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.