Poetry review – THE MAYDAY DIARIES: D A Prince admires Robin Houghton’s wide-ranging collection which succeeds in mixing the personal with the political
The Mayday Diaries
Robin Houghton
Pindrop Press, 2025.
ISBN 978-1-7384059-4-7
£12.00
Is this the future? Tucked on the final page of The Mayday Diaries is a QR code which gives access to Robin Houghton reading some of her poems. I’ve never come across this in a collection before: I’m not sure how to respond. A book has always been a quiet thing, for me, yet I can see that for some readers this would enhance their reading experience. But for now I’ll settle into the poems on the page, the way I know.
This is a debut collection and an accomplished one. Although it’s organised in four sections there is no sense of these ever having been separate pamphlet-like units: the connections between the sections — and between poems — are subtle and part of the underlying strength of the collection’s structure as a whole. Houghton has paid close attention to how each poem will earn its place and contribute to the movement of themes and undercurrents at work here, as well as to the visual aspect. The variety of form ranges from the air and space around couplets, the neatness of tercets, the solid block of prose poems, the use of indents and italics, even a poem using redaction to powerful effect: flick through the pages for a preliminary overview and the variety is evident. The interplay of print and white page attracts the eye, even before the reading starts.
As with any good collection, this one repays a linear reading. The opening section (Part 1:”Tell me it never happened”) establishes Houghton’s clarity of observation and precision. Her poems centre on the sharp discomforts and power struggles of commercial office work in the 1990s, experienced from a woman’s viewpoint. Too few poets write about office work and its minutiae, despite it being the reality for many: these poems are a salutary reminder. Houghton nails it, beginning with “Work experience”
rolled up through revolving doors
we checked our suits
the awkward business of heels
The phrase ‘awkward business’ is not just the office requirement that women should wear high heels but will stand for the whole of Houghton’s day job in marketing, along with the socialising and flings, fears and tensions, appraisals and meeting rooms (both Red and Blue). “Career as a caryatid” sums up, in a career-advice tone and two neatly balanced 7-line stanzas, how women were urged into office work
it’s a brilliant job for a girl
an essential supporting role
without you whole nations would fall
[…]
stay calm under pressure
stay still and look pretty
A small detail: the omission of capitals letters indicates a woman’s lack of presence in the workplace. There are four “Career as …” poems. Although the image of a caryatid is the most visual, the “…stink pipe” and “…Aperol spritz” amplify features of the job, while “… an archaeological find” brings in the uncovered remains of a PowerPoint presentation and a possible P45 ‘… in the mire/ and its bottomless pit of despondency.’ Any scraps of private life take place on the edges, even “On a day a nurse unstaples my breast” — a pain-filled title even before the physical precision of the poem. The only relaxation from the tensions of work pressures appears in ‘decree absolute’ — ‘…I’m stopped in a glorious moment/ of vacancy’
This should be a good moment (poets ration the use of ‘glorious’ to the highlights in a poem) but the reality of work tainting life cuts in. A list of what the poet would like to forget includes
the lawyer between macchiatos dashing off her pencilled Xs
summing up in three pages the greyed-out underwear of my ex-life
you and your bleached-out face blurting grudges for all to hear
how a gull crapped an exclamation mark across my car
There’s an unspoken — and unwritten — question underlying this opening section: is this all there is in life? It remains unanswered, with the final poem, “Speech”, a half-page prose poem which opens
Flings. I’ve had a few. But then again that was in the sexed-up nineties. We thought the
world was going to end, computer bugs blast planes from the sky — so why not? Every
meeting or awayday shot adrenaline through our veins. We fell into each other with the
speed and shock of a zip-wire.
The teasing echo of Sinatra’s My Way suggests a date, confirmed by the millennium bug and the uncertainty as 1999 tipped over into the unknowns of the twenty-first century. The shift into a new section, brings relief — and a longer poem, released from capital letters (in a positive way, this time) and formal punctuation, visual prompts of change. Even the title, “For Sagra, at the beginning” has a hint of hope while the subject — how to manoeuvre a car off a ferry when its doors are jammed — can be seen as a metaphor for the future
or you can twist your neck and look behind
and drive yourself back-end first
with faith over water
to the promise of land
Faith and promise. When I started reading this collection I’d intended to read a few pages at a time, but the poems drew me on: I kept turning the pages, pushing forward, delaying the moment when I’d have to put the book down. Not that I wanted the clichéd comfort of a happy ending but those two words — faith, promise — held out an offer, a shift in the language. The poems dip back into school days, and stretch across women —Pia, Thais, both characters in Dante’s works — who are defiant and speak up for themselves. There are children, too: “Hazel is fascinated by space” is a prose poem about relative sizes, satisfying her curiosity. “Found at auction” is a poem interspersing mixed lots from an auctioneer’s catalogue, the detritus of cleared houses, with the poet’s searching
I looked for love among the dust-crates, the storage racks
three fishing tackle boxes, a set of wheels and
two keep nets, a folding tackle bag
[ … ]
I didn’t know what I was looking for, yet there it was
a bag of objects including candle snuffers,
miniature microscope and a Hoffman book
a large pottery inkwell in the form of a car radiator
a Jack Warner signed autobiography, Jack of all Trades
some evening all enchanted, down among the lots
collection of sheet music, some politically incorrect and
some signed
Part found poem, part simple narrative, it’s an effective way to bring the muddle of lives into confrontation with her own desires. Again there’s the allusion to a familiar song, one that flickers at the edge of memory. Variety of form, of subject — who could stop reading? In a section about family relationships — successful in that it isn’t pegged to the anecdotal but about how people interact — each narrative leaves questions, unanswered for both poet and reader. “Her mystery” evokes the physicality of a house but without explaining the essential core of her sister n
perhaps my sister’s secret is under the carpet
in my niece’s room where I’m lying awake
listening for the toilet door or padding feet
on the landing perhaps her secret is stopped
in straw or the wadding behind walls or ceiling
There is no single word for the space between sisters: it’s an under-explored area where sisterhood is a too often a cliché for closeness. This poem catches that idea of another space, and how hard it is to enter into: ‘it will go with her like the pause in the phone call’ shows the mystery. In “Confession” Houghton manages the tricky position of both being in the poem and observing herself, almost out-of-body —
been shaking mum again
the way they do in movies
briskly by the shoulders
this is no time to swoon
wake up wake up
It’s one of those poems where the reader is just slightly ahead of the poet, knowing this is about death, about the unreality of recognising what is happening, while the action is shown with filmic realism.
The poems are broadening in scope by this stage, part of the careful placing and structure of the collection, as though sharing with the reader how the world is a wider and much more human place than the 1990s commercial world. Burial at sea, the misery of the homebound commuter train, an elderly client escaping briefly from his carers: if I list the subject of Houghton’s poems it might make them sound as though they have no connection with each other but the connections echo across the collection as a whole. The final section expands her focus: the poems acknowledge the context of the political, contemporary world of refugees, human traffickers, war, the constant search for certainty in a desperate and sometimes despairing world. Appropriately it has the heading ‘Mayday’, the international cry for help.
“Song of ascent”, with its epigraph from Psalm 122 (‘May there be well-being within your ramparts, tranquillity in your palaces’), is in the voice of a grateful refugee landing on a shingle beach —
this is my dream he sang and he sang with the other youngish men
arrived at the foot of the white white cliffs their feet aslip on shells
arrived at the gates of a fortress at the bright light gates of justice
and we will go up like those before us and in his gladness in his
joy and at this journey’s end he cast his blessings to the wind
and the pebbles he cast his peace on the men walking to greet them
Unpunctuated lines give it a forward, headlong rush of relief: the reader can provide the ironies. We’ve already passed its peaceful counterpoint, “At last, overboard” in the previous section, where a man is buried at sea, with his family present and all in agreement.
“Long ride in a slow machine”, with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno, translated as ‘Behold the one that makes the whole world stink!’, is more direct:
He promised the ride of a life and that life would be better
we tolerated his bombast, winks and laughs
his let’s do it guys, his we’re in it this boat together
Can anybody else read a political parallel into this? Pulling the poems together is “Problems”, a prose poem in five paragraphs, which mimics the style of those practical mathematical questions I dreaded at school:
The corridor is a centimetres wide on one side of the bend and b centimetres wide on
the other side. Find, in terms of a and b the length of the longest stick …
The first paragraph is school-stuff and I am ten years old again. But the second paragraph poses a new problem: a tank manoeuvring in a narrow city street — ‘Find, in terms of feet, inches and hands the number of protesters it would take to stop the tank.’ This has jumped the decades within me, no longer school-stuff but calling to mind Prague, Tiananmen Square, more recent news. The third paragraph — and another problem — brings redaction into the poem. This is not here as the latest fashion in poetry but to capture the reader’s full attention: it deals with families manoeuvred to a border around burnt-out tanks and the units of measurement are ‘… candles nappies and the volume of xxx .’ The language of the problems and rational objectivity overlap: we are in today’s news, inescapably. Too often redaction is simply a poetic device: here it is effective in showing not only the reality of war but also how it’s blanked out, like an excuse to look away.
Balancing the political with the personal is tricky in a collection but Houghton has achieved it in The Mayday Diaries. Even the cover photograph, an assembly of scraps and objects that reflect her life — photos, notebooks, Filofax, candles half burnt out, wine glass (half-full and I’m sure that’s intentional) — is working to show the variety of what’s within the covers.
And the QR code? In the end I chose to ignore it. The poems spoke from the page, allowing their own time for reflection: that was enough for me but other readers might find the innovation of hearing the poems increases their reading pleasure. I hope it helps this collection reach the wide audience it deserves.
Jun 24 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Robin Houghton
Poetry review – THE MAYDAY DIARIES: D A Prince admires Robin Houghton’s wide-ranging collection which succeeds in mixing the personal with the political
Is this the future? Tucked on the final page of The Mayday Diaries is a QR code which gives access to Robin Houghton reading some of her poems. I’ve never come across this in a collection before: I’m not sure how to respond. A book has always been a quiet thing, for me, yet I can see that for some readers this would enhance their reading experience. But for now I’ll settle into the poems on the page, the way I know.
This is a debut collection and an accomplished one. Although it’s organised in four sections there is no sense of these ever having been separate pamphlet-like units: the connections between the sections — and between poems — are subtle and part of the underlying strength of the collection’s structure as a whole. Houghton has paid close attention to how each poem will earn its place and contribute to the movement of themes and undercurrents at work here, as well as to the visual aspect. The variety of form ranges from the air and space around couplets, the neatness of tercets, the solid block of prose poems, the use of indents and italics, even a poem using redaction to powerful effect: flick through the pages for a preliminary overview and the variety is evident. The interplay of print and white page attracts the eye, even before the reading starts.
As with any good collection, this one repays a linear reading. The opening section (Part 1:”Tell me it never happened”) establishes Houghton’s clarity of observation and precision. Her poems centre on the sharp discomforts and power struggles of commercial office work in the 1990s, experienced from a woman’s viewpoint. Too few poets write about office work and its minutiae, despite it being the reality for many: these poems are a salutary reminder. Houghton nails it, beginning with “Work experience”
The phrase ‘awkward business’ is not just the office requirement that women should wear high heels but will stand for the whole of Houghton’s day job in marketing, along with the socialising and flings, fears and tensions, appraisals and meeting rooms (both Red and Blue). “Career as a caryatid” sums up, in a career-advice tone and two neatly balanced 7-line stanzas, how women were urged into office work
A small detail: the omission of capitals letters indicates a woman’s lack of presence in the workplace. There are four “Career as …” poems. Although the image of a caryatid is the most visual, the “…stink pipe” and “…Aperol spritz” amplify features of the job, while “… an archaeological find” brings in the uncovered remains of a PowerPoint presentation and a possible P45 ‘… in the mire/ and its bottomless pit of despondency.’ Any scraps of private life take place on the edges, even “On a day a nurse unstaples my breast” — a pain-filled title even before the physical precision of the poem. The only relaxation from the tensions of work pressures appears in ‘decree absolute’ — ‘…I’m stopped in a glorious moment/ of vacancy’
This should be a good moment (poets ration the use of ‘glorious’ to the highlights in a poem) but the reality of work tainting life cuts in. A list of what the poet would like to forget includes
There’s an unspoken — and unwritten — question underlying this opening section: is this all there is in life? It remains unanswered, with the final poem, “Speech”, a half-page prose poem which opens
The teasing echo of Sinatra’s My Way suggests a date, confirmed by the millennium bug and the uncertainty as 1999 tipped over into the unknowns of the twenty-first century. The shift into a new section, brings relief — and a longer poem, released from capital letters (in a positive way, this time) and formal punctuation, visual prompts of change. Even the title, “For Sagra, at the beginning” has a hint of hope while the subject — how to manoeuvre a car off a ferry when its doors are jammed — can be seen as a metaphor for the future
Faith and promise. When I started reading this collection I’d intended to read a few pages at a time, but the poems drew me on: I kept turning the pages, pushing forward, delaying the moment when I’d have to put the book down. Not that I wanted the clichéd comfort of a happy ending but those two words — faith, promise — held out an offer, a shift in the language. The poems dip back into school days, and stretch across women —Pia, Thais, both characters in Dante’s works — who are defiant and speak up for themselves. There are children, too: “Hazel is fascinated by space” is a prose poem about relative sizes, satisfying her curiosity. “Found at auction” is a poem interspersing mixed lots from an auctioneer’s catalogue, the detritus of cleared houses, with the poet’s searching
I looked for love among the dust-crates, the storage racks three fishing tackle boxes, a set of wheels and two keep nets, a folding tackle bag [ … ] I didn’t know what I was looking for, yet there it was a bag of objects including candle snuffers, miniature microscope and a Hoffman book a large pottery inkwell in the form of a car radiator a Jack Warner signed autobiography, Jack of all Trades some evening all enchanted, down among the lots collection of sheet music, some politically incorrect and some signedPart found poem, part simple narrative, it’s an effective way to bring the muddle of lives into confrontation with her own desires. Again there’s the allusion to a familiar song, one that flickers at the edge of memory. Variety of form, of subject — who could stop reading? In a section about family relationships — successful in that it isn’t pegged to the anecdotal but about how people interact — each narrative leaves questions, unanswered for both poet and reader. “Her mystery” evokes the physicality of a house but without explaining the essential core of her sister n
There is no single word for the space between sisters: it’s an under-explored area where sisterhood is a too often a cliché for closeness. This poem catches that idea of another space, and how hard it is to enter into: ‘it will go with her like the pause in the phone call’ shows the mystery. In “Confession” Houghton manages the tricky position of both being in the poem and observing herself, almost out-of-body —
It’s one of those poems where the reader is just slightly ahead of the poet, knowing this is about death, about the unreality of recognising what is happening, while the action is shown with filmic realism.
The poems are broadening in scope by this stage, part of the careful placing and structure of the collection, as though sharing with the reader how the world is a wider and much more human place than the 1990s commercial world. Burial at sea, the misery of the homebound commuter train, an elderly client escaping briefly from his carers: if I list the subject of Houghton’s poems it might make them sound as though they have no connection with each other but the connections echo across the collection as a whole. The final section expands her focus: the poems acknowledge the context of the political, contemporary world of refugees, human traffickers, war, the constant search for certainty in a desperate and sometimes despairing world. Appropriately it has the heading ‘Mayday’, the international cry for help.
“Song of ascent”, with its epigraph from Psalm 122 (‘May there be well-being within your ramparts, tranquillity in your palaces’), is in the voice of a grateful refugee landing on a shingle beach —
Unpunctuated lines give it a forward, headlong rush of relief: the reader can provide the ironies. We’ve already passed its peaceful counterpoint, “At last, overboard” in the previous section, where a man is buried at sea, with his family present and all in agreement.
“Long ride in a slow machine”, with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno, translated as ‘Behold the one that makes the whole world stink!’, is more direct:
Can anybody else read a political parallel into this? Pulling the poems together is “Problems”, a prose poem in five paragraphs, which mimics the style of those practical mathematical questions I dreaded at school:
The first paragraph is school-stuff and I am ten years old again. But the second paragraph poses a new problem: a tank manoeuvring in a narrow city street — ‘Find, in terms of feet, inches and hands the number of protesters it would take to stop the tank.’ This has jumped the decades within me, no longer school-stuff but calling to mind Prague, Tiananmen Square, more recent news. The third paragraph — and another problem — brings redaction into the poem. This is not here as the latest fashion in poetry but to capture the reader’s full attention: it deals with families manoeuvred to a border around burnt-out tanks and the units of measurement are ‘… candles nappies and the volume of xxx .’ The language of the problems and rational objectivity overlap: we are in today’s news, inescapably. Too often redaction is simply a poetic device: here it is effective in showing not only the reality of war but also how it’s blanked out, like an excuse to look away.
Balancing the political with the personal is tricky in a collection but Houghton has achieved it in The Mayday Diaries. Even the cover photograph, an assembly of scraps and objects that reflect her life — photos, notebooks, Filofax, candles half burnt out, wine glass (half-full and I’m sure that’s intentional) — is working to show the variety of what’s within the covers.
And the QR code? In the end I chose to ignore it. The poems spoke from the page, allowing their own time for reflection: that was enough for me but other readers might find the innovation of hearing the poems increases their reading pleasure. I hope it helps this collection reach the wide audience it deserves.