Our featured publication for Spring is The Price of Happiness by Nikki Robson, published by V. Press.

‘The Price of Ηappiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens (‘Goodness, I’m weeping said Mum’) to full-blown violent coerciveness (‘the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown’) and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life (‘it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long’). You barely take a breath before you’re holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship. It is a tribute to Nikki Robson’s skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing – these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude – ‘my label of a husband’; ‘my mummy-smile’; ‘this Vitruvian boy’ – and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: ‘[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another’.‘ W. N. Herbert

‘‘The divorced cannot/bury their dead.’ Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her ‘mummy-smile’, layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet’s first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot.‘ Beth McDonough

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Signature dish

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Omens?

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Bone-weary

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First Laugh

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Nikki Robson was born and raised in Northern Ireland between Tyrone and Fermanagh, where she still regularly spends time with family and friends. Following 25 years in Scotland, she now lives in Suffolk. After a career in business, she obtained an MLitt in Writing Study and Practice from Dundee University. Her writing often explores relationships, place, associations and the idea of home, with poems published in many journals and anthologies. The Price of Happiness is her first pamphlet.

Copies of The Price of Happiness are available to purchase from the V. Press website, here.