It’s an enormous pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Pam Thompson. Pam and I met 13 years ago on an extended writing course. You can find her biography below the poems. These are from Pam’s prize-winning pamphlet and show the range of her writing. The Paper Swans pamphlet competition was judged by John McCullough: ‘Sub/urban Legends gripped me because of the way it marries poignancy with a really bold imagination and stylistic flair’. The intriguing cover image is also by Pam.

Explorers, Antarctica, 1901

The leader sits on the sledge.
He never does this.
It’s against the rules of the expedition
but now there are no rules.

Two huskies – the two
remaining huskies, they ate the rest –
sit either side like imperial lions.

The ship is stuck in frozen waves.
The crew are starving or dead
but this photo will be evidence
that they reached their destination.

The photographer in the black hood.
Stepping back. Pulling the cord. The flash.

Self Portrait as Fulang Chang

Freedom, chica, is all. I’ll wear
the mandarin’s hat and silk waistcoat,
eat all the honeyed grapes,
to stay favoured, like a first-born.

I perch on her left shoulder,
always on guard, never at ease.
I bare my teeth and scream,
at Diego and the village dogs.

I am the brush passer, ear
for her secrets, but I am all chat,
you know, teller of her tales
though she isn’t one to keep schtum.

The bloody hearts we paint
will drip onto the Blue House floor.

Fête Galante

Take the bus from outside the Water Margin Chinese restaurant—or from where it used to be in 1974—allow plenty of time. You’re at work in Lewis’s, folding up school shirts badly, cramming them back in their packaging; in a History of Art lecture looking at a slide of Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’. The bus will be full, people will be smoking on the top deck, so will you. This must be your stop. Is it everybody’s stop? You join the flow—you think of Tracy Emin’s tent with the names of all the people she ever slept with, or is it her messy bed you’re thinking of. All the beds you ever slept in. Lewis’s. All the shops you ever worked in. And the canteen in the factory where the men always patronised you. Here—you say to the tiny chef—you scrub the bloody burnt pans. All the patronising men you ever worked for—they all get off the bus. You watch them cross London Road. You haven’t moved very far. The Water Margin is the water’s margin and you wonder how this pond, this lake, this sea, arrived in the city. There are willows, and, over there, a fête galante, a woman on a swing, being pushed and pulled, higher and harder, by all the people she ever slept with.

Biography

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time, (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) was published in March 2025.