I am sharing this extract from ‘Never Leave The Dog Behind’ today in honour of Paul Besley, talented and courageous writer, mountain man, friend and inspiration to many.

Paul has been sharing profound reflections on the progression of terminal illness over the past few years on his Substack ‘Heading for the Exit’ and yesterday he posted a note of thanks and goodbye.

The picture above shows him on stage with me at the Boardman Tasker Prize at Kendal Mountain Festival last November with his beloved dog Scout, subject of his book ‘The Search’, which I urge you to read. I had the honour of presenting Scout with the inaugural KMF ‘goodest boy award’, a set of chewy treats. In my opinion, Paul’s book itself deserved countless prizes. On stage - as in the rest of life - he exuded dignity, wit and eloquence with zero bullshit.

Paul’s words have brought (and will bring) comfort, hope and renewed resilience to many. Here’s a short extract about being a ‘dogsbody’ for him and Scout in their Search & Rescue training. I will never forget any of my conversations with Paul, even if they weren’t long enough.

Scout is the handsome cover star of ‘Never Leave The Dog Behind’.

Extract from ‘Body’

I have never known ‘body’ as a verb before. I lie still in the long grass and try to become an action, try to become a silence, as archetypal as the Kinder stones. I am a body. My body is a part of me. But I am also ‘bodying’, practising metamorphosis, playing dead while be­ coming increasingly aware of my breathing, my rising and falling chest, the blood that beats steadily in the vein at my neck. It’s almost like meditation, only there’s a raw urgency to it.

I first met beautiful border collie Scout and his handler Paul on a grey Sheffield day. We walked to the Buckstone on Stanage and I scrambled on top of it for joy, slithering down the other side. Scout immediately saw some sheep, his ears pricked up and then he glanced at Paul. Something invisible passed between them and he knew not to go near.

Paul has been walking in the Peak District since he was fourteen. He grew up in Rotherham and comes from industry. He’s now studying creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

‘I was an engineer. I left and became a salesman. I was very good at that. Then I woke up one day in a hotel in Frankfurt and said, “OK, I’ve had enough.” Walked out and started a bathroom and kitchen company the next day. I retired when I was forty-seven. In 2012, I’d gone climbing on Dow Crags on Valentine’s Day. It was very windy, ice around. In the afternoon, I walked over to the Old Man of Coniston and was planning to drop down. There was a snow cornice on the path so I backtracked. The last thing I can remember is stepping over a brook. Next thing, I woke up in the snow. There was snow on my head and it was red. My scalp had been peeled back. I managed to raise the alarm and mountain rescue came and got me. I was in a very bad way. I was supposed to be going out with my partner and she phoned me while I was still with the mountain rescue to find out when I was coming home. I’d broken my wrist, my ankle, my legs, smashed my teeth, my ribs … I had a cup of tea and some cake. To this day I don’t know what happened. It took them three and a half hours to get me off. The following February, I went out and did the walk again and then I applied to join Mountain Rescue – it was a way of giving back.’

He joined the Woodhead branch as soon as he could. Last time we had a bad snowfall in Sheffield, I opened a copy of The Independent and found a report about lorry drivers rescued from their vehicles in the Woodhead Pass. The man they’d interviewed was Paul – he’d been instrumental in their recovery. Paul is modest to a fault in the way he describes himself:

‘I’m not a crag rat. I’m what mountain rescue call a donkey – I lug stuff up hills. But I’m good at nav, good at search and rescue, and I just became interested in how the dogs worked. I’m a bit of a loner and that’s a thing you need with the dogs. I don’t know what it is but we all are.’

You have to be in a mountain rescue team for at least eighteen months before you can train a dog. But you also have to body first, completing a minimum of ten days nationally. The bodies are the most important thing in the whole of SARDA, Paul argues. Each dog requires a different interaction and response and the bodies must know how to read that. Paul describes the relationship between him and Scout as an experience of ‘being at one’. Scout was meant to go to the Swiss Mountain Rescue but Paul ended up with him instead. The dog he had originally planned to have and picked out from a litter ended up as a pet for someone else because the breeder reckoned he would be no good for Paul’s purposes.

‘The tragedy would be for him to not grade because of me … we had a problem where he wouldn’t leave me for a bit. It went on for four or five months. I was close to tears, really choked up about it. It gets a lot of the handlers like that. It’s such a close bond.’

Paul almost seems tearful whenever he talks about the stresses of training Scout. His social media feed is full of their training adventures and skirmishes together – images of Paul with his legs savaged by brambles, images of Scout lying contented in the bracken, his tongue lolling from the side of his mouth. Beneath this all, I suspect, is the urge to ‘be more dog’. When Paul watches Scout, I sense part of him is running through the bracken too, flirting with the idea of not coming back right away.

‘I love him. I really, really love him. It’s difficult for me to imagine him not being here. He knows what I require now, can almost read what I want him to do. He’ll range up to 300 metres. He might end up on top of a ridge, get a good scent and come all the way back. I trust him and he trusts me.’

I once asked Paul if his relationship with Scout is different from the other dogs he’s owned and he agreed right away.

‘I’ve spent time teaching him how to jump over stiles and gates so I don’t need to open them. I don’t walk with anybody else, just my dog. I’ve got a photograph of us above Bakewell. We’ve stopped for lunch and we’re under these trees by a little stream. He’s had some lunch and he’s asleep and I’m sat there and it’s just magical. It’s everything you want.’

Paul showed me the photo. Dog and owner content in the same purpose, together but slightly apart. There’s something very compelling about that slight distance – the way a dog doesn’t place demands on you as a human would, doesn’t narrate its own experience in familiar language. The needs of dogs seem so simple, so practical, so exact. But perhaps that’s just because we don’t fully understand them. And perhaps we don’t want to, preferring the illusion that we can be small gods to them, provide them with the things they need for comfort and safety. In the image, Paul and Scout look into the same vastness:

‘It’s like two craftsmen working together on the same project and they know what each one is going to be doing. They trust implicitly that each of them will do their own bit. It’s more than friends, although he’s not a cuddler; he’s too independent for that. He’s not bothered about being round us in the house, but as soon as he sees the signs of rucksack, lead and boots he’s alert.’

Two craftsmen, each reading the other and responding. From my small burrow, I wonder what it must be like to be Scout, free yet tethered out on the moor, brought back by an invisible thread.

‘Never Leave The Dog Behind’ was published in 2020 by Vertebrate Publishing, Sheffield and ‘The Search’ by Paul Besley was published in 2025.

I’ve been fascinated by pubs as spaces of storytelling since my pamphlet ‘a pint for the ghost’ back in the mid 2000s. When I got back to the UK after my fleeting trip to Penang, Anthony and I started writing a few poems-in-dialogue about bars.

I’m massively excited that Anthony is coming over to the UK at the end of this month and we’re going to be reading together along with Matt Byrne at Sheffield’s very own Over The Yardarm on 31st August.

Ahead of that gig, I thought I’d share a couple of drafts of things I wrote in response to poems by Anthony. Mine are set in Manchester, but the first piece took inspiration from a line in Anthony’s poem ‘Hanoi, Day and Night’.

If you want to see us in dialogue IRL, come to Sheffield on bank holiday Monday, August 31st!

Hope you like these two mini bar poems!

Irwell

‘..not stink, just fragrance gone too far.’ – Anthony Tao

The way Canal Street’s overcome
some nights by sudden river
so as you sit under the rainbow flags
at dusk, in unfit northern weather
you might smell something tar-like,
dankness, shipping’s aftermath,
the smoke-on-clothing reek
of defunct industry, lung-deep
and if you let yourself inhale
you’ll notice how the Irwell
holds the scent of everyone
it ever touched, or catch a note
of things once wanted-rid-of,
forced down, twice-drowned.
Tyres. Trinkets. Rucksacks
from the dead-presumed-lost
and when the karaoke starts
to pulse from Oscars,
all this perfume might remind you
of your own sunk past,
a childhood note of dandelions,
coffee on your mother’s breath

or teenage aftershave, bile
rising in the mouth, how it felt
to taste the ground, hard,
blood on your bottom lip.
You sip your bitter gin –
pink pepper, juniper –
and Mark asks for the bill
and it gets dark, and someone laughs
stage left and you walk out, knowing
the city could make a swimmer
of you yet, under green lights,
strobe and bassline pulling
you under, bones
light debris
you came from.

*

The Drowned Hour

I walk to Deansgate, past the neon, yoked-together concepts
of the night. O Frog & Parrot! Star & Garter! Lamb & Flag!

Do only gods name bars? And who decides what makes a pair?
A man falls out of Wetherspoons to piss against Lloyds Bank,

glitter-anointed women weave, arms linked, and traffic
stops for them. Some things just work together: Dog

& Partridge. Jug & Glass. But I’m in love with everything amiss.
Where is the Platform & Ennui? Where is the Stare & Break?

The Tongue & Clavicle? I want names for the sheer
unholy mess of everything, the urge to stay where cigarettes

are shared as if they have no cost, and where we can pretend
these new builds aren’t like kids to us, the city will not hold

our kind responsible for how it all works out. The world,
I mean. The windows frame what they can’t keep

as we walk past, our faces held for seconds, just -
Regret & Summertime. Mosaic & Dread.

I would like to drink – please – in the Hour & Drown.
We’ll lean into last orders, watch the strangers leave

together and apart or stand, islanded at the bar like
high rise apartments, joined only by proximity. The Hope

& Aftermath. The What & Next of things. Forever
& Forever, yes, Amen.

Taunton. Summer. My seven year old is sending text messages to his best friend Robin. They have to go via my phone to Robin’s mum’s phone and in this they assume something of the old fashioned delay and circularity of a postcard. He types with a frown on his face:

Dear Robin, I hope you had a wonderful time in Cornwall. I am in Taunton with my grandad we are here for the cricket we are having fuunnnnn!

Then he sends twelve head exploding emojis, a devil face, a LOL, a wolf, a unicorn, a broccoli and five monkeys with stars for eyes. He signs off ‘From Alfred’, then checks every thirty seconds for a reply.

When I was a kid, I used to try to make the addresses on postcards as over-extended as possible: THE EARTH, THE SOLAR SYSTEM, THE UNIVERSE etc. I can’t remember who I sent them to. I do remember being fascinated by the idea that even if you put a first class stamp on a postcard, it would be delivered second class. As if no message without an envelope could be urgent. As if holidays weren’t ever life or death.

In Somerset (and everywhere), August grass is the colour of the paper we used to stain with tea at school to make fake parchment. I would repeat the tea trick at home in my room, made my handwriting cursive. I always wanted to be older than I was.

The rest of the country is on fire. Europe is on fire. Perhaps the moors around Sheffield will be burning when we get back to them. We sit in the bowl of heat at the cricket ground and watch Rocky Flintoff score his first century. My son accepts suncream and a hat. My dad says he’s never worn a hat in his life and he isn’t about to start now.

Half of a postcard is the picture side, the image which is supposed to represent the trip. We take photos of everything for Robin – the flattened pitch, the cream tea, the backs on chairs. Alfie photographs the sparse field of my dad’s hair from above.

My dad is with men he has known for over fifty years, ex cricketers. When he was in hospital after his stroke, some of them sent him handwritten postcards, illegible with love. They take it in turns to push his wheelchair around the grounds. Some of them have had illnesses of their own, some of them have recovered. Every year, the group is a little smaller.

It is traditional to end a postcard with I wish you were here. Perhaps not much matters beyond that. It is a case of form over content.

Robin replies and Alfie’s face blooms with excitement. CRICccccEEEEEETTTTT he types. Smiley face. Winking face. Running man. Cricket bat.

In a workshop behind us, the real bats are being made from willow, still abundant in England. The stands erupt in a cheer. Lancashire are winning. The world is sizzling. We are having a lovely time!

Strangers talk to you here, under the sun, share fans and sunglasses. Two men from East London are impressed by Alfie’s seven year old understanding of ratios. When the cricketers take their helmets off, I’m amazed by how young they look, how expectant, even watched from a distance. They hope the field has been perfected for them. That it’s all to play for.

My dad’s friend takes his arm without him having to ask. Together, they start to walk, slowly and with great care. A street in Taunton. The earth. The universe. Amen.

Good Dog

The dog was A Good Dog
we agreed – coat caramel
and whipped cream. A Good Boy,

a very Good Boy, despite
the breadth of chest,
the weight of skull.

At rest, his soft pink nose
would twitch, or one eye
track the door. Then one might

consider the set of that
huge jaw, the muscle
dormant in the legs. Nights,

he’d take my slippers
to bed. I could think nothing
but Good Good Good

as you shrugged off
a layer, stood,
showing your back

and ran the tap, filled
your greenest glass
right to the brim and said

the problem with him
is his capacity, (he moved
one ear, you hushed

as if he was human
enough to hear)
he seems well-trained

but if he turns -
and then I noticed
all that sunlight, sudden

on your traps and lats,
the power in your shoulders,
forearms

slack then tensing, fist
at the neck of the vessel.
I swear I could’ve

numbered every tooth
inside your mouth.
if he can overpower you,

perhaps
you shouldn’t keep him
in the house.

In Port Renfrew, British Columbia, Great Blue Heron is always flying away from me, startled by my presence. I have come to Canada to meet these graceful birds and I have not succeeded in seeing one standing still. There’s something uncanny about the beaches here in February, misty, with the full force of the Pacific rolling in. The shoreline in places makes me think of the Graveyard of the Elephants in Disney’s film The Lion King: instead of the bones of creatures, the beaches are full of felled trees, washed up timber. It is rich with recent history. There are cormorants perching on rocks, great shrugs of their wings. I spot the occasional high wheeling bald eagle. But mostly, I sense the wildlife watching me rather than vice versa.

I can only think properly when I’m away from the demands of home. There, the days are unpredictable and crammed full. Everything is large scale here. The Red Cedars are so vast that it is humbling just to look at them. There are Sitka Spruce with dark, feathered trunks and twisting Douglas Fir trees. 10 kilometres from here in the Gordon River Valley stands Big Lonely Doug, over 70 metres tall, a great sentinel of a Douglas Fir, islanded and alone. I’ve posted about this before: in 2011, logger Dennis Cronin discovered the enormous tree while surveying a patch of forest that was to be logged. Cronin wrapped green ribbon around it with the words “Leave Tree” repeated along the length, saving it from being felled for timber. But almost everything else was chopped down. Three years later, photographer and activist T.J. Watt happened upon the tree and named it Big Lonely Doug, a play on the tree’s species name and its relative isolation amid the clearcut.

Doug stands like a heron in the water, waiting. It makes everything around it seem insignificant. It is fronded with mist, spectral. At Botanical Beach, even the mussel shells are huge, shot through with porcelain blues and iridescent silver. I hold one up and it looks like hunched wings. Often it rains for days here. The world becomes all soundscape then, branches dripping, roofs treated as drums, tyres hissing on the road. I like the intimacy of rain heard from under a hood. I like the feeling of my damp hair, cold against my face.

To the First Nations Pacheedaht people of the Pacific North West, herons have traditionally symbolised inner calm and self-reliance. On these overcast mornings, heron shuns my company, makes a graceful escape. In the sand by the cove, I find the distinctive footprints of a black bear, claws deeply indented. I place my hand on the ground next to a print to compare sizes and feel appropriately small. The tracks are relatively fresh, it seems, and they disappear into a patch of forest. It’s early morning and I glance over my shoulder, wary and excited. No bears. No heron. Just yearning.

Near Sombrio beach, I watch a clutch of weekend surfers throwing themselves recklessly against the sea. I know it is a fine art, all in the timing, catching each wave, but my untrained eye just sees joyful, dangerous abandon, bodies putting their trust in a greater force. By the boots of their cars, young men and women are changing, wetsuits rolled down to the waist, a great collective unpeeling. I notice the neat hips of the women, their salt-curled hair and flushed faces. I catch myself staring: a guy in his late twenties with tousled, lavish hair and an improbable moustache, back sinewy with muscle, arms marbled with ink. I turn away, busying myself with the waves again and their obvious grasping.

*

British Columbia is dense with heron mythology. I’m told Heron frequently adorns the tops of Kwakwaka’wakw masks and in some oral traditions, Heron might appear as a watchman or represent patience and grace. Some members of the Haida Eagle clan use the heron as their crest figure. They are also prominently featured in plaque carvings and two-dimensional artwork. Before I left for Vancouver Island, my friend Rachel gave me a heron pendant to wear, made from a Ukranian coin. Heron is held in a circle, wings outstretched like the goddess Nike. I have not gone out without it since I got here. It is my talisman, my version of a crest. It is small enough to be held in the palm of my hand and I love its rough edges.

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Vulgar Latin. To undo. Undo your / her shoelaces. Undo your / her bra. Undo all of the good work.

Defeat is something that is done to you, unless it is self-defeat which is also something done to you but with the illusion of control. Self-sabotage. Press self-destruct.

Outside my local pub, the council are taking down the outdoor structures built to encourage people to sit in sunshine. They were built by the last landlord, but now the current landlord is responsible. There were special TV screens so you could smoke and watch the football. This morning, three men are removing them. No - one man is doing the removal and the others are standing and pointing to things. My son cries when we go past because he doesn’t like change.

My son is very tired because he was up late watching England vs. Argentina. When people are tired, children are less in control of their emotions. Adults too. We make plausible excuses for them.

AI overview: To defeat the Panzer Soldat (the boss in the classic Origins map), keep your distance to avoid his flamethrower and shock charge. Target his glowing red visor to stun him, or catch him under a giant robot’s foot for an instant kill.

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Why?

Herons stir things up. Always have. They’re little avian agitators.

Something which seems fairly consistent across cultures, across history is the idea of heron as provocation, whether benign or fearful. In Japan, the crane symbolises peace and longevity but its cousin the heron’s appearance is more mysterious, more ambivalent, tied to spirits, gods, death, a link to another world. White herons are said to appear as someone is about to pass into the next realm.

In Ancient Greece, the word for bird (‘ornis’ / ‘oionos’) also meant ‘omen’. Thus birds like herons were an expression of the Gods’ intent, whether benign or otherwise. In Homer’s Iliad Athena sends a heron as an auspicious omen to Odysseus:

“Pallas Athena sent a night heron; they did not see it with their eyes through the murk of night, but heard its ringing cry. And Odysseus rejoiced in the bird sign.” (translated by Caroline Alexander)

In the novel ‘The Rain Heron’ by Robbie Arnott, a chilling, gorgeous eco-fable about our fragile and dysfunctional relationships with the planet and each other, the heron is a contested symbol of wildness which destructive forces seek to capture and tame. Arnott’s book contains some of the most devastatingly beautiful descriptions of this hybrid being made of weather and flight. Tellingly, the heron is always see-through, shape shifting:

“Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird.” (Armott)

In Mary Oliver’s ‘Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond’, the bird seems to accomplish what is impossible. The narrator watches the heron take off from ‘thick water’ and feels a sense of infinite scale, knows that there are more things in heaven and earth (and pond) that we might dream of:

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself--

This image is ostensibly hopeful, but the untethering the heron symbolises might feel a little vertiginous too. An un-anchoring.

*

One of my favourite articles about what poetry does will always be a piece my friend the poet and psychotherapist Alan Buckley wrote for Magma in which he examines the connection between poetry and trauma, making the case that a poem ‘unmakes the world’ and enacts a kind of disturbance. It’s called ‘My Marmalade Passion or Remembering Proust’s Gloves’.

In it, he argues that poetry and therapy can both productively agitate: ‘it’s not the primary purpose of therapy (any more than poetry, or art in general) to help people feel better; rather, it’s to help them to feel, to think, to be more engaged with the actuality of themselves in their environment.’

Buckley begins by exploring how in the therapeutic context “deep psychological process needs commitment, courage, and above all time” to be transformative. He goes on to connect this to literature:

“And this is where the good ships of poetry and therapy begin to sail in similar waters, for isn’t some kind of transformation a key part of what we’re about? Even if a poem isn’t blowing our head off, it surely should be delivering at least a sufficiently strong tap on the skull to wake us from our necessary, ongoing trance. Whatever the poem’s register or genre there has to be some quality of disturbance, of the reader being engaged by something at least partly familiar before being startled into a different or heightened awareness. Frost’s dictum of “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” suggests that a similar process has to have happened during composition; the analyst Wilfred Bion said that if there aren’t at times two frightened people in the consulting room, we will only find out what everyone already knows, and the same applies to the little room of the poem.”

I love this article so much I’m always at risk of just quoting it in its entirety. I think it is one of the most astute pieces about the creative process I’ve ever read. You should certainly seek it out, spend time with it. But for me, the crux of the piece is when Alan connects poetry to something we might understand as trauma:

“Trauma is something that exists on a spectrum; anything that suddenly threatens our perceived sense of self-in-the-world can lead to an overwhelming flood of perception and stimulus. Not everyone will have been in a train crash or fought in a war, but most people will have an experience of, say, being small and momentarily losing sight of one’s parents in a crowd – which for a child is as much a ‘whole-world’, life-threatening experience as Paul’s heart attack. This means that it’s possible to talk about trauma and traumatic process on a very small scale, and my argument is that somewhere within every successful poem there’s at least one moment that mildly traumatises us, that triggers our deepest knowing of how the world may be unmade in an instant. Even if it appears to be re-made in the following moment, we can’t claim that nothing has changed; the poem, which draws us in with the illusion of being a fixed event, has given us a glimpse of how the world is both utterly interconnected, and constantly in flux.”

I’m starting to see the quality of herons in many things, objects that interrupt a view. I see them in the cooling towers that rise about East Midlands Parkway station, grey against a candy floss early evening sky.

I find a Reddit thread from the USA that begins: ‘the chances of getting killed by a Great Blue Heron are low but never zero.’ Apparently if you have to pick one up you should immobilise the head and beak first to stop them taking your eye out.

‘Never turn your back on one’ says a man who claims to have been stalked (yes STALKED) by herons around Half Moon Bay, CA. Someone else claims they’ve heard herons ‘strike like a spring loaded harpoon with enough force to punch a hole in a human’s skull.’

GBH: Great Blue Heron or Grievous Bodily Harm??

Somewhere within every successful heron there’s at least one moment that mildly traumatises us, that triggers our deepest knowing of how the world may be unmade in an instant…

I think a heron is as complicated and compelling as a poem, as profound and simple as the conditions that produce one.

We’re all familiar with the notion that a poem is only ‘ours’ until we implicate a reader. Then, meaning = negotiation.

That’s all very well in theory. We adore readers! We seek them out! We wrote the book so we could speak to them! But now we’re terrified and we want to go home.

For my part, I tend to believe passionately in any collection right up to the point when the proofs are sent off to the printers. Then I decide it’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made, want to change or retract everything, contemplate running away to the rhubarb patch at the bottom of the garden where I used to hide as a kid. This gnawing anxiety eats away at me until - come publication day - there are only a few scrappy bones left.

On that note…. happy publication day to my fourth collection with Chatto & Windus, STEPMOTHER!!

For me, the best part of any new literary project is when it exists as concept, unsullied by my attempts to put it into words. I first started thinking about the figure that animates my new book -The Wicked Stepmother - around 2021, and I lived inside the stories I was researching, imagining the lives of real and fictional stepmothers around the world.

When the writing process begins, there’s the daunting thrill of grappling with form and shape and order, trying to structure your ideas in a way that flows. You’re alive and intent, often frustrated but excited too. You’re building something. When I’m at this stage, I feel the kind of absorption I get on a single pitch rock climb.

Then the editing: a mix of doubt and euphoria. There’s always a point in the pruning and reshaping and expanding of a collection where the whole thing feels destined to collapse. That is when the real work starts. When you think the book won’t work, you’re usually closer than you imagine to finding a solution: creating ‘sections’ only to take them out again, revising your starting point, moving towards a different concluding mood.

In ‘Body Work’, the ever-wise Melissa Febos captures writerly ambivalence succinctly:

“...while I sometimes resist the work of writing I resist my own psychic suffering more, and writing has become for me a primary means of digesting and integrating my experiences and thereby reducing the pains of living. Or if not, at least making them useful to myself and to others….There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”

One of the abiding themes of STEPMOTHER is my argument that occupying any position in a family (especially a blended family) requires work and negotiation. This finds a parallel in the writing process and the strange ‘look-at-me-don’t-look-at-me’ of publication.

To quote Melissa Febos again:

“It is joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found.”

Thank you to my wonderful editor Sarah Howe for her shrewd and patient attention to STEPMOTHER from an early stage. The book launches today and you can order copies here.

And a little flavour of the prose-poetry in the book can be found below!

(Oh and WHAT IF I NEVER WRITE ANYTHING AGAIN and other favourite poet publication day fears)…..

See you at one of the launches. I’ll be the one hiding in the corner with a large wine.

I come back to this news story again and again because it neatly symbolises our hypocritical urge as a species to only defend the ‘cute’ (if you want a deep dive into this topic, read the brilliant poems of Isabel Galleymore).

Ducklings are cuter than herons. The fluffy baby versus the gangly grim reaper. In a conversation piece for Poetry London Galleymore has said of her poems examining ‘cute’:

“There’s something sly about cuteness – that’s what drew me to it in the first place. Its vulnerability is irresistible, yet there’s manipulation hidden inside it. And of course that’s what makes cuteness such a great marketing tool. The Squishmallow’s plan is to stir so much tenderness that you have no choice but to buy the plushie and take it home. So whenever I approached cuteness as a subject, I found myself in two opposite states: enthralled by its charm, yet oddly repelled by its force. At times, it felt like being bounced back by a giant, smiley-faced balloon. What at first seemed simply adorable began to feel surreal and even sinister.”

I mourn the noble heron shot in Wales, its breakfast rudely extracted. But the hunted heron is a fascinating subject.

Mohana fishermen from the Indus River Valley in Pakistan still hunt birds by hand: photographer Randy Olson captured this in a striking, famous picture.

They wear hats made from dead herons already captured and put other live herons on hoops, tied to them as decoys. They then wade through the water, submerging themselves up to their chins, grabbing birds by hand as they appear.

Olson remarked of his image and the tradition it depicts:

“They weren’t doing it to be quaint, it is a practical method of survival. The photograph captures a culture vastly different from my own and I’m proud of its authenticity.”

There’s also something remarkable about the way these fishermen are hunting AS herons do, something democratic in the method.

In the Ramayana, the Hindu smriti epic poem from ancient India, deaths of herons are associated with the origins of poetry itself. I have the brilliant writer Joe Hakim to thank for putting me onto this.

According to the Ramayana, the sage Valmiki went to the Tamasa River to bathe. There on the riverbank, he beheld a pair of joyous, mating herons (krauncha - this term is usually translated as heron or curlew) mating. Suddenly, an arrow fired by a hunter struck and killed one of them.

Hearing the sorrow of the bird’s mate, Valmiki was overwhelmed with profound sorrow and grief. In his anguish, he cursed the hunter in a metered, rhythmic verse (as you do: I always like to curse my enemies in iambic pentameter).

The Sanskrit term for this sudden poetic realization is captured in the phrase:
Sokah Slokatwam Aagatah (from grief, poetry is born). Lord Brahma, world-creator, then appeared to Valmiki and confirmed that his spontaneous grief-born lines were divinely inspired (again, this always happens to me just after I’ve penned the equivalent of a diss track).

Brahma then commanded Valmiki to use this newly discovered poetic meter to narrate the righteous life of Lord Rama. Thus, the tragedy of a pair of copulating herons led to the creation of the Ramayana, all 24,000 verses of it.

That’s a pretty fine origin story. Next time you read a poem, thank the dead herons of the Tamasa river. They may well be responsible.

Rest!

How hard we work at it
in rooms of assured silence,
sofas too taupe to be comforting.

We have completed centuries
of weight-bearing exercise
and now we must sleep

when the baby sleeps,
sink into age-defying dreams
known only by the dead.

A breeze bothers the sash frames.
Next door’s dachshund
whines like a firework

coming back to earth
and we want to draw a great sheet
over us, silken against the chill

but perhaps we have husbands.
With our eyes shut we are busy
helping fathers who can’t help

themselves, or tending dawn
with secretarial efficiency.
Miles away, even our lovers lie

beneath exquisite coving,
high ceilings complacent
with light. We should imagine

our own lives - cool whitewashed
corridors full of closed doors,
how we might test them

one by one and firmly,
leaning our good weight
as a woman might

lean from a fifth-floor window
cursive, intending at first
only to take the air.

Helen Mort

In Vernon Watkins’ poem ‘The Heron’, an implacable stillness is admired:

The cloud-backed heron will not move:
He stares into the stream.
He stands unfaltering while the gulls
And oyster-catchers scream….

We are supposed to infer that the heron shares something with the poet: trying to fix his or her attention on the surface of the water, guessing what is below.

The heron is alert for things others might miss. ‘Watching a stone in water, / A fish's hidden light.’ Oh yes - that’s not just any old stone, Vernon!

If the poet is a great bird waiting for the moment to strike, there’s an implied hierarchy. Perhaps the gulls are novelists, out enjoying their stolen chips. Poets aren’t like the rest of those noisy creatures!

Calamity about him cries,
But he has fixed his golden eyes
On water's crooked tablet,
On light's reflected word.

Is heron reader or writer, then? Does heron need to be one in order to be the other? In ‘Our Heron’ by William Olson, the heron - ‘baiting saint of the shallows’ - is text rather than writer: ‘a heron is a ‘how to’ book on twilight. Open anywhere.’

Don’t take that too literally. There’d be a lot of mess.

*

Herons are often defined by their motionless poise. But if a heron looks a bit TOO still, you might need to worry.

I was walking through Islington last week in the strange hush that followed the Arsenal parade. Nebbing into other people’s gardens, I was surprised to encounter this beaky individual in a high hedge.

Fake plastic heron! Or some other material? I considered scrambling up through the foliage to find out. I’d probably have done that in Sheffield. Was it ornamental or practical?

In suburban gardens around the world, ‘decoy’ herons are used to deter the real birds from swooping down and taking fish from ponds. I remember my uncle in his village on the Lancashire / Cumbria border having violent thoughts about his neighbour’s unsightly metal herons. “They’d make fine weapons if you wanted to do someone in,” he mused, only half-academically.

There’s little evidence that these fake herons work, as herons are territorial and will sometimes ignore, land near or even attack decoys. As with the thorny topic of neighbourhood cats and flowerbeds, you can find whole internet forums devoted to heron deterrent strategies, suggestions escalating to the macabre. I lost an hour on fishkeeping.co.uk scrolling through a thread on ‘the dreaded heron.’ A user called Otter piped up:

“An outdoor dog is one of the best deterrents. I've never heard of anyone loosing [sic] fish while a dog was on the job, though I suppose it's possible if the heron were bold and the dog were either lazy or fast asleep. And I suppose it's possible a dog might learn to fish, but I've never heard of that either.”

Taken one step further, I love the idea that the heron might teach the dog fishing skills. Otter continued:

“I think a pet fencer would be more likely to work. Herons are cautious birds, and should give up on the pond entirely after a good jolt. I seriously doubt they'd persist through enough zaps to figure the thing out. But if you forget to turn it off when you work around the pond, you'll probably wish you'd used fishline instead.”

He added:

“Shooting the bird with an air-soft gun (plastic BB's) is non-lethal and is said to scare them off for good, but this may be illegal where the law forbids harassment of herons, and you'll need some other defense when you're not watching.”

Harassment of herons! What emerged from Otter’s commentary is the notion that herons are both very smart and very persistent. Fair play to them, I say. They’ve earned their koi supper.

*

I went back the next day just to check the fake heron was still there. It was: rain-soaked, at a jaunty angle. But there was something sombre about it too. I felt pathetically sad that it would never know the ascension of Mary Oliver’s heron rising from a dark, summer pond on smoke-coloured wings: ‘see how the clasp of nothing / takes her on’.

Because I’ve rediscovered my love of boxing recently (Thursday nights are all about sparring, coming home with blood on my gloves and wondering who it belongs to), the decoy heron put me in mind of the ‘feint’, the trick move, the attempt to outwit an adversary.

In boxing, a feint is basically a fake attack that looks real but isn't meant to land. You might fling your lead hand forward about halfway and twitch your front shoulder to make it seem as if you’re about to jab. This draws your opponent’s hands up so you can land a real shot. Or that’s the theory anyway. But my coach warns against them: the problem with feints, he reckons, is that most people get into patterns with them. A skilled fighter will learn to read your feints and respond, the way a heron can pick out a decoy.

We have to be careful with this in writing too, I’d argue, particularly in poetry. If - as Vernon Watkins implies - the poet shares a mode-of-attention with the heron, we need to EARN that noble comparison.

Clara Adler recently posted a wincingly-precise takedown of trends in Substack writing:

“Sentences that begin with “I’ve been thinking a lot about…” and end, several hundred words later, having thought very little… The ideas are recycled at industrial scale: the same epiphanies about burnout, authenticity, wellness, and “doing the work”….Anecdotes mistake themselves for evidence. Lists replace thinking. And the tacit contract between writer and reader, that the writer has wrestled with something, risked something, discovered something worth the reader’s irreplaceable time, is broken on arrival, cheerfully, and often daily.”

Reading poetry is an over-signifying enterprise because of the relationship a poem has to silence, to the space around the words. We assume that every detail in the piece is there for a reason. As poets, we must be careful not to exploit that readerly tendency.

We’ve all been there - it is tempting sometimes to list items portentously but randomly, or rely on the reader interpreting something as metaphor, crucial to the thematic domain of the poem when, in fact, it might not be. If I’m helping someone think about how to redraft a piece of work, I’m unlikely to be very satisfied with ‘I just liked it’ as an explanation for a detail’s inclusion. But you can still write an ok-sounding poem full of these moments of false epiphany, because the reader is hungry to infer meaning, to assume intention. Hell, you can even write a poem that sounds pretty good!

Do it too often though, and the ‘feint’ becomes predictable. An intelligent reader learns there’s nothing of gravity behind it.

Luckily, there are many ways to resist the lure of false epiphany. Not trusting first ideas automatically (is the poem really just ‘about’ that or is there another connection that hasn’t arrived yet?), not abandoning the thought too early, digging underneath anecdote, allowing yourself to be surprised, letting form shape content…. it all takes time.

Put differently - you’re a heron. Don’t strike too quickly. You might come back without fish. You might become a heron-outline on a hedge in Islington.

Take Linda Hogan’s poem ‘The Heron’. It begins with the usual heron observations (bird in pond, wading, one leg lifted etc etc), but Hogan allows herself to be ambushed by a stranger thought.

It is a mystery seen
but never touched
until this morning
when I lift it from its side
where it lays breathing.
I know the beak that could attack,
that unwavering golden eye
seeing me, my own saying I am harmless,
but if I had that eye, nothing would be safe.

Then, just when we think we know where we are in the seesaw of vulnerability, the poem takes another turn in the last stanza:

You could kill me or help me.
I know you and I have no choice
but to give myself up
and in whatever supremacy of this moment,
hold your human hand
with my bent claws.

Marriane Moore famously urged poets to create imaginary gardens with real toads in them. I’d urge you to build imaginary ponds, fill them with real herons, take your chances.

Caroline Stancer has a Creative Writing MA from Nottingham Trent University and has twice been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, longlisted and shortlisted for the Primers competition and commended in the Verve Poetry Competition. She is widely published inmagazines and anthologies, including The VERVE Anthology of Protest, iamb, Litter and Anthropocene. She is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-runs Dandelions Poetry. Her pamphlet Full Body Reclaim is with Five Leaves Publications.

As ever, I’ll present Caroline’s poem and then offer some brief reflections and tangents from my reading of it.

Your body

It is important that you place your body here and here. This is so that you can work. This is so that you can live. This is so that you can be paid in full. I will touch your body here to see if it hurts. Does it hurt? Of course your body is not your body, but these expressions keep things simple. We have, after all, won Plain English awards.

Your body has been agreed, it is certain to the point of erasure. Do you agree? Please sign here. Please tick the box to which your body corresponds. If there is no such box, tick other.

You have been filed under other.

We have decided to make a political point with your body. We have decided to enact revenge upon your body. We have decided we have decided we have decided.

We are sorry that you have been scraped clean and left in the sun like a crab shell. Sadly this is something that cannot be prevented. We regret to say that your body is wide open, it cannot be hidden. We regret to say that your body is over-exposed. Over and over and over. We regret to say many souls are sliced from their bodies. It is not a medical issue. It is not an issue. It is not.

Please note, you should not pass freely without awareness of how you are seen. You must be properly presented. You should not rise up, wallowing in the fleshy things your body does. You should not enjoy imagining you are a horse in a field while you are pissing. That clean jet of urine. You should not love your body like a warrior comrade. You should not love.

Your reality will not be recognised. Your body will be lonely. Does it matter if animals are lonely? Do not write your answer in this box. It is for office use only.

*

Ever since I watched the French film ‘Heartbeat Detector’, I’ve been obsessed with the language of bureaucracy as a form of violence in itself. ‘Heartbeat Detector’ follows the unravelling mental health of a psychologist charged with working in the gleaming headquarters of a French subsidiary of a German petrochemical company. Writing about the film for The Guardian, Philip French summarised it thus:

“There is no longer any concern for human beings. They are creatures to be exploited and ruthlessly cast aside in the interest of profit and rationalisation. They are 'things', 'units'. Euphemisms and technical jargon protect people from the consequences of their actions.”

I think ‘Your body’ is interested in similar forms of violence. The title turns out to be ironic - the body in the poem is not really ‘yours’ at all, it is the property of the speaker, the ‘I’ and ‘we’ of the piece. From the very first line, the body is in a sense given over, placed somewhere specific, distanced from the ‘you’.

The speaker(s) here claim to be acting in the best interests of the person (‘this is so that you can live. This is so that you can be paid in full’), but there’s a brooding uneasiness from the start and the reference to winning Plain English Awards only makes this more acute.

What I like about this piece is that it occupies a register that we think we recognise, but it continues to surprise and wrong foot us. We never quite know what will come next.

The dark humour of ‘you have been filed under other’ makes me think of voice activated telephone services that incorrectly guess responses, systems that make you feel you’re being categorised against your will (even though ‘other’ should feel like a capacious concept).

(It also made me re-watch the Voice Activated Scottish Elevator sketch from Burnistoun which is never a bad thing. If you haven’t seen it, you must.)

I love the line ‘we have decided to make a political point with your body’. It rings like a hollow, sadistic laugh.

I also love the specificity of ‘you should not enjoy imagining you are a horse in a field while you are pissing.’ How we imagine what we are told not to. Do not think of an elephant.

Even the ending is a rejection, a refutation: the ‘you’ is asked a question that they are not allowed to answer. There is no way out. The forms are for office use only. Underneath this language, the reader might recognise the sadness and desperation of being trapped in a system which claims to offer support but where form and content are misaligned, the support is not supportive because of the access barriers.

I finished reading this poem and then went back to the start and kept going in a kind of loop. Do not pass GO. Do not collect £200. Etc.

You can buy Caroline’s pamphlet here.

In Lord William Percy’s ‘Three Studies in Bird Character’, he describes a rare communal aerial display by a group of herons:

‘An individual returning from the fishing grounds in the usual long descending glide on set wings suddenly alters course and begins circling low over the tree tops. As this first bird swings upward, loud yelps burst from it as if to summon the community to a grand parade. One by one the birds on the nests sweep up to join it until at length the whole company is soaring in spirals on motionless wings like vultures far up in the blue vault of heaven almost to the limit of human vision. As each circling bird turns and the sun strikes the dove-grey back and white neck, the company seems to sparkle with intermittent glints of light….. finally, with necks outstretched to their full extent, they ‘peel off’ by twos and threes in giddy, twisting, ‘falling leaf’ dives to the tree tops below.’

The blue vault of heaven. Yes. Almost to the limit of human vision – and perhaps beyond it. Because how would we know?

Percy calls the spectacle a ‘joy flight’, but acknowledges he’s flirting with anthropomorphism. Do herons feel joy? It is, he notes, the kind of thing that would arouse the scorn of a rational person, of ‘the seeker after truth desiring to see no more than there is to be seen, nor less than there is to see’.

I misread that at first. I read ‘desiring to see no more than there is to be seen OR less than there is to see.’

Desiring less than there is to see. I think some people move through the world like that, engaged in a purposeful narrowing. They have learned how to please themselves. I don’t blame them: it is more comfortable than seeing and feeling everything at once, the heart summoned from its nest by the wing-beats of another. Summoned into the air only to fall back again, to be tangled in branches.

It is painful enough to see what there is to see in this world, let alone want more. Safer by far to stay in the nest.

To the scientific observer, then, the ‘joy flight’ is a misnomer:

‘….it must be seen in terms of ‘conditioned reflexes’, upward air currents and aerodynamics. Upward air currents are no doubt essential for the performance no less than external conditions to many forms of human enjoyment, but does the fact that they are necessary concomitants detract from it as a manifestation of the sheer joy of living?’

On a boat in East Greenland years ago, I saw a clutch of gulls turn as one in flight and sparkle in the same way Percy describes the herons sparkling. There were two whales metres from the boat, rising and falling in parallel as the gulls undulated on their current of air. I was sitting next to my friend Bill. We were not wearing life jackets. The engine was so loud he couldn’t hear what I was saying to him, but what I was saying was “if I died in this moment, it would be ok”.

I’m glad I didn’t die then. Apart from anything else, I still had so many beautiful mistakes to make. So many joy-flights. So many ungainly falls.

In William Trevor’s novel ‘Reading Turgenev’, the protagonist Mary Louise falls in love with her cousin Robert, though she is married to another and Robert is extremely ill. They go for short walks together and Robert promises her a heron in the stream beyond the vegetable beds he tends. Mary Louise has never seen a heron before:

‘I’ll show you some time. And the heron’s really there too, you know. I didn’t make the heron up.’

‘I didn’t think you made the heron up. Why would you do that?’

‘To make you come back’

One day, they glimpse it:

‘Mary Louise could see, at the very place where they often watched the fish going by, the grey, angular form of the heron they had hoped for so long to catch a glimpse of….. it stuttered closer to the water on its ungainly legs, then turned, spread out its wings and flew away’.

Back at the house, they look the heron up in a reference book and he asks if he may kiss her. He tells her she is beautiful and she replies that she is not in the least. ‘Actually you are,’ says Robert. They have tea in the kitchen. She goes home.

I discovered William Trevor through someone who later frightened me. I felt the wing-stirrings of grave danger. Perhaps, then, it would be better if I had not. But no -I’ll always be grateful for the herons in Reading Turgenev. It is a spare, delicate novel about regret and entrapment, love and survival. The herons in it are a symbol of release, totem of could-have-been. If I were a wiser, more guarded person, I might not have encountered them.

I can never wholeheartedly dismiss anything that led me to this, the passage in the book where Robert dreams of Mary Louise. It happens after a day when they have talked about her wedding day, the pub she went to, the people she met.

‘That night, a few minutes before midnight, Robert dreamed that it was he who accompanied his cousin on her honeymoon to the seaside. The three men described to him were standing on a road, and on a wide, endless strand a flock of seagulls swooped down to the edge of the sea…. As soon as the birds touched the sand they were seen to be herons. He put his arm around his cousin’s waist and as they walked on the strand they talked about his father. In that moment Robert died’.

I wish you joy flights. I wish you unguardedness. I wish you more than there is to see.

This week I’m featuring a haunting poem by Michelle McGrane, a piece I find extremely moving. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Michelle and her delicate, tough, well-crafted poems on several courses, including Arvon. I’ve always admired her ability to give voice to the unsayable, her skill with imagery.

Michelle McGrane’s debut collection, The Suitable Girl (Modjaji Books, South Africa; Pindrop Press, England), was published in 2010. She lives in south-western Ontario, Canada.

I’ll share Michelle’s poem and then offer a few words in response.

Sunday Afternoon Tennis

You are six, barefoot on cool tile,
a ribbon slipping from your hair,
the hallway dim beyond you.

He waits somewhere behind the walls,
the young anaesthetist who gave you
a grown woman’s ring, a smile with no weight.

Outside, white shirts flash beyond the hedge,
rackets tapping like small applause,
the players’ voices drifting through the windows.

I know the turn you’re about to take,
the left-hand passage to the sewing room,
darker than the rest.

I step between you and that future,
offer my hand as if it’s nothing,
as if we are choosing sugar over thread.

Come, I say, not urgent, just enough,
and you look up, curious, unafraid,
your hand folding into mine.

We turn toward the kitchen’s light,
past the ticking clock. Let us bake
a cake, the counter with its flour

like first snow, eggs knocking softly
into a ceramic bowl,
four gold yolks side by side.

We measure, we stir, we wait for heat,
your smile lifts the room’s corners,
the oven steady as a heartbeat.

Outside, a serve cracks the afternoon,
a point won, a point lost. I keep you here
with simple things:

whipped cream, a song
that carries through the kitchen.
I think of all the years that follow,

how they might turn you elsewhere,
how a hand can change a map.
Of the door that never opened,

the room that stayed only a room,
the afternoon that kept its light.
Outside, someone serves again.

He lingers in another doorway,
finds no child crossing the hall toward him,
finds only light and the smell of vanilla.

*

Michael Donaghy’s long poem ‘Black Ice and Rain’ contains a phrase I always come back to: ‘the past falls open anywhere’. Such is the nature of memory, a book which lands with its pages facing you. But one of the things I love about poetry is that it can stage an intervention: intervene in past, present and future.

‘Sunday Afternoon Tennis’ intervenes, simply and powerfully, in contained tercets.

We have a ‘you’. We have a ‘he’. We have the delicate detail of the ribbon slipping from the girl’s hair - I can feel that texture. Then comes the subtly chilling line ‘gave you / a grown woman’s ring, a smile with no weight’.

At this point, we have to look outside.

I have never thought of the sound of tennis balls striking rackets as ‘small applause’ before, but I will from now on. The image is painfully and tenderly at odds with the growing sense of threat. The idea of tennis carrying on outside makes me think of Auden’s ‘Museé des Beaux Arts’, where everything turns away from the central event.

When the narrator addresses the younger ‘you’, it is simple and significant: ‘Come, I say, not urgent, just enough’. How heartbreaking, that stanza. Later: ‘I keep you here with simple things.’

The word ‘curious’ in stanza 6 hits particularly hard for me. Children should be able to be curious and unafraid. They should not have to fear strangers. The verb ‘folding’ for a hand finding a trustworthy hand is particularly deft too and it links nicely to the baking imagery that follows.

There is a fault line running through the centre of this house, this poem. The eggshells yield on impact. A serve ‘cracks the afternoon’. We consider the rupture, linear.

The last few stanzas dwell in the terrain of Derek Mahan’s ‘Leaves’, the ‘heaven of lost futures’:

the room that stayed only a room,
the afternoon that kept its light.

Those lines, for me, are indelible.

A poem doesn’t just describe or hope for a parallel reality, it creates one, makes another room for us to dwell in. ‘Sunday Afternoon Tennis’ is a quiet reclamation. Despite the sewing room being ‘darker than the rest’, there is, I note, a lot of light in this poem.

When my Dad was learning to walk again, he looked like a bird painted by John J. Audubon. Specifically Audubon’s Great Blue Heron, arranged in a posture which seems unlikely, almost grotesque – the neck angled down, the beak open, the wings slightly apart from the body but not quite unfurled, as if they’re being held down by some invisible forcefield.

‘The Birds of America’, Audubon’s best known work, features 435 striking, hand-coloured life-sized prints made from engraved copper, each representing a different species. Many of the pictures are dramatic, full of movement and some of them depict almost violent, impossible scenes. I find them beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. Propped up against a stand aid with his back curved, his neck tilted and his left immobile, my Dad was an illustrated heron, proud and ungainly. I watched him more attentively than I’d ever watched a bird or animal. I willed him upright, wished him a heron’s take off.

Eventually, the stand aid was replaced with a walking stick with three prongs on the bottom for support. A kind of trident.

Look on the one that stands near the margin of the pure stream:--see his reflection dipping as it were into the smooth water, the bottom of which it might reach had it not to contend with the numerous boughs of those magnificent trees.

Slowly, my Dad began to lift his left foot, shifting his weight with great effort.

The tread of the tall bird himself no one hears, so carefully does he place his foot on the moist ground, cautiously suspending it for awhile at each step of his progress.

It was as if he was struggling to raise it from quicksand, or deep mud. I held my breath. His physio was next to him, supporting, ready to catch.

But now, he moves; he has taken a silent step, and with great care he advances; slowly does he raise his head from his shoulders, and now, what a sudden start!

Dad moved. He took a step, left foot planted down on the carpet, then he brought his right to join it. We breathed out. He seemed taller, magnificent even. He paused, braced his core. He was a heron stepping out from the pages of a book that had confined it, surveying the kingdom of his pond.

*

The event that changed everything happened in late November, when the snow was just clearing from the streets outside my house in Sheffield. I had gone upstairs for a nap. Next to my ear, my mobile phone vibrated, over and over. Mum. I answered.

“It’s your Dad. We’re in the hospital. He’s had a major stroke.”

I don’t remember how I got to The Royal. With the UK still in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, nobody was allowed onto the A&E ward except patients. I only found this out when I arrived. I begged with staff outside the ward. They explained that my Mum was with him, he was safe. Her presence was only allowed because he could not speak intelligibly at the point when he was admitted. I went back into the lobby and sat on the chairs, numb. They were fixed into place, angled towards the hospital reception. I was told that I would be allowed to see him only if it looked as if he wasn’t going to pull through. I was not sure if he was going to pull through. I was not sure of very much at all.

Things got progressively worse. As the day dragged itself on and the consultant was able to do an MRI scan, the extent of the damage became clearer. It was, the specialists said, a life-altering stroke. My mum was told to prepare herself. I sank to my knees, useless, in the waiting room and I stayed there, a land creature in water.

*

Dad was moved to the stroke ward, Eastwood, and allowed one visitor for exactly one hour in the evening every day. Most nights at 7pm, I’d drive over from Sheffield, put on my mask, disinfect my hands five times and then make the long walk through the labyrinthine corridors to see him.

He was with three other men in a bay, each affected differently. Most were bed bound, but some were surprisingly mobile. One man in particular, Eddie, was physically capable but extremely confused. Sometimes he’d try to climb out of a window to see ‘what the crack was’ in the car park. Other times, he’d ask if anyone wanted to go fishing with him.

Eddie was an ex-miner and liked to talk about fights him and the lads had had with boys from Notts. His knuckles were blue with old tattoo ink. Amongst all this, my Dad was immobile, lying with his neck at a strange angle in a bed with cannulas and tubes for oxygen. He was being fed through a tube too because he could no longer swallow. He could not sit without being hosited by three members of staff. His left arm was leaden, his fingers curled underneath. Often when I went to sit with him, he was asleep, or drifting in and out of consciousness, lucid moments followed quickly by silence, or by the delusion he was about to go somewhere. Twice he asked me to look up the bus timetable so he could go out to Bakewell in the Peak District for a walk.

I kept watch over him as he slept. My face was damp behind my mask. Staff came and went, took measurements. A nurse got two of the men in the bay mixed up and tried to move one of them from a bed that was in fact his, chastising him sternly.

“John! Get back to your own bed.”

“This is mine. I’m here.”

“You can’t sleep in here.”

“I’m not John.”

His wristband confirmed that he was, indeed, not John.

Behind each bed was a scene from the Peak District. My Dad’s was a view from the far end of Bamford Edge, a place where I often climbed on gritstone, looking out towards Ladybower. Sometimes, when he was briefly awake, we did the crossword together, me reading the clues to him and him giving answers. Even half-asleep, he was faster than me. The disparity between his physical state and the alertness of his mind was remarkable.

Seeing him so inert, so trapped, so intelligent made me think about animals and their consciousness. What hides inside things we do not know how to listen to? What do the rocks on Bamford and Burbage and Stanage Edge keep to themselves? What do bird-movements say to those patient enough to know how to read them? We so often think ourselves into the centre of things. Then we are felled, decisively, made to sympathise abruptly with the condition of tree.

Sometimes Eddie would come over to borrow a pen. He leaned on the rail at the bottom of Dad’s bed with his mosaiced hands.

“When’s tha leaving?” he asked Dad.

The response was mumbled “Not for a while, maybe.”

“Well,” said Eddie “whenever tha’s leaving, let me know, I might as well leave with you.”

He sauntered back to his own side of the room, a regular at a bar going over to his table.

When I was not in the hospital, I couldn’t focus. Words merged together into a murky pool, a reedy place of fish and pond skaters and watchful herons. I found comfort in Audubon’s strange paintings. I planned extravagant tattoos of owls and falcons, inspired by his large-scale scenes. I’d always known about ‘The Birds of America’, but I’d never spent time with it, not in the way you might spend time with a river. Sitting by Dad’s hospital bed had acclimatized me. I was able to watch and wait. Eddie was right – I did want to go fishing after all. I wanted to be next to water, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house unless it was to visit Dad, so I cast my net into the great pool of Audubon instead.

John James Audubon was America’s most prominent wildlife artist. He was – and remains – a hugely controversial figure. His contributions to ornithology, science and art are undeniably vast, but he was a complex and troubling character who did abhorrent things. He was accused of—and most certainly committed—both academic fraud and plagiarism. Among the earliest of the plates printed for ‘The Birds of America’ was ‘Bird of Washington’ which Audubon claimed to have discovered, but it was published without specimen evidence and no specimen has ever been found. It seems the discovery was an elaborate lie Audubon concocted to convince members of the English nobility sympathetic to American affairs to promote his work. He kept the deception up for decades.

His fraud is of little import compared to his politics, however. Audubon enslaved Black people and wrote critically about their emancipation. And he even stole human remains and sent the skulls to a colleague, Samuel J. Morton, who used them to assert that white people were ‘superior’. Some researchers have credibly argued that Audubon was born to a woman of mixed race. Others insist that Audubon’s mother was white. Like many other things, Audubon himself lied about the circumstances of his birth – claiming to have been born in Louisiana, home of the Ohio blue heron he so admired. Whatever his origins, his beliefs and actions speak for themselves.

Perhaps I turned to Audubon’s birds – his herons especially – because I was so numb. I wanted them to stir something in me, whether it was revulsion, fear, or uncomfortable admiration for the image viewed out of the context of its creation. I felt deeply ambivalent as I looked. Audubon’s birds seem both realistic and fanciful at the same time. They are often pictured mid-motion, capturing prey or in pursuit, talons grasping. They made me feel ill when I spent too long looking at them. His Great White Heron has a pink fish in its beak and you can almost sense the wriggling struggle. His Louisiana heron is contorted back on itself, origami neat.

There is implicit violence in so many of his famous birds. Their eyes hold something uncomfortable. They seem to be in search of what the photographer Cartier-Bresson described as ‘the decisive moment’, the point at which something changes or is defined as what it truly is. It made me think of stroke. The moment of collapse. Its origin as a medical term goes back to the 1500s when it was shortened from “the Stroke of God’s Hand.” But its also thought to come from German streich, a strike. A blow. I thought of lightning striking, touching my Dad’s life and then forking, touching all of us. Audubon’s birds are often poised to strike. What is this thing of force and violence that comes for so many of us, dropping from the sky to claim us?

This week, I’m fortunate enough to be sharing an unpublished poem by Karan Chambers. Her work is visceral, bold and frequently witty, testing out new relationships with form (multiple choice questionnaires and diagnostic checklists - ACTUAL forms). It is full of impossible encounters: Courtney Love, the Furies at a high school reunion… I got to know Karan’s work through mentoring and I love the way she tells embodied female experience slant. I’ll share her biog and then the poem (‘metalsmith’) and a few reflections on it.

Karan Chambers (she/her) is a poet, tutor, and former English teacher. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at UEA and is currently completing an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. She has poems in Poetry London, The London Magazine, The Rialto, 14 Magazine, The Aftershock Review, and The Stinging Fly. Karan is the winner of the 2025 Katrina Collins Poetry Prize, she was Highly Commended in the 2023 Cheltenham Poetry Competition, and Runner-Up in the 2024 Classical Association Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet ‘woman | folk’ is available from Salò Press and her second pamphlet is forthcoming with Atomic Bohemian. She lives in Surrey with her husband and three lively children.

metalsmith

three times we drove through
that formless darkness, thick
with possibility. each time, headlights
flashing: beaten copper plating
a black-shaft road, & i, gripping
hard to the bellows, breathing

the baby down. then the rush
to bright fire & heaving forge, heat
& sweltering steelwork. the hiss
of water on molten limbs. my body: hammer
& metal, all at once. anvil-firm, muscles

a white-tempering crucible. & when,
at last, the babe was placed newly-cast
on my chest, i wondered if i was the maker
or the made.

‘Three times we drove…’ - the specificity is intriguing. So much more interesting as a way into a poem than just ‘we drove through…’. Then the metalwork imagery begins (the title has already suggested it to us) and makes things strange and stranger, from the way the light meets the road to the scene inside the car.

A central or guiding metaphor in a poem generally wins me over if it defamiliarises an object or experience but in a way we can gesture or extrapolate towards from where we stand as reader. Imagery that seems novel, but not novel for the sake of it. That’s how bellows and forge and anvil and all the other concepts from the world of the metalsmith work here. ‘My body; hammer / and metal, all at once’ - I can’t paraphrase why that clicks for the experience of giving birth, it just DOES.

I like the way this poem uses stanza breaks. It makes me think of driving to hospital when I was in labour with my son, the gaps between contractions - the expectancy. There are different qualities of pause in poems. These ones are tense line breaks and tense stanza breaks. I like the way each stanza gets shorter by one line each time, the way the gaps between contractions get shorter too as the birth nears.

And then there’s that opening-out at the end which stops the poem from clicking shut: the child seems ‘new cast’, but who has been made anew here? We are left with an implied, a question that never goes away in parenting - who crafts who? Where does the process of making stop?

You can read more work by Karan here.

Ways of looking at a heron 4: the begrudging avian take off

I’ve been revisiting Jarod K. Anderson’s idea that ‘the heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you give it meaning.’

Anderson’s quote is beguiling because it grants us creative power. It reflects the idea that herons contain multitudes, they can be what we wish for (all we wish for?), they appear to us at the moments when we need them.

But I can’t entirely discount my hunch that there is something intrinsic, something ‘pure heron’ that exists, persists beyond the stories we create. And for me, if there’s an essence of heron, it is probably something like the recalcitrant figure in Paul Farley’s poem ‘Heron’:

One of the most begrudging avian take-offs
is the heron’s ‘fucking hell, all right,
I’ll go to the garage for your flaming fags’
cranky departure, though once they’re up
their flight can be extravagant…

I love the image of the fiercely unwilling bird. Herons do seem to move like that, dragging themselves airborn. There is something wildly unlikely about them in flight, even as their wing beats above the water seem large and graceful.

Perhaps Anderson’s musings on herons are just a little bit too consistently sincere, too serious for me. He adores their magic symbolism. ‘Something In The Woods Loves You’ opens with a gorgeous myth of herons hunting by twilight, plucking luminescent powder from their feathers with their long beaks and sprinkling it across the water and drawing bluegill fish to the spectral starlight. I find that story enchanting. But when I think of the grey herons I grew up seeing in the north of England along the South Yorkshire canals and waterways, I’m drawn to Paul Farley’s complicated, ambivalent bird instead:

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Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal: Catastrophe / Mapping the Catastrophe

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal is a writer and literary translator, born in Palampur, India. She studied at St. Bede’s College, Shimla; Trinity College, Dublin; and Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, German, and Italian, and have appeared in Ambit, Bad Lilies, Banshee, Cyphers, Gutter, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Jukebox, Poetry London, Rattle, The Irish Times, and elsewhere.

Supriya is currently based in Manchester, where she is working towards a practice-based PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Place Writing. Her research, funded by AHRC’s regional consortium NWCDTP, explores reservoirs as engineered ecologies shaped by memories of displacement, control, and transformation. I’m one of her PhD supervisors and that’s how I was lucky enough to first encounter her poems.

I’m going to share some sections from Supriya’s unpublished creative-critical hybrid work and tell you a little about what I find intriguing in her writing. I won’t say TOO much, because I want to give you as readers space to have your own responses to poems. The main point is to let them unfold in this time-and-place.

These are two pieces exploring the notion of catastrophe. I’ll share them in turn, with a little commentary in between.

What would it mean to write something without naming it? Is this the ultimate show-not-tell? The opening lines propel me towards further questions. Can we unthink / unsee the word (any word, but especially this one) once we’ve read it? Even if the word has been titular? (Is a catastrophe always a title, a headline?).

There is a fascinating, unsettlingly loud absence at the heart of this piece - we must deal with an event and its repercussions ‘without access to the event itself’. It is humbling to engage with the process of doing so.

‘Atmosphere, not spectacle’ - in this, we cannot be voyeurs of catastrophe. We are forced to look beyond the distracting facts-of-the-matter and think instead about disaster as affect.

In the third section, I love how we kind of expect the phrase ‘not memory, but fiction’ and instead we encounter ‘friction’: a tension which might produce something new (even if that something new is discomfort). And I love the idea that this is where denial ‘settles and thrives’.

This poem is both profound and playful: we are asked to trust confusion. We move towards a place where form (the form of the un-named catastrophe? The form of denial?) replaces meaning.

Here’s the second iteration of the piece, or a writing / mapping which responds to the first:

I keep coming back to the way the map is depicted as a limited tool here. That wonderful phrase ‘the river is rendered as a single intention’. I’m thinking of Eavan Boland yet again, the limitations of cartography.

The crossing-through of the lines we’ve already encountered in ‘Catastrophe’ seems to offer a new way of writing catastrophe ‘without naming it’.

Supriya’s work on catastrophe makes me think about flooding and flood maps, of course, but it also brings to mind the phenomenon of ‘dark tourism’ and our collective tendency to be interested in the sites of disaster or tragedy, a field which another wonderful poet and Manchester Met researcher Jennie E. Owen is working on.

You can follow Supriya on Substack here.

Further biographical notes and upcoming work:

In 2021, Supriya was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship at the University of Kent, where she developed a series of poems tethered to the life and work of Norah Richards, the Irish theatre practitioner who called the erstwhile Punjab and the Dhauladhars her home.

She is the author of The Yak Dilemma (Makina Books, 2021). Upcoming works include a limited-edition pamphlet of plague poems called Bitter Almonds, that’s currently in production with Salvage Press, Dublin.

Ever wondered how best to cook a heron? No, me neither. But there ARE instructions out there, suggested ways of serving. In medieval times, the grey heron was a delicacy for the top table at a banquet. Only swan had a higher status.

In ‘Forms of Cury’, a cookbook from the 1400s, a recipe suggests:

‘Cranes and herons shall be armed with lardes of swyne and eaten with ginger.’

(Lardes of swyne are basically fatty bacon lardons).

In ‘The Book of Carving’ from 1513 by Wynkyn de Worde, the author suggests hearty seasoning:

‘Dysmembre that heron….rayse his legges and his wings as a crane and sauce him with vyngre, mustard, poudre of ginger, and salt.’

‘The Accomplisht Cook’ by Robert May (1660) reports that herons were sometimes stolen from nests and kept in sheds where they would be fed livers ‘and the entrails of beasts and such like cut in great gobbits.’ Eventually, they would be boned and filled with a minced meat and suet stuffing, seasoned with spice. They were sometimes served with oysters.

There is little evidence, however, that herons were enjoyable to eat. Clarissa Dickson-Wright noted ‘it was very fishy…rather stringy and reminiscent of moorhen.’

By 1914, Mary Byron saw fit to include a ‘recipe for heron pudding’ in her British Home Cookery Book where she speculated on the cause of this unpleasant taste:

‘Before cooking it must be ascertained that no bones of the heron are broken. These bones are filled with fishy fluid which, if allowed to come into contact with the flesh, make the whole bird taste of fish.’

The fluid, she noted, should not be wasted but should be extracted and kept in a medicine cabinet for it was deemed excellent for applying to cuts.

Heron stopped being eaten when it ceased to be legal game.

*

What is it about herons and the desire to consume?

‘The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you give it meaning.’ So says Jarod K. Anderson in Something In The Woods Loves You, an account of how nature gave him a radical shift in perspective when he was suffering from depression. Herons bring meaning or the possibility of constructing it in a world which can often seem baffling, where ‘we buy our harmonies pre-sung in tidy plastic packages.’

To Anderson, the American blue heron moves like ‘a poem of ancient slowness’ and, just like a poem, its meaning is often disputed. Depending on who you ask and when, herons and their appearance might signify grace, gluttony, fear or patience. In Japan, shoguns once declared herons sacred. We all agree they mean something.

In his memoir, Anderson characterises his own depression as a birdless state: ‘during those years, I was not concerned with herons.’ Does any sentence capture that flattening of life better?

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Strokestown, Ireland. The rain here has the character of my grandfather, my dad’s dad: it asserts itself in these little, guttural outbursts. Infrequent, intense. When it starts, I hide in a bar at the back of the grocery shop. When it ends, I walk through sunlit Strokestown park, past the gnarly entangled trees, the smaller ones collapsing into marshy ground. Strokestown Poetry Festival has one of the finest settings imaginable.

There are a handful of poems I keep returning to in my ‘teaching’. They embody something I feel deeply, can’t paraphrase. Paul Muldoon’s ‘Wind and Tree’, with its delightful and problematic dualities, is one:

In the way that the most of the wind
Happens where there are trees,

Most of the world is centred
About ourselves….

Eavan Boland’s poem ‘That The Science of Cartography is Limited’ is another. It stands for what I feel poetry of place can do at its best. The poem begins with a palpable absence:

That the Science of Cartography is Limited

-and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.

Poetry as evocation of what the map doesn’t illustrate, doesn’t assert. Map as partial truth, or map as colonial history.

The narrator in Boland’s poem stares at the ground:

I looked down at the ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads as this to build.

Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

Ended / and ends still. How much weight those two words carry.

Ends still.

From 1845 to 1847 a great famine devastated Ireland, particularly the west and south. You may already know this. You may know it all too well. Over 2 million people – almost a quarter of the entire population – either died or emigrated in ‘An Gorta Mór’ - the Great Hunger. It has become regarded as the single greatest social disaster in 19th century Europe. And it is barely taught in schools in the UK.

Strokestown is the start of the National Famine Way, a 165km heritage trail that connects with Dublin. The route, dotted with bronze shoe trail markers, was launched six years ago to commemorate Strokestown people who made this same journey on foot in 1847 after being forced out by their Anglo-Irish landlord, Denis Mahon. Unable to pay rent, starving, they struck a deal in exchange for free passage to Canada – “assisted” emigration. Many died on the walk, or in Liverpool waiting for the boats, or on board the ‘coffin ships’, or in quarantine at their destination. Most of those who did survive would lose contact with their families for generations to come.

The famine was caused by a perfect storm: potato blight throughout Europe had a disproportionate effect in Ireland because of the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. In the background there was also the effect of massive population growth in the years before.

Initial government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new administration in London, their decision influenced by a poisonous assumption on the part of British government: that the famine was some kind of divine judgement on the Irish.

A plaintive letter from the starving people of County Roscommon, The Cloonahee petition, is striking in its eloquence and restraint, given the conditions it describes:

“Our families are really and truly suffering in our presence and we cannot much longer withstand their cries for food. We have no food for them, our potatoes are rotten and we have no grain”.

- Cloonahee Petition, 22 August 1846

It was the discovery of the Cloonahee Petition by local businessman James Callery after purchasing Strokestown Park House that inspired him to create the National Famine Museum. The estate at Strokestown played a key role throughout the famine. Major Denis Mahon, owner and manager, was the first landlord to be assassinated during this desperate time. The records Mahon kept of the period are now a resource of international importance and they’re displayed here to powerful effect.

Walking round the museum, everything is given space: each statement on the walls has room around it. It makes me think about the shape of poetry - silence doing half the work. There is a silence in which the harsh contrasts of the famine can be properly observed: the museum juxtaposes the lives of landowners (often dividing their time between London and Ireland) with the fate of everyone else. A recipe for lobster soup – “the best soop I ever saw” – is carefully transcribed by one of the landlord’s family. Facing it is the landlord’s instruction to provide meat on Christmas Day to “as many as are living” from a list of tenants.

I go running in the early morning. I pass the graveyard and I think of those who could not be buried there. I jog down a green lane, avoiding the sodden parts and the puddles. Cows peer out from sheds or rest their heads on walls, chewing languidly, watching me pass. They are not really watching. They are not interested. I run to where the track peters out. An abandoned scooter, a skeleton. Long, long grass. There the route stops.

Ends / ends still.

Thank you to the wonderful committee at Strokestown International Poetry Festival for honouring me with a voice at this year’s festival and thank you to everyone who came to my workshop on Saturday.