Fish Loughan

Footbound by your father’s too-small gumboots,
I’m dragged by Maggie, your springer spaniel, 
to the body of water bestowing name on place.

Holly-green wavelets lap nearer every day— 
they blacken when heftier weather blimps in
from North America: Jesus-rays spoking out 
of dark cumulonimbus cracking golf-ball hail.
 
You crease up as unleashed Maggie whooshes 
across the mudbath to lump her walrus weight in, 
displacing litres as if Archimedes were watching. 

From this, I learn life’s travels are not a river, 
but a lake—a Caspian Sea, fed by rivers on all 
sides—whose antediluvian coldness harbours 
sharp-fin barracudas and red-bellied piranhas.

Harry Whitehead, "White Road"

Congratulations to Harry Whitehead, Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, on the publication of his second novel, White Road!

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and its annual free lit-fest, Literary Leicester. His first novel The Cannibal Spirit (Penguin) was reviewed as "powerful, brave, ambitious" (The Globe & Mail), "a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive" (Quill & Quire). White Road (Claret) is his second. He’s published short stories, reviews, essays and more in a wide variety of genres. Currently, he’s writing a novel about climate change in the Himalayas. 

About White Road, by Harry Whitehead
White Road tells the story of an oil rig that explodes in the High Arctic just as winter is setting in and the environmental disaster that follows. Carrie, a Scottish-born rescue swimmer, is lost, presumed dead, after the accident. Only she can answer the questions about what really happened, but first she must find her way back to civilisation across the polar wilderness in the Arctic night.

Below, you can read a short section from the novel. Carrie is stranded on the sea ice, with a badly injured back, following an ice ridge beside open water south. The ice is rapidly breaking up after an abrupt change in the weather. And she’s about to realise the true extent of the environmental disaster unfolding somewhere out there on the dark ocean.

From White Road
Clutching the walking poles, she leaned forward to haul the heavy sled, but her back hurt so fiercely she had to crouch down instead. She pressed her fists into her temples. Squeezed through the hood, trying somehow to reduce the agony. She needed focus. At any moment, this ice slab would break free of its mooring and she’d be marooned on a crumbling, free-floating berg on the ocean.

Crying out with each step, she slogged forward over the ice’s dancing surface. Its shivering movement, the way it dropped and rose, meant her legs hardly knew what to do. Her knees gave way at the wrong moment. Her rump slammed down on her ankles, and her back exploded in anguish. 

But now the ice ridge beside her began to come apart in earnest. Fragments showered down on her. Looking up, she saw one giant slab, big as a pick-up truck, teetering one way and the other. Desperately, she picked up her pace, adrenalin numbing the physical anguish.

A tearing clamour, snaps, a series of bangs and then a sizzling rush. The weight of the sled against her harness abruptly vanished. Over her shoulder, she saw it lifted up on a wave of smashed ice and roiling water where the ridge had come down behind her. She had time to take another step before the sled whipped her legs away and she collapsed on top of it. She careered forward amid the wave’s roar. A ball of ice two feet thick whistled past her head. The water and slush-ice gushed about her body. She was screaming. 

At last, it stopped. She lay still, arched diagonally over the sled like a sacrifice across an altar. The water’s confusion subsided. Carrie fidgeted the sled harness from her waist, dragged herself to her feet. The floe she’d just escaped was turning away like some stately liner leaving dock. A mass of smaller ice chunks still cascaded down the broken ridge-end into the frothing sea.

Her arms, her body, glimmered in subtly refracting colours. For a time, she just stared at herself in fascination. She was hallucinating. Then she understood. Where the water had washed over her, she was covered in a thin film of oil.

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.