It’s a pleasure to introduce our August guest poet Stuart Handysides. We met years ago on a poetry workshop. At that time Stuart was still working as a GP. His poems have been widely published. For 11 years Stuart ran the annual Ware Poets competition. At the end of the post you’ll find his biography.

Here are four poems from the last one picked, Stuart’s debut collection which was a winner of the Indigo-First Poetry Prize 2024 and published last year. Fellow poet Matthew Paul reviewed the book on Substack.

Sinner, brought up short

Allowed, just once, to sit elsewhere in church;
not midway back with Mum, the usual place,
but at the front, next to a special friend
— we were, I think, no more than six years old

— proximity to Father guarantee
that I would never dare to misbehave.
But suffering the slow, long, quiet time
I itched to wriggle, talk, to make her laugh.

The shock, the shame, to hear my name — one word
deep and calm, punctuating his sermon
— my small, hot, red face believing all eyes
forever on me, unforgiving.

Disgrace

You vanished into space I’d never seen
– on my behalf – you needed darkness
while you rolled me up a film.

I took the door’s key out to peep.
You shouted – in alarm – and I was scared.
And in my haste I must have turned the lock.

You thought that I had played a prank.
I fled, you hammered on the door
to be released. I sensed your held-in rage.

I never got the film and never saw
your darkroom, never dared to ask to see
your den of alchemy, despite the lure

of dishes, timers, paper, negatives
of images that magically appeared
enlarged and focused under dim red light.

This poem is the souvenir I failed to buy

Within the list of things I might regret
this shouldn’t even figure, but it does.
We’re hanging out in San Francisco when
perhaps too close to dinner time I drag
them into City Lights, explaining how
it isn’t just a bookshop, more a shrine.
And, to be fair, they play along
although I sense they’d rather be elsewhere.

But, having thumbed through Howl and On the Road,
A Coney Island of the Mind,
it all becomes too much. I leave the books
unbought, as if there’d be another time.

Winter morning, unbroken

The only light a moon that’s almost full
seen through a naked tree and soon to set,
a cold green glow from the cooker’s clock,
the kettle filled by feel — to turn on light
would break the spell of undone night.

Frost twinkles on a pitched wood roof
above a sprinkled pile of bird seed
where later pigeons, unprepared, will slide,
regain their poise, attempt to look unruffled,
somehow flap inside to feed.

The kettle boils, the tea is poured,
I flee the chill ceramic tiles
and take it back to bed.

Biography

Stuart Handysides grew up in the Midlands but lived in London and the South East for many years. He began writing as a general practitioner, continued while working as an editor of medical publications, and started writing poetry. Stuart’s poems have appeared in magazines, such as Acumen, the North, the French Literary Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and the Frogmore Papers. He has had success in competitions, and his play Gleaming for an Instant was performed online in 2020.