There is a wintry feel to our March shortlist. We feels its chill but are not frozen by it. And we look up!
Which poem will you choose as your Pick of the Month?
- Alicia Byrne Keane, ‘Bureaucracies of Water’: the paradox of simultaneous presence and absence represented by the ghost apple.
- Gareth Culshaw, ‘THE APPRENTICE OF GROUNDHOG DAY’: a poem that seems to behave like pliable mixed mortar, a metaphor for the creative process.
- Jan Fitzgerald. ‘Old Age’: celebrates being alive as a gift given each new day.
- Eugene O’Hare, ‘In Memory of Anne’: the imagination’s journey through the other worlds of death, dreams and ‘the unearthly dark.’
- Tamara Salih, ‘Buried’: descriptions of warmth shine through against the cold, a wonderfully emotive poem.
- Daniel Sluman, ‘Ceilings’: a meditation on these as the skies that press us in place with their water stains, cracks and tenuous threads.
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and Zakia 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 Thursday 16 April.
Our ‘prize’ is £25 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 MARCH 2026 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Bureaucracies of Water
I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
managing thus far, attending appointments,
the fissures in their teeth holding sugar
or leaf-fibre. A ghost apple
is something the name of which I keep
forgetting so I call them glass apples instead,
which is more what they look like.
During a cold snap, fruit breaks
under its own skin; rain settles solid
as information. It takes more for an apple
to freeze, compared to water.
Lower temperature, an increase of nights.
So the flesh falls away & the ice remains,
pitted as an Autumn made of breath
or so it seems, the stalk and branch
leading to cloud-crater, iridescent air.
When we went to the sandspit island
to see our city mirrored, lights wavering
by the bulk of the docks, we each spoke
only briefly from the wind-whip of our bikes
of the lake that was forming there
among dun reeds, tenuous dunes.
This place floodplain & changing shape
from the beginning. A puddle joins another
to become rippled azure, the land
a surprised letter with absence in its middle:
p peninsula, b breakers, d disappearance.
Dr. Alicia Byrne Keane‘s poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry and Poetry Ireland Review, among other journals. Alicia’s second collection is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in autumn 2026.
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THE APPRENTICE OF GROUNDHOG DAY
I tried to work from a van. Sitting in the passenger
seat listening to a guy whistle. His frown, a cloud
he lost when his mother died. Each wrinkle
he laid as mortar on a wall. More bricks, more weight.
I’d watch from somewhere my eyes didn’t see.
I knew my life was years ahead from now.
All this was an experience. A jail-term. Clapped
by a system like using an umbrella in the sunlight.
I thought I heard a bird singing, but it was his whistle.
And a radio that took me back to the kitchen at home.
I tilted the shovel. Made more mortar. His whole life
sat in a pint of moonlight. Sand and cement were names
of exes. The spirit level balanced his newspaper.
He’d headline his own thoughts at dinnertime.
Munching on a pasty like a horse with a carrot.
I never knew his future. Just his past as I wheeled
it in a wheelbarrow.
Gareth Culshaw is an Autistic poet from N.Wales. He has four poetry collections. His latest, Some Things That Have Happened So Far, Backlash Press, 2023.
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Old Age
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
or watch the sky
raise its brass trumpet
in a call to gratitude.
What is not to love about
the air on your skin,
each breath a new miracle
or the sound
of a small bird’s song,
the gift a tree offers
welcoming you back to the world.
Jan FitzGerald is a NZ poet with publication overseas including Atlanta Review, Loch Raven Review, Voegelin View, The London Magazine, The High Window, Allegro, Acumen, Orbis and Gutter. Shortlisted twice in the Bridport Poetry Prize, she has five poetry books published.
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In Memory of Anne
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
and its stars – the small unfindable
glass in a vast unwalkable carpet.
Night is where more things hide
than dare to appear. Except behind
closed eyes, here new worlds realise;
less-ordered, sculpted from twisted
timelines, reared as if out of a sleeping sea;
waves to keep the sleeper from wakeful thought.
So when the priest said she died
at home in her sleep, I replied Too vague
demanding to know during which
dream she was caught. Was she mid-chase –
half-dressed in a colour she’d never wear?
Already talking to the dead?
Or something more of our world, perhaps –
like changing the bed, reversing the car,
washing the step some Summer afternoon,
peeling a label from a beetroot jar –
her cupboards were still full; spices, pins,
seeds for pots. All those flowers.
Eugene O’Hare recently won runner-up for the 52nd Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the poetry prize at Belfast Book Festival. His poems appear, or forthcoming, in The Frogmore Papers, Stand, Poetry Ireland Review, Acumen and others.
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Buried
That winter the snow kept rising,
a slow white wall climbing the windows,
each morning untouched,
the whole world muffled under it.
A hush so complete it felt like a hand
pressed gently over the mouth.
I pulled on my snow pants, my jacket.
No one home, I went outside.
Back then we wore our house keys
on shoelaces around our necks—
mine a fluorescent yellow
because I lost things.
I thought I was building an igloo,
though it was only a mound of snow
with a tunnel carved into its center.
Still, I imagined fur, seal oil,
families folded into warmth,
a fire licking the dark.
Inside my tunnel the snow leaned in,
heavy, watching through my mittens.
Sweat cooled against my wrists,
a thin film turning to ice.
For a moment I thought of resting—
the work had been hard,
the quiet so complete—
the ceiling gave way.
I took a breath.
Under that sudden weight
I wasn’t sure
I could get myself out.
Tamara Salih is a physician and writer. Her poetry has appeared in MedMic and Poet in Verse Journal. Her work explores memory, inheritance, and the body. She lives on the west coast of Canada near the Salish Sea.
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Ceilings
just as the night sky shifts
beyond the minds
of the animals outside
the ceilings
we are pressed beneath change
in aspect & colour
each evening they drop
a little closer
in rooms that carry us
from one year
to the next
we float below water stains
& cracks
lit like reels of stars
my faith
in a better reality frayed
to a single thread
as I scan the cobwebbed beams
in silence
& wait for a sign
that refuses to drop
lidocaine-bright
or yellowed from bowers of smoke
some nights only darkness seems
to keep the roof up
& each evening
the quietness wraps
a little tighter
as we sink into the sheets
eyes dazed shut
our prayers like hands
crawling
over the drips of faux-plaster
how our shirts slip from one colour
to the next
& time is always in deficit
catching up or catching on
to something half-gone
Daniel Sluman is a 39-year-old poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, and he has published three poetry collections with Nine Arches Press. His most recent collection, single window was released in September 2021, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.