Pinks #26: Little Interruptions

A week of poems from books I'm enjoying

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Read each one separately — one to-day, another to-morrow — and then perhaps one or more of them may sink [in] and bear fruit

Turgenev, Poems in Prose (1878)

A simple Pinks this week: seven poems from books on my recent poetry shelf. As a critic with a never-ending To Read pile, I envy the John-Peel-style DJ who can make a show from listening to new music and playing stand-out tracks (my current favourite is Gideon Coe on BBC 6Music, 9-11, Thursday nights: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026kln). So I decided to find a week’s worth of short poems from my recent reading that I felt would speak for themselves. This was harder than it sounds: my critic’s instinct was to look for talking points, but I tried to suppress this and listen instead… Here’s my playlist. If you want to read more, I’ve linked to the publisher page for each. Tune in next week for sonnets by The Fall.

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Isabel Galleymore, Baby Schema (Carcanet)

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Timothy Thornton, Shapeshifting (Run Amok Press)

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Mimi Khalvati, Collected Poems (Carcanet)

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Graeme Richardson, Last of the Coalmine Choirboys (New Walk Editions)

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Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, translated by Alissa Valles (Penguin)

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Billy Mills, a book of sounds (Shearsman)

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Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning and Other Poems (Faber) [somehow I never noticed this Smith poem before until I read it in this new selection…]

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That’s the seven, all from books published in 2024. And now here’s a bonus track, from Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s forthcoming debut, Strange Beach, which is out on 30th January. It marks the launch of the Fitzcarraldo Editions poetry list, which is an exciting development in UK poetry publishing — a new record label, pop pickers!

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