As the summer comes to a close, let us take a look once more at the fine work that we accepted in August and examine those that have made it into that month’s shortlist.
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- Andy Breckenridge ‘Abertawe’, deft and full of love. Really beautiful.
- Angela France ‘The Cloud’, the heightened feel of a sonnet with haunted imagery
- Philip Gross ‘The Song of the Scans’, an elegant and intelligent poem, both vast and intimate
- Alfie Nawaid ‘COWBOYS NEVER DIE’, an interesting world, a sort of lovely magic realism
- Ansuya Patel ‘Venerate Her Husband’s Image As A God’, a poem drawn along by its repetitions that make you think of all women who are pawns in a patriarchal society
- Stuart Rawlinson ‘Bust of a Young Man (from the Burrell Collection)’, deeply empathetic and kind, with an unexpectedly sensuous underbelly
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and Sofía or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
Please VOTE HERE. Voting will close at 6pm on Saturday 21 September.
Our ‘prize’ is £20 towards the charity of your choice or an emailed National Book Token giftcard*.
*Book tokens can only be used within the UK. Sadly, we are unable to find suitable cost-effective alternatives outside the UK.
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The AUGUST 2024 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Abertawe
After Richard Siken
For CHD
Tell me about the time I mansplained
that Swansea is the English for Abertawe
and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe.
And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach
Lundy Island’s spectral mass floated
on the blue of the Bristol Channel.
And to the south, a different river Taw
without the ‘e’, runs up the map towards us
to the sandy estuary where it joins the sea.
Along their routes both rivers gain salt and tide.
A world beyond anglers, herons, otters.
Or that fold along the English Channel
where Land’s End mirrors Finisterre
and St Michael’s Mount reflects Mont St Michel.
Tell me about that time we opened the atlas
of our held hands and found two identical scars.
Andy Breckenridge writes about cultural identity, memory and a sense of place. His debut pamphlet was published in 2022, The Illustrated Liquid Air Andy Breckenridge & Chris Riddell | DREICH GROUP and his collection, The Fish Inside, in 2023. https://flight-of-the-
Twitter handle: @drbafc
Instagram: breckenridgeandy
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The Cloud
Driving into low cloud everything fades
to a blur, all colour and definition leached
so that trees and buildings become vague shapes.
The glimpse of a house light is a spark, a blink
like the flicker of the broadband router
and it seems to me that we could be travelling
through the unmarked lanes of the internet.
Undefined and undetailed people loom
in and out of focus; dead or alive, we leave
shadows of ourselves where we have been.
Footsteps remain as when a cat walks
across wet concrete, to blend and blur
over time but fixed and always there.
Our voices, silhouettes, thoughts right or wrong,
still there to be chanced on through the fog.
Angela France’s fifth collection Terminarchy came out in 2021 with Nine Arches Press. Angela teaches creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire and in community settings. She leads the longest running reading series in Cheltenham, ‘Buzzwords’.
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The Song of the Scans
This is the song of the cells’
soft throb, the quivering coherences,
their shuffling the profit and loss
of life, to have and to hold.
This is the trace on the scan,
clouds, miasma of tissue, the ghostings
of bone. And this is knowing what
I know: that these shadows are you.
And this is the song of the fidgeting
molecule, shunting the code
that says Be, says Be This, says Be
More, says Be other to else.
And this is my own – the whisper
of weakness in the bone mass, flecks
of lack speckling out as if
to disperse me, to drift me away.
And this is the song within songs,
of the orbiting near-to-nothings
of the atom, mere points of purpose
in their whirl through unthinkable
distance, each its own universe
in which, between, within (love,
listen with me, now;
it’s where we live)
is silence. And the silence sings.
Philip Gross’ Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, which he previously won in 2009. www.philipgross.co.uk ‘The Shores of Vaikus’, a creative re-inhabiting of Estonia, his refugee father’s birthplace, comes from Bloodaxe in November: www.bloodaxebooks.com
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COWBOYS NEVER DIE
a cowboy is that split second of doubt between victim
and victor, quick whipcrack out the corner of the mouth,
then dissolving into being. a good cowboy never
introduces herself, wants you to confuse her
for some other tasselled horseback hopeful
crawling through the sand, wants to draw out the thrill like a
tumbleweed from her cocked hip before she wrenches the air open
with the curl of a finger and turn of a heel.
a cowboy is like love. not good, not bad, not guaranteed
to end in a shoot-em-up but always passing through.
you get more familiar with the clothes on their
back than the lines around their eyes.
cowboys never falter because any bandit worth their holster
knows that death is as good as the next town over, half
a day’s ride away on a sturdy horse. they traipse their tradition:
arrive, abandon, all eyes on the exit signs.
cowboys never stop moving so death can’t catch them,
can’t tap them on the shoulder to bring them in with a wry
smile and a rusty handgun. instead, they might be
rearing up on horseback somewhere on the 24-carat dawn,
grins wide as a cloudless sky, ‘cause the future is a desert and
the past is a gritty wind passing over the road and a cowboy
is a promise made between the two, the barest brush of hands.
cowboys never die, they just keep galloping
into the fading light. their eyes become the glint
of stars, their outstretched arms the horizon,
their windswept smiles the crescent moon.
cowboys never die, you just blink-and-miss them,
see a shadow out of the corner of your vision,
watch it stutter into nothing, heartbeat broken
by a stray bullet.
once i knew a woman who loped through town
like a slow summer, her tongue spur-stun sharp,
eyes like pennies in empty cups. her hands
were rough and warm like sun-kissed stone,
don’t ask me how i know. some things just catch your
attention in the dimness of a dust-blush bar, the front door
swinging behind the last patron like a loose buckle.
you see, all cowboys walk that daggers’ edge between life
and sleep, boots nimble and worn down by how far
they’ve come and hanging on for how far
they’ll go.
you see, all cowboys need to keep their heads up,
keep following the dying day, their muscles like animals,
barely wrangled,
knowing it’s for the better that nothing can hold them.
one day, you’ll find a cowboy’s shadow writhing in the sand
but by then, hopefully you’ll have come to understand
that some folk live to keep the unknown fed,
so you’ll just tilt your head. tip your hat. turn your back
on that horizon
and let it pass.
Alfie Nawaid (they/he) is a queer, South-Asian poet who loves the mundane and fantastical in equal measure and uses the interplay between them to explore themes of identity and otherness. When not writing, Alfie is usually making cursed memes.
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Venerate Her Husband’s Image As A God
Think what it must have been like for her
fasting from sunrise to moonrise, to wake up
three hours before dawn, bathe, apply sindoor
on the parting of her hair line, decorate her hands
with henna, dress in a crimson sari to remind
her husband of the girl he once married.
Think what it must have been like for her to
silence her thoughts and pray to Lord Shiva,
Lord Ganesh and Lord Kartikeya. Starve
until a glimpse of the moon appears, venerate
her husband’s image as a god before breaking
the fast with water. Think what it must have
been like for her daughters, lost, lonely, trapped
by tradition to secure a suitable marriage,
once married to keep fasting as if her life would
be incomplete when she danced like the wind,
took the open road on her brother’s Suzuki
waved at the young girls in waiting.
Ansuya Patel’s work has appeared in Rattle, Renard, Artemesia, Gypsophila, Last Stanza, Cerasus and highly commended by Erbacce. Her collection `Wolves at the Door’ will be published in 2025 with Indigo Dreams Publishing. Instagram @ansuya_a_
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Bust of a Young Man (from the Burrell Collection)
Bronze. Roman copy, made in the Eastern Mediterranean. 100 BC – AD 100
I’m nineteen, I’m ancient.
I am so hungover
one of my eyes has fallen out…
He’d come in every Saturday morning,
looking rough as fuck. Chipped skin
on what was left of him:
not much more than his face,
shoulders, and nipples.
He had a permanent expression of discomfort
slapped across his remains,
and his bronze looked rotten
in the cafe’s lights.
I used to wonder about him, and try to picture
what a party in Tartarus might look like.
I would dream about how it might feel,
to ruin metal like his every weekend,
instead of pouring out coffee for the brunch rush.
His friends always had to cut up his breakfast.
They would push the eggs past his lips,
stiff since antiquity.
But he was always so polite.
Come midday he’d be off,
no doubt for a sitting, or a photoshoot,
or simply posing behind glass for the afternoon.
Around then the constant coffee refills
would heat up my arm,
making all my oils run.
By the time he was waving goodbye
my colours would be dripping over the counter,
showing the rough, loose sketches underneath.