This is a book about noticing. All poems are about noticing, of course, but Andrew McDonnell takes it to a whole new level. He really sees.
Whether it’s trained on the field mouse disturbed by a farmworker’s boot, the patio behind a bar, or the schoolmate ‘in his cardigans too big for him’, McDonnell’s forensic eye also sees what’s under the surface. In so doing, he has written a hugely insightful book with much to say about class, masculinity and family.
The title 55 Devotionals (Against Erasure) gives us an immediate steer about his take on these topics. The ‘devotional’ element manifests in the vein of joy, gratitude and wonder that runs through the work. One poem, for example, is a self-declared ‘love poem for a bicycle’. But the ‘Against Erasure’ in parenthesis is perhaps the real clue to the ambition of this book. It’s a manifesto against forgetting and being forgotten; a hymn to remembering and being remembered. In ‘Devotional for a Patio’ it’s in relation to the speaker’s late father – how he once built roads and ploughed fields. The poet proclaims:
All that is erased. All that is always erased.
He then acknowledges the responsibility we all bear for allowing things to disappear:
I was complicit in erasure.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, in parallel with this is a desire and need to record. Indeed, the words ‘record’ and ‘recorded’ occur no fewer than nine times in ‘Devotional for my grandmother’s hands’. This statement of intent is, in fact, clear from the off, with the opening poem, ‘Devotional for a writing manifesto’ ending:
Words that make us visible. Voices that resist. Write it.
The ‘us’ in that line is never exactly defined, but it feels like it’s referring to the working classes (a subject that comes up time and again), plus those who may feel uncomfortable with the traditions and expectations surrounding masculinity. A few poems actually share the title ‘Devotional for a problem of masculinity’ – poems in which McDonnell manages to be simultaneously critical, pitying and fond of men’s behaviour.
This is also a book about change and what’s forgotten in the wake of so-called ‘progress’. One example is how industrialisation changed the landscape – and people’s lives – forever after motorways were built in the 1950s. ‘Devotional for tarmac’ refers to an:
Old Albion hidden behind deep banks and hump-back bridges and ancient woodland glowing in the light of Happy Eaters.
But it isn’t just the landscape and the economy that’s changing. This volume of mainly prose poems charts the speaker’s progress from son to father – and these are the sections I found most moving. There’s a real tenderness and vulnerability, highlighted in the poet recounting a visit to Foxley Woods and thinking:
But I’m just a little boy.
Ditto the heartbreaking final poem (the title of which, ‘Somewhere to get to’, is the only one which deviates from the ‘Devotional for…’ convention) recalling his late father:
And there is a pub on a green
where we share a pint in the light
of a spring day and son, he says
son it’s alright and we got that pint
we promised ourselves under blossom.
In another, the connection between generations is spotlighted, when the speaker’s father places his around him:
It felt odd, the weight of his arm. It was the first time he had found a way to express his love in this way and I did not know what to do with it, as if he had broken the puzzle of his own absent father.
Don’t be fooled – this is not a book, however, without humour. Far from it. Any poet who can get away with the title ‘Devotional for the motorway bridge at Swanley before the M25 connected it’ deserves to be read.
Similarly, I laughed out loud at ‘Devotional for a swimming improvement cup’ in which the speaker is awarded said trophy ‘for not drowning’. In McDonnell’s adept hands, this poem manages to make comment on the education system – epitomising, perhaps, his idiom as a mixture of the deeply personal and the strongly political.
This is a fine collection, one that will repay multiple reads, and one that is – in the spirit of the poems it contains – really worth looking closely at.
55 Devotionals (Against Erasure) (10.99) by Andrew McDonnell is published by Broken Sleep Books (2026).
Tim Relf’s debut collection, ‘Not Even October’, is out in November 2026 with Salt Publishing. His most recent novel, published by Penguin, was translated into more than 20 languages.