Yet another poem from a not-poet. I wrote the first draft of this at a Rosy Carrick workshop at the Brewery Arts Centre a couple of months ago. Rosy challenged us to attach a bad memory to a broken object, and then to fix the object. My bad memory was a lucid nightmare I had as a kid: paralysed with fear in early-morning light while fog boiled from an open cupboard door. When I found my voice I screamed the house down. That was the bad memory; I patched it with the help of my wife, walking a fell in the fog to rebuild a fallen cairn. The poem evolved from there, as these things do, and now it isn’t much about that childhood fright at all… which I suspect was the point of the workshop.
I kept working on that first draft in my notebook, then spoke it into being over several more sessions. I’ve written before about the value of reading work aloud; that’s never more true than with poetry. I know my poems have rough edges. I like rhymes to land sometimes, but I really really don’t like rigorous structure… I want the sounds to scan more than the words, and that can sometimes feel stilted on the page. Printed words are pinned in place but sounds – oh, the sounds – they’re alive and inherently unique to my voice, my breath, my cadence, my emphasis.
We recently watched an absolutely stunning documentary called Come See Me In The Good Light, about the American performance poet Andrea Gibson and their battle with ovarian cancer. The film is sensational. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. For the purpose of this post, I was amazed to see Gibson sing their poems as part of the writing process – not singing words like the lyrics of songs, to a melody – but vocalising the metre of the sounds – and then finding the words that fit that metre. I think this is why their work has such astonishing momentum, that barrelling tumult of sound that sweeps the listener along. I don’t pretend to anything as crucial as Gibson’s work, but that search for flow, for motion – that feels important to me.
Anyway. My poem is called Ritual. It was recently awarded runner-up in the Verey Books Poetry Prize 2026, a thing which left me equal parts humbled and flabbergasted. It’s both lovely and strange that my poems-not-poems appear to be landing right side up.
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