Monthly Archives: May 2026

Life expectancy begins to fall – guest poet

Leave a reply



I’m very pleased to introduce this month’s guest poet Tom Sastry. His collection was published to its usual high standards by Nine Arches Press in 2025. The striking cover ‘Half Full’ is by Tom Denbigh, 2025. It’s a contemporary woodcut of the 1607 Bristol Channel Flood image.


Tom Sastry has published one pamphlet and three collections. Carol Ann Duffy said he “makes friendships and love affairs new and strange” and Hera Lindsay Bird call him “a magician of deadpan”. His poems have appeared in The Guardian and Poetry Review. His latest book is Life Expectancy Begins to Fall is described by Jonathan Edwards as “the most important – and certainly the most entertaining – book about the end of the world I’ve yet found”. Tom himself describes it as the perfect birthday present for someone with a sense of humour about their mortality.


The title poem – a sequence of six titled poems, each consisting of six couplets – is at the core of the book. It is linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and government decisions.


The collection is also a short master class on making titles work:

  • How to tell the apocalypse is happening when you get all your news from Instagram
  • Navigating the Peri-Apocalypse with Radical Self-Care
  • The preserved body of a billionaire slowly defrosts in a devastated world


These are strong poems in a variety of form, length and layout. In among the titled poems are untitled poems of six lines in italics. They create a change of tone and voice. The white space gives the reader a chance to catch their breath. Here is an example:

Everyone loves the end of the world
 
We all hope to enjoy the apocalypse 
from a distance. A good storm 
spares the roof but rattles the glass.  
Children know: destruction is funny, sometimes beautiful.

A distant inferno would enchant your night 
if you saw it from the next coast. 
So much torment is shut away, you might even be comforted 
by a Hell with space for your friends. 

We build great telescopes to watch stars die 
send divers to explore drowned cities, give prizes
for pictures of flaming sinkholes 
or bones bleaching by a dry lake. 

An old man reads of a decade he won’t see 
lethal heat, scarcity of food. 
It aches softly, like a sunset.
A new desert at the edge of town, some murders on the news. 

If the world is broken, let it be final:
a vengeful or careless god
snapping continents like biscuits.

What I fear is a Next Day.
The sweeping up and the reckoning.
The sobriety. The resumption.

As I was preparing this post, Tom wrote to me: ‘You can be pessimistic about the drift of world-historical events and still hopeful about human nature and human connection. You can be hopeful about what might happen next week or about the reception of your friend’s new book.  There’s no link between optimism and virtue or between pessimism and cynicism. So that’s really the moral centre of the book – the belief that an age of pessimism doesn’t condemn us to live mean lives. We can live well as pessimists.’

Three more poems from this collection described as ‘part-elegy and part-satire’.

Nothing to do but play cards

If it’s too late to start cathedrals
or trust in a forty-year pension plan

too soon
to snatch the thing to hand
in the name of survival

if we’re too honest
for self-sufficiency
or heroism

and our giddy hours don’t come

if the deed
in our small reach
has no resounding name

let’s call it with our silence
let’s shuffle it again.

Hope buys an absurdly expensive woodland burial plot

She is excited to be rendered
by fungi into tree-food. I feel a sharp
sadness when she says it. I check
it was not an urgent purchase
then ask questions. I learn
the particulars of the site and the price
smile at her joyous cycle of life
and secretly, inwardly
devour it with my scorn.
Life is a guzzling machine
forever eating itself.
Hope – your people need you.
Don’t give up on us.

An increasing incidence of extreme weather events

We watched the charts all week
as the old hurricane’s great lash
curled back across the ocean, not weakening
until we saw Bristol in its path.

The police told us to leave
for the nowhere we had to go
in the nothing we had to get there.
They would take the gloves off for looters.

Abandoned people are always crazy
like a fool who squares up to a storm.
Crazy like us, on the roofs of Easton
waving at the news helicopter

as the studio repeats the warnings
we were apparently ignoring
when we walked onto the M32
in a world already shaking and tearing

for a woman desperate to pass her child
into the mystery of a stranger’s car
which was crammed to the corners
with the old necessities of home.

Panorama Mesdag – favourite museum

Leave a reply

Panorama Mesdag, Scheveningen village with The Hague in background. Credit: T Duijndam.

Recently two friends were over from the UK – a Seville reunion. They stayed at Scheveningen, minutes from the beach and boulevard. It was mostly sunny. I pointed out some sights: the red lighthouse, the building with the green shutters, and Seinpostduin – the high dune on which the painter Hendrik Mesdag sat in 1880 to make the preliminary sketches for the commission he’d received for a 360-degree painting.

At one time there were many panoramas. They were expensive to maintain and once photography and film were available, people’s interest declined and most were demolished.

Panorama Mesdag, The Hague (1881) is the world’s oldest surviving panorama in its original location. The painting is over 14m high, has a diameter of 40m and the circumference is 120m2. That makes it the largest painting in the Netherlands.

Scheveningen was then an independent fishing village with its own clothing and dialect. There were about 500 houses and people lived from herring fishing.

When he got the commission, Mesdag was already well-known for his seascapes. Several of these are shown at the Panorama. He wanted the sky to look as though it was the weather on one single day. He made many sketches, also of the houses which were transferred to canvas using a grid. The original glass cylinder in which he sat is shown at Panorama Mesdag.

The Panorama commission was a massive job and Mesdag was fortunate to be able to put a team together: his wife Sientje Mesdag-van Houten who was an established painter in her own right, Théophile de Bock who painted the sky and dunes with broad brush strokes, Bernard Blommers, and George Hendrik Breitner who specialised in painting horses. Mesdag himself focused on the sea and the flat-bottomed boats on the beach.

It took them four months to complete the work. Instead of a signature, Mesdag painted Sientje. She sits on the beach painting under a white parasol. Panorama Mesdag opened on 1 August 1881.

It’s an astonishing experience – come up the wooden staircase and suddenly you stand on the viewing platform: scenery all around you. There is so much rich detail: dozens of boats, horses pulling in the boats, cavalry horses, the sky, the women out with their washing, bathers, the steam train on its way from The Hague, birds.

Because of the glass roof, the weather changes as you are there, and the illusion is complete because the platform is surrounded by real sand with objects on it. You are standing on Seinpostduin, more than 140 years ago.

My thanks to David Cooke, Editor of The High Window, where this poem first appeared.

Panorama Mesdag

Invisible skylights let through the light.
Just as I arrive upstairs, the sun comes out
across the busy beach I know so well.

All those horses. In two neat columns,
the cavalry on exercise, heading south.
Other horses pull the flat-bottomed boats
onto the sand. Fish is being sold straight
from the boats. Women are repairing nets.

Mesdag’s wife has been included.
I know where to look for Sientje, painting
in a folding chair, striped sunshade.

Am I hallucinating the sound of gulls?
I see the seams in the canvas, and I don’t care.
As I go round the wooden platform, here
is the washing laid out on the grass,
a plume of smoke, the empty clog.