Featured Publication – The Mayday Diaries by Robin Houghton

Our featured publication for Autumn is The Mayday Diaries by Robin Houghton, published by Pindrop Press.

‘Robin Houghton is a poet who really notices things – silly and deadly serious, quotidian and extraordinary, often all at once – and knows precisely how to sift them so that only tight, resonant poems fall out. She makes ‘the debris of our private lives’ newly familiar and honestly strange, and never solely for sport, though she is playful too. The Mayday Diaries is a stylistically and thematically dextrous triumph in four unyieldingly inventive movements, and I don’t write that lightly.’ Rory Waterman

‘There’s so much delight and surprise in these poems. A clarity of diction to-gether with a playful reach and sense of experimentation, a formal agility and for all their dramatic storytelling and beguiling sense of humour, a persistent subtlety, an emotional tension in even the most light-hearted or casual lines. What do we feel when we hear the word Mayday? Alarm, fear, intrigue. And what do we hope to find in a diary? Intimate confessions, the inner workings of a psyche trying to make sense of the world. The unusual conflation of these two words in the title of the collection evokes perfectly the intense and every-day wonder at its heart.‘ Greta Stoddart

‘While Houghton’s foray into American corporate capitalism equips her witha satire-ready vocabulary, she is equally fluent in the idioms of another in- ferno – that of Dante – and the poems that show his influence are transcendent. Houghton writes with poignancy, humour, formal versatility and, most of all, a refreshing self-awareness that circumvents both self-aggrandizement and self-pity.‘ Kathryn Maris

The long-haired girls

Previously published in The Rialto

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Before the splicing

Previously published in Prole

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Break

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Robin Houghton is the author of four poetry pamphlets including Why? And Other Questions (Live Canon, 2020) which was a winner of the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition 2019. Her work has been published in many magazines including Mslexia, The Rialto and Poetry News, and is widely anthologised. She was awarded the Hamish Canham Prize from the Poetry Society in 2013. With Peter Kenny she founded the poets’ publishing collective Telltale Press in 2014, and their current project is the podcast Planet Poetry, begun during the 2020 pandemic. Born in London, Robin has lived and worked in Italy, Germany and the USA. After a marketing career with Nike and then Adidas, she obtained a masters degree in Digital Media in 2000 and ran her own online marketing business for over twenty years. She is now settled on the South coast of England. The Mayday Diaries is her first full poetry collection.

Copies of The Mayday Diaries are available to purchase from the Pindrop Press website, here.

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