Ben Wilkinson: Surprise (strike sonnet chain, 10)

I hadn’t thought to think, so have for nowt
this sonnet, jack-in-the-box that’ll always
spring summat from thought’s brief blackout:
a word, a phrase, even this image. Today
I’m out-of-office because the jesters say
there’s no cash, at least not beyond the stash
stacked high from our goodwill. The glaze
of their painted-on smiles wears thin. In a flash
they’ll vanish again, into some newly brash
building since that’s the way the money goes.
We turn the crank; the music plays; crash
and boom the same to these pinocchios.
Now bob along to the market’s grim credo:
money is truth, that is all ye need to know.

Ben Wilkinson’s second collection of poems is Same Difference (Seren, 2022). Don Paterson (LUP, 2021), a reader’s guide to the poet’s work, is due out in paperback later this year.

Jacob Polley: A Tern (strike sonnet chain, 9)

Someone’s always praying for a second chance.
I walk the seaside path again, just once
today along the now, dragging my feet
into the wind for birdsong, hope and light.
The body strikes the ground day after day.
My shoes show me this in their rubbings away.
But I forget when I walk what it is to work:
to walk isn’t work. But it’s work to walk
into the wind. The walking chamfers my shoes:
the wind on the big glass rollers chamfers those
and blows the dusty foam back out to sea.
The light is chamfered, too. A tern shows me
with its wing-tilt flash, that flash a thought
I hadn’t thought to think, so have for nowt.

Jacob Polley’s fifth book, Material Properties, is out now from Picador.

Claudine Toutoungi: Escape Fantasy (strike sonnet chain, 8)

Someone’s always wishing the ground would open up
or a passing, high-speed woodpecker would offer a ride
or a silvery, cosmic rope-ladder would just drop down
and you’d clamber right up to the candy floss clouds.
Someone’s always dreaming that they could go back
and reshoot the scene and upscale their part.
Someone’s always searching for a loaded kiss,
a backward look, a lingering glance.
Someone’s always asking for another rewrite
of your version of them or their version of you
and whether the toll it’s all taken is just
one of those things – a blip, a dark night
of the soul and that night soon (surely) must pass.
Someone’s always praying for a second chance.

Claudine Toutoungi’s audio drama ‘The Voice in my Ear’ is currently available on BBC Sounds. Her most recent book, Two Tongues (Carcanet 2020), won the Ledbury Munthe Second Collection Prize.

Paul Farley: Tumbleweed (strike sonnet chain, 7)

O will I have nothing to show for the long miles
a tumbleweed wonders, a dandelion clock
that emigrated, did well, grew huge, blew back
a legend of the screen, though there were tales
about a lack of lines leading to trouble
and rumours of unhappy sets, a broom
without a handle bumbling through each frame.
Affairs with creosote-scented chaparral
were toxic box office, too. But all that gossip,
Vegas, wilderness years, even the straitened
landscapes of TV, mean plenty of work
in the empty air that follows certain jokes,
or miles of nothing when a line doesn’t land.
Someone’s always wishing the ground would open up.

Paul Farley’s most recent collection, The Mizzy (2019), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Awards.

Katharine Towers: Walks (strike sonnet chain, 6)

A gust of nothing new diverts my thought.
The things that occupy my mind are old –
French words or words for the sounds
birds make, or the country names of flowers.
It’s like this when I’m walking in the woods.
What do you think about, someone asked
because I had been gone for long hours
and I could only answer nothing,
although I did remember singing
as I tramped and I also remembered
sheltering under an ash when it rained a bit.
I’m afraid that when I turn the pages of my
scrapbook mind I’ll find they’re empty.
O will I have nothing to show for the long miles.

Katharine Towers’ most recent book is Oak (Picador, 2021). Her first book, The Floating Man (2010), won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and her second, The Remedies (2016), was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize.

Matthew Welton: Get Back (strike sonnet chain, 5)

I promise that I will get back to you
though won’t say when: – some days I work from home
and snack, perhaps, or snooze, and yet get back
to everybody; other days I go
to work to work, and pound my pithy thoughts
to mush, and nobody gets got back to.
Though it makes sense that things are better viewed
square and direct, the way my woodland walks
some weekends might involve my getting back
to some draft answer rustling round my mind
suggests some things appear clearer while indistinct,
undemarcated, undevolved, dilute.
Trees sway; the sunlight softens. Mist drifts in.
A gust of nothing new diverts my thought.

Matthew Welton’s most recent publication is Squid Squad (Carcanet, 2020).

Tara Bergin: Out of Office (strike sonnet chain, 4)

We’re sold the new but love the given most –
Hello. Thanks for your note. I’m not at home.
This is an Automatic Reply. Try
Again. Or redirect to Absent Minds:
Press number nine then five (for sonnets). No
Cold Callers please. My special knives and stones
Are rather busy – I apologise.
My eyes are out of town. They want to be alone
Or else with Rilke’s secrets. Send your rhymes
To ‘Her Upstairs’ – cross-patch – Mrs. Bones –
(She burnt the supper twice to write these lines) –
Forgive me. Try the wire; a tin-can phone!
Do STOP Whatever STOP You have to do.
I promise that I will get back to you.

Tara Bergin’s most recent publication is Savage Tales (Carcanet, 2022)

Jacob Polley: The Dip (strike sonnet chain, 3)

Obeying greed will make you profit’s fool.
The world moves us. There’s no denying this.
Perhaps as little of it as has pooled
overnight in a dip you glimpse from the morning bus,
silver and somehow Romanly old,
like a floor coming up through the field, then gone.
A secret stillness not so hard to hold
against the rush-hour bus’s shuddering on.
You’re late for work, obedient but late,
greedy but satisfied by winter sticks
and unsquelched mud, your looking’s appetite
an appetite for things that looking at
will neither kill nor alchemise to waste.
We’re sold the new but love the given most.

Jacob Polley’s fifth book of poems, Material Properties, is out now and his last, Jackself, won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize.

W.N. Herbert: The Vice (strike sonnet chain, 2)

Work you love is no less work, remember this.
But is love work or should it be, the heart
would want to counter, wouldn’t it? – in bliss
as secretly we know it finds its start,
its engine, and its journey to that mart
in which such matters find their meagre price.
For love is worn as care, worn down and scarred
by cleaning up for love’s sake, and – no nic-
eties here – those we love are in this vice,
how should we free them from its hard-jawed truth?
Our bosses dole out pleasures by device
and cake crumb, rake in energy and youth.
The love that moves us and our peers is fuel,
obeying greed will make you profit’s fool.

W.N. Herbert’s recent books are The Wreck of the Fathership (Bloodaxe 2020), and The Kindly Interrogator, translations from the Persian, co-translated with the author, Alireza Abiz (Shearsman, 2021).

He is an editor of New Boots and Pantisocracies, together with Andy Jackson, with whom he also edits Gude & Godlie Ballatis. He is currently putting together a collection of renga he curated for G&GBs, drawing on writers from the Dundee area.

Jacob Polley: Valentine Strike Poem (strike sonnet chain, 1)

I write this valentine while I should be at work.
When I strike I’m not paid, so I do it for love.
I love my close workmates and colleagues I haven’t met,
the younger who are starting out, the hourly paid
and unsecure, and I love my students who love
to learn, no matter where that learning might lead;
and I love those who might not love learning straightaway
but ten or twenty valentines from now will look back
on what and how they learned, surprised to know
all they know and to remember a teacher with something
like love; and I love those who might do what I do
after me, for love. But love’s the tax an employer
levies from you in longer, harder work for less.
Work you love is no less work. Remember this.

Jacob Polley’s fifth book of poems, Material Properties, is out now and his last, Jackself, won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize.