I’m delighted to share three poems by Matthew Paul from his new collection with Crooked Spire Press. The poems demonstrate Matthew’s ‘unflinching clarity’, and his ‘fierce attention to detail’. His biography follows the poems and there you can also find a link to his own website.

Spent Matches

Mum lets only Granddad light up in our house.
The second Thursday of every other month,
she fetches Grandma and him over from Sutton.
The chalkhill-blue elegance of the Wedgwood
ashtray rhymes with unfiltered smoke rings
pixilating like Ceefax in the living-room air.

Teatime doesn’t wait for Dad: Hovis, Primula,
Shippam’s fish paste, allotment tomatoes, cress;
mini rolls, Penguins, cremated fruitcake; pots
of Brooke Bond PG Tips; Beryl Ware replaced
by Royal Worcester, on Hay Wain place mats.
Chit-chat wilts like Dad’s California poppies.

Mum fills space with monologues. My brothers’
progress; mine. WRVS activities. Her botched
hysterectomy. We watch Grandma’s must-see,
Crossroads, then ours: ‘Top of the Flops, I call it,’
says Granddad. The outfits, songs, presenters
and Legs & Co. baffle him into silence; except

when Julio Iglesias butchers ‘Begin the Beguine’.
‘Artie Shaw!’ he cries; and his and Grandma’s
memories spool back to bulletins on the wireless,
to Chamberlain’s jubilant declaration of peace.
Barely through the door, Dad re-buttons his coat
to take them home. Granddad beams, ‘Abyssinia!’

A Common Hand

I don’t have to prove whether I did it or not; if they can’t see it, what kind of damned experts are they? [. . .] I’m not a crook; I’m just doing what people have always done in the history of the world: ever since art was invented, people have made imitations of it.
Eric Hebborn, ‘Portrait of a Master Forger’, Omnibus, BBC TV, 1991

Eric pestles oak gall, gum Arabic, pinches of iron
Sulphate and rain into ink with ‘a gorgeous patina’,
To pen his line on slyly foxed paper, in the styles
Of Pisanello, Poussin and sundry other old masters,
Reshaping preparatory sketches to make pentimenti,
Faking collectors’ monograms as cherries on top.

At junior school, Eric, aged eight, discovered that
Burnt Swan and Vesta matchsticks’ charcoal tips
Burnished imagination’s marks, incurring, firstly,
Welts from a leathering for possessing matches,
Then a three-year stretch in an Essex reformatory
For wilfully setting cloakrooms on fire. A flair for
Painting sees him into art schools, lastly the RA,
Where, though he wins every prize, contemporaries
Remember Eric only as ‘a silent creature’; ‘a joke’.

They would say that, since he’s brought their craft
Into disrepute. ‘Dealers are not interested in art, but
Money,’ he says. ‘The real criminal, if there is one,
Is he who makes the false description; guiltier by far
Than had he manipulated the nib himself. Ignore
The fusspots. Enjoy art, without worrying whether
Attributions are correct.’ Museums have everything
To lose from uncovering Eric’s handiwork; queasily,
They check their acquisitions back to the Sixties
And issue, de haut en bas, highly selective denials.

‘No one is studying art with honesty,’ claims Eric,
Upon the publication of The Art Forger’s Handbook
In Italian. Out in Trastevere three icy nights later,
He stumbles, soaked in Chianti Classico Riserva,
Down a cobbled passage, to his blunt force demise.

In Which I Spend a Fortnight of my West Berlin Summer in 1987 Doing a Few Hours’ Cleaning Per Day in Some Multinational’s HQ

My Iraqi supervisor Zaynab and I enjoy,
for our lingua franca, helpless
amusement. Every day, precisely
at knocking-off time,
we point at the clock, chorus ‘Sechs!’,
then cackle like siblings.

Dieter, fellow cleaner, never gets our jokes.
Just like me, he’s twenty and nearing
the end of a gap year; mandatory,
before enrolment at Humboldt.
Mine’s elective, for my mental health.
He and I view the city’s halves from the roof:
the Wall zigzags like the Western Front.

Afterwards, we take the U-Bahn
—he buys a ticket; I don’t—
to the agency’s office, at Nollendorfplatz.
He translates the clerk: I won’t get paid
until next week. ‘Scheisse,’ I say.
Dieter deadpans: ‘She said,
“Ah, so the English boy
can speak German after all”’

Biography

Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in June 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections – The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. His reviews regularly appear in The Friday Poem and elsewhere. He blogs here.