A poem by Ricky Monahan Brown

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

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.

Scenes from a film, Nicholas Hogg's Missing Person

‘Cinematographic’ or ‘filmic’ aren’t habitual adjectives when describing the vast majority of contemporary U.K. poetry, but they provide an ideal point of departure for discussion of Nicholas Hogg’s first full collection, Missing Person (Broken Sleep Books, 2023).

In the above context, the last two stanzas from ‘Starring Role’ seem especially relevant:

Then a tea with the lads,
            the ruffle-haired cub. I wander off
from the gang — cue plaintive strings (not too loud)
            as I stand and stare from a new-build shell.
A reviewer may write
            that this is rather mawkish,

the boy at a window
in an empty home. What the critic
has failed to gather, is how the man will carry
            this void
            into every room he walks
            for the rest of his life.

These lines read as a statement of poetic intent. They’re comparing an individual person to a character, a fictional scene to a supposedly factual event, highlighting the blurred lines between the two, while they’re also anticipating a potential film critic/literary reviewer’s reticence at the poem’s struck poses. And all this, of course, plays out alongside a reference to an archetypal musical soundtrack for the event or film. Via these references, Hogg is implicitly asking us questions. Are we reading a poem or watching a film? Is it fact, faction or fiction?

The endings in Missing Person are particularly interesting. At first, they might often lead a reader to suggest that they’re taking an easy way out of the poem. However, an alternative conclusion presents itself once we view them as the closing shot in a mini-screenplay. This is when they suddenly become loaded with the connotations of Hollywood, toying with our expectations of life and cinema. One such poem is ‘Gun (With Englishman)’:

I want to add a detail here, like circling birds, or a dust devil swirl.

But, no. Just a fridge. And a target with a heart

blown out.

In this extract, the first person jumps from being a protagonist to taking on the role of the screenwriter. Or even the director. At this point, the reader is made aware that the poem is blending with a scene from a film, riffing on all those stereotypical plot twists and images that the big screen imposes.

These cinematographic poems are by far the most remarkable pieces in Missing Person. They stand out among the other strong but less striking poems that make up the rest of this collection, and are well worth the entrance fee to the book as a whole. Here’s hoping Nicholas Hogg’s future writing continues to explore and mine their potential, because they strike at the heart of a crucial issue in contemporary U.K. poetry - the blurring of the poet and the first person – and they do so with terrific, idiosyncratic insight. I recommend you read them for yourself!

A clear-eyed approach to grief, Christopher Arksey's Variety Turns

Variety Turns (Broken Sleep Books, 2023) is Christopher Arksey’s first pamphlet and is unusual in many ways. To start with, it’s thematic in nature rather than following the time-trusted route of providing an initial wide-ranging sample of the poet’s attributes. This decision alone indicates the poet’s confidence in his own writing, which also extends to a trust in his readers throughout these poems, never forcing arguments or conclusions, instead allowing layered details to speak for themselves.

The pamphlet revolves around the loss of a mother, tracking the process of her dying and then her family’s grief. Such highly personal subject matter means it’s far too easy to conflate the poet and the first-person protagonist, as is demonstrated by several of the otherwise insightful blurbs that accompany the book. However, Arksey himself refuses to fall into such a trap. One excellent example of his method is ‘Grief’, which I’ll now quote in full (with thanks to the poet himself for granting me permission to do so):

Indescribable,
though I’ve tried.
Failing in my usual
way of stumped silence
or inarticulate babble.
The best I can offer:
a permanent resident,
neither seen nor heard,
though their presence
is felt everywhere.

The poem combines self-deprecating humour with a clear-eyed, never maudlin attitude towards hefty themes, all alongside an implicit reminder that poetry is art and artifice rather than mere anecdote, as is reflected by Arksey’s explicit invocation of metaphor. Moreover, he engages with the suggestion that elegies are renowned for allowing the poet to overreach to express something that cannot be expressed. Arksey’s afore-mentioned self-deprecation undercuts such an approach, providing us with an implicit statement of poetic intent for the pamphlet as a whole, standing against received wisdom.

Both in approach and in execution, Variety Turns introduces us to a fully formed voice. A quick glance at the endorsements might suggest it’s a hard read, but Christopher Arksey’s light touch enables him to dodge any accusation of sentimentality or self-indulgence. This is a pamphlet that shows how pain can be turned into poetry without abandoning the reader, and that’s a considerable achievement in the current poetic climate.