Here's my new article on Pablo García Casado's exceptional poetry. It's just been published in the latest issue of The Madrid Review...
As I move ever deeper into the third
print run of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, I find myself reflecting more and more on the complete
irrelevance and absolute significance of sales figures.
Sales are completely irrelevant to me as an objective or target, but on the other hand their growth brings
with it an accumulation of readers, who are by far the most important part of my
whole creative process. Without a reader’s enjoyment, my poems would seem
self-indulgent.
Then there’s the fact that no
favour trading or box ticking are involved in someone’s decision to sit down
with a collection, and engage with it. The gaining of a reader is by far the
greatest award that a poet can win.
I’ve come to believe that slow-burning word of mouth is the most solid, long-lasting way to build a reputation as a poet. Do you agree…?
Properly chuffed to report I have a poem in the June issue of The New Criterion! You can read it via this link.
Here's the gorgeous poster that the Madrid Review have created for my forthcoming event...
I'll be reading in Madrid on 27th May. As the guest poet at The Madrid Review Live's event, titled ‘Vinos and Verse with Matthew Stewart’, I'm looking forward to giving an outing to my more Hispanic and wine-related poems, while also taking part in a Q&A with James Hartley, the editor of The Madrid Review.
Chuffed to report that I have another new poem in The Spectator this week. You can read it on their website by following this link.
I'm delighted to feature today a poem by Ricky Monahan Brown, taken from his recent pamphlet, Drawer of Letters (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).
The piece I've chosen is titled ‘Drawer’, so its significance within the manuscript as a whole is pretty clear. I don't tend to be a fan of poems that use the passive voice a lot, nor of poems that don't contain any main verbs. However, those two devices are actually used to terrific effect here, holding back narrative details that the reader is allowed to fill in, such as the identity of the protagonists. Meanwhile, progressively tweaked repetition is clearly a driving force, used deftly, moving us forward without any punctuation towards the poem's emotional core.
I hope you enjoy it, and please consider visiting the Broken Sleep website (see here) to grab a copy of the pamphlet if you do...
Drawer
a
drawer made of letters
letters
made of lined paper
letters
made of hand-cut paper
letters
made of thick Egyptian sheets
letters
made of translucent skin
letters
bound by bulldog clips
letters
secured by steely staples
letters
gathered by woven strings
letters
stuck by elastic gum bands
letters
woken by a slashing pen
letters
leavened by a smiling blot
letters
smudged by a dragging hand
letters
blurred by <illegible>
letters
built by paragraph slabs
paragraphs
formed from frilly sentences
sentences
verbed into brief existence
verbs
that describe a life
and
a letter made of words
made
of letters
like
L
and
E
and
A
and
V
