Hungry Outside a Pub on Darien

This week, The Lyre was startled to read some poetry news in the Guardian. As part of their Books Season, Nicholas Lezard weighed up the price of Carcanet's New Poetries V against 'a good main course at a gastropub'. Heroically, he came out in favour of beans on toast and the lyrics of William Letford, a Scottish poet who works as a roofer:

I can honestly say that on reading his 14 very short poems here, I feel just as Keats did when he read Chapman's Homer: that a new planet has come into the sky.

As Adorno said, however, it is barbarous to read poetry without thick chips. The Lyre is grateful, therefore, to Carcanet for sending a copy which saved us Lezard's dilemma. As we hit the sticky toffee pudding, Letford's poems swam into our ken too and -- like a less stout Cortez -- we actually stopped chewing for a minute. 'It's aboot the labour' pretty much gets to the heart of the matter:

hammers    nails
hammers    nails
hammers    nails

heh Casey did ah tell ye a goat
a couple a poems published  
widizthatmean
widayyemean
dizthatmeanyegetanymoneyfurrit

eh        naw
aw       right

hammers    nails
hammers    nails
hammers    nails

We also breathed moments of the pure serene in poems by Oli Hazzard, James Womack and Kate Kilalea, and travelled much in the realms of gold generally, until we got the bill.

Here at The Lyre, though, we like to think that new poetry is not only a luxury product for 'poncey southern metropolitan softies', as Keats -- sorry, Lezard -- would have it. Readers restricted to the price of a pint instead should ask for a glass of tap water and an all-day helping of Andrew Spragg's Notes for Fatty Cakes.

This riotous love sequence, with a cover painting by Emily Critchley, comes recommended by Lyre favourites Tom Raworth, Vahni Capildeo and Brian Catling. Spragg's poems hit the nail on the head too, but on the slant, and into unexpected objects. Here's one of our favourites from his first collection, The Fleetingest:

cash

their disposition was poor
in the interests of work avoidance
he shot them down with a .44

money has a caustic
weight and there is
a sound that rang like

a baby grand finding
the first step before
halting -- they

call it 'ice' sometimes.