Refreshing received notions, Daniel Hinds' New Famous Phrases

With the publication of his first full collection, New Famous Phrases (Broken Sleep Books, 2025), Daniel Hinds has confirmed that he’s very much an outlier among his contemporaries on the U.K. poetry scene. In fact, many might label him ‘A Poet’s Poet’.

What does that term mean in the context of Hinds’ writing? Well, to start with, there are numerous mentions of other poets in this collection, often accompanied by quotes and references to book titles. This indicates that its target audience is already poetry-savvy. New Famous Phrases doesn’t feel like a suitable entry point for general readers who believe poetry might not be for them. On many occasions, they’d be left to wonder how much they were missing due to having no prior knowledge of all those names. And even experienced readers of the genre are sometimes forced to guess that their own deficits may be hindering the deciphering of a literary code.

But what about the poems themselves? Well, to start with, the first letters of all their lines are capitalised. Apart from providing a harder line ending, this decision is a signal of intent, a pointer that they are not only anchored in the canon, but drinking from a very specific set of its wells.

Throughout the collection, Hinds’ invocation of the power of emblematic words is of special interest. He’s always aware of their allusions, connotations and ramifications, as in the closing couplet to ‘The Fifth Season’…

We will stand in the sand and glass of the broken
Timepiece and ask it to flow.

This poem offers us a terrific example of Hinds’ method at its best, marrying tradition with contemporary concerns (about climate change in this case), taking received notions and renewing them.

By taking a step back from everyday experience and viewing it anew via an esoteric literary filter so as to understand it better, he’s reminding us that other poetries are still possible in the contemporary landscape. As such, New Famous Phrases is a courageous book. It takes real guts for a poet to plough their own furrow in a first full collection, and Daniel Hinds is to be congratulated on his achievement.