Poetry review – THE LAST ONE PICKED: D A Prince recognizes how far Stuart Handysides has developed his craft and experience before producing a first collection
the last one picked
Stuart Handysides
Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2025
ISBN 978-1-0684934-2-3
£9.50
How many poets have the courage to open a collection with a fully-rhymed sonnet? The current wisdom is that rhyme is old-fashioned and the sonnet must be re-invented: innovation and novelty are what the aspiring poet should aim for. Yet in the opening poem of the last one picked Stuart Handysides has chosen to balance the Shakespearean sonnet form against the equally unfashionable subjects of private doubts and the role of reticence. It works — and sets the tone for the rest of this debut collection.
Good ordering of poems is the foundation of any collection and Handysides shows how well he understands this. He places his poems carefully to let his evolving themes emerge as though in conversation with each other. One strand is his experience of growing up in what the back cover calls ‘a deeply religious family’.
In “Unshriven” (the opening poem) the octet reflects on the ‘confessions’ it’s tricky to make, the ones you’re not sure you can trust to friends. Yet not making them risks leaving them ‘un-exorcised’. Here Handysides uses ‘you’: is he talking to himself or identifying this feeling in the reader? Both, I think. In the sextet, however, he closes in to the first person and his own discomfort
But maybe that’s just me, and those I see
whose words spill out unchecked, as it appears,
may in effect be having therapy:
they clear their minds, leave nothing in arrears,
while I flick through the stories left untold
and wonder if I’ll ever be so bold.
It makes for a good opening: unforced, light touch, and aligning poet and reader in a recognition of private doubts and the way they cling. Throughout this collection Handysides reveals his ear for conversational syntax – those everyday speech rhythms that drop easily into iambic pentameter – and also for the conditional. At first glance it looks easy but getting the balance right, controlling the play between question and self — but without descending into banality — is a skill developed over years, a craft which Handysides has worked at. The vocabulary of confession in the religious sense slips almost unnoticed into the poem but he builds on it. His personal uncertainty is countered in the following poem “Quality time: After Genesis, chapter 22”, with its opening tercet
God is God. Like the air, or water, like the stars
essential, fundamental — but needy
always wants to know you’ll put him first.
The story of Abraham and Isaac, in Isaac’s voice — a whiny teenager, down to ‘let me go, I’ll tell Mum’. Neither character is named directly so it’s the reader who provides the biblical background. The question the poem raises is this: how did father and son get on afterwards? Abraham’s side of the story is straight-forward — ‘He’s passed the test; he’s put God first.’ The scriptural element is clear and tidy but then there’s the family relationship, Isaac’s side:
But now he has to live with me.
And I with him.
Shamed in church for misbehaving during his father’s sermon (“Sinner, brought up short”), awareness that his religious life lacked saints —‘our faith supplied a hotline to the Lord’ — and a rueful recognition that ‘… it is a cruel world/ the meek have not inherited as yet’ (‘ Good luck petitioning the patron saint of lost causes’) are all part of childhood’s tensions. The comedy and fears of growing up, for adults and children, is balanced in the nicely-titled “Kept from and in the dark” —
We knew we weren’t to go in people’s cars
and there was something wrong with strangers’ sweets.
But innocence can turn to tragedy, as it did for ‘… the ones/ who perished on the moors not far away’. Handysides doesn’t need to provide footnotes: he writes for readers who can supply background, and a wide-ranging one.
On a lighter note, who remembers collecting the fifty picture card sets in packets of PG Tips? I can still recall the thrill of finding the last card in the Wild Flower set. Handysides uses the History of the Motor Car set as a basis not just for the social activity of swapping duplicates at school but for joining up distant family — ‘We wrote to aunts and uncles who we didn’t see’ — and how frequently they disappointed. Disappointment is an inevitable part of childhood, and gives the collection its title. The family car looked like ‘a shed on wheels’ —
if it had been a boy or girl at school
it would have been the last one picked
(from “Concours d’élégance”)
— much like Handysides himself in “I should have played more football”, wistfully regretting being an outsider among boys for whom football was everything, while he was not even able to support the local team because his family treated Saturdays as days of contemplation. That motif of regret threads through the poems, whether in “Family Reunion” — ‘It’s what you want the most, or so you think.’ — or “This poem is the souvenir I failed to buy”, about not buying books in San Francisco’s City Lights bookshop —
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.
Perhaps this reflective voice is inevitable in a debut collection from an older poet: Handysides is a retired GP and although he keeps that detail from most of the poems it surfaces in “Spring morning in the surgery”, showing, quietly, how in the midst of life we are in death. An ordinary day, a patient who has to be told — ‘He needs some tests, he has to be referred.’ There’s a doctor’s side, too —
He may not want to see me after this
– he was OK until he came to me,
I’ll be the one who gave him his disease.
Monosyllables and colloquial vocabulary: this is a glimpse of the every-day of working life, and death.
Handysides reaches an accommodation with his father, as “Crossed threads’”shows, using his father’s phrase ‘It might come in handy.’ when there’s a ‘rusty six-millimetre bolt/ and nut I’ve clocked on the ground.’, something that might be useful. His father would have done the same and he honours the memory of men like that —
Such was their way, these gentle men, who built
their strength through work, who served their time,
learnt to cut square, drive nails straight
craft wood and hammer steel to shape
who never lifted weights for their own sake
their jobs the only gym they knew
books and meeting when their work was through.
Language and subject are well-matched here, as they are throughout the collection The final poem, “Somewhere still to go”, an unrhymed sonnet about his parents’ grave, gives a quiet resolution — and an honest one. Look closely at ‘still’: there’are layers of meaning there. There’s an echo of Larkin in the phrasing, too: Handysides has earlier used Larkin’s “Church Going” as a way into his own poem, and he’s tuned to Larkin’s muted, almost-apologetic tone. It’s an emotion many readers will recognise, I suspect.
I seldom visit: faded plastic flowers
and silk that’s frayed suggest half-hearted care
that wouldn’t really cut it if they know.
But something in the place where less and less
remains of their remains retains its force,
a sense of having come from somewhere,
having somewhere still to go.
He began with a fully-rhymed sonnet; he ends with an unrhymed one. Handysides understands his craft but doesn’t foreground it: it’s organic. This collection blends the small comedies and sadnesses of life very well, and it’s how many of us have lived, with our various guilts and regrets and embarrassments. I’m glad Handysides never played football: if he had we might never have had these poems. This is a collection that could encourage non-poetry readers to re-think the view that ‘poetry’s not for me’ — and one that habitual readers will enjoy. I hope a second collection will follow.
Apr 21 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Stuart Handysides
Poetry review – THE LAST ONE PICKED: D A Prince recognizes how far Stuart Handysides has developed his craft and experience before producing a first collection
the last one picked
Stuart Handysides
Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2025
ISBN 978-1-0684934-2-3
£9.50
How many poets have the courage to open a collection with a fully-rhymed sonnet? The current wisdom is that rhyme is old-fashioned and the sonnet must be re-invented: innovation and novelty are what the aspiring poet should aim for. Yet in the opening poem of the last one picked Stuart Handysides has chosen to balance the Shakespearean sonnet form against the equally unfashionable subjects of private doubts and the role of reticence. It works — and sets the tone for the rest of this debut collection.
Good ordering of poems is the foundation of any collection and Handysides shows how well he understands this. He places his poems carefully to let his evolving themes emerge as though in conversation with each other. One strand is his experience of growing up in what the back cover calls ‘a deeply religious family’.
In “Unshriven” (the opening poem) the octet reflects on the ‘confessions’ it’s tricky to make, the ones you’re not sure you can trust to friends. Yet not making them risks leaving them ‘un-exorcised’. Here Handysides uses ‘you’: is he talking to himself or identifying this feeling in the reader? Both, I think. In the sextet, however, he closes in to the first person and his own discomfort
But maybe that’s just me, and those I see
whose words spill out unchecked, as it appears,
may in effect be having therapy:
they clear their minds, leave nothing in arrears,
while I flick through the stories left untold
and wonder if I’ll ever be so bold.
It makes for a good opening: unforced, light touch, and aligning poet and reader in a recognition of private doubts and the way they cling. Throughout this collection Handysides reveals his ear for conversational syntax – those everyday speech rhythms that drop easily into iambic pentameter – and also for the conditional. At first glance it looks easy but getting the balance right, controlling the play between question and self — but without descending into banality — is a skill developed over years, a craft which Handysides has worked at. The vocabulary of confession in the religious sense slips almost unnoticed into the poem but he builds on it. His personal uncertainty is countered in the following poem “Quality time: After Genesis, chapter 22”, with its opening tercet
God is God. Like the air, or water, like the stars
essential, fundamental — but needy
always wants to know you’ll put him first.
The story of Abraham and Isaac, in Isaac’s voice — a whiny teenager, down to ‘let me go, I’ll tell Mum’. Neither character is named directly so it’s the reader who provides the biblical background. The question the poem raises is this: how did father and son get on afterwards? Abraham’s side of the story is straight-forward — ‘He’s passed the test; he’s put God first.’ The scriptural element is clear and tidy but then there’s the family relationship, Isaac’s side:
But now he has to live with me.
And I with him.
Shamed in church for misbehaving during his father’s sermon (“Sinner, brought up short”), awareness that his religious life lacked saints —‘our faith supplied a hotline to the Lord’ — and a rueful recognition that ‘… it is a cruel world/ the meek have not inherited as yet’ (‘ Good luck petitioning the patron saint of lost causes’) are all part of childhood’s tensions. The comedy and fears of growing up, for adults and children, is balanced in the nicely-titled “Kept from and in the dark” —
We knew we weren’t to go in people’s cars
and there was something wrong with strangers’ sweets.
But innocence can turn to tragedy, as it did for ‘… the ones/ who perished on the moors not far away’. Handysides doesn’t need to provide footnotes: he writes for readers who can supply background, and a wide-ranging one.
On a lighter note, who remembers collecting the fifty picture card sets in packets of PG Tips? I can still recall the thrill of finding the last card in the Wild Flower set. Handysides uses the History of the Motor Car set as a basis not just for the social activity of swapping duplicates at school but for joining up distant family — ‘We wrote to aunts and uncles who we didn’t see’ — and how frequently they disappointed. Disappointment is an inevitable part of childhood, and gives the collection its title. The family car looked like ‘a shed on wheels’ —
if it had been a boy or girl at school
it would have been the last one picked
(from “Concours d’élégance”)
— much like Handysides himself in “I should have played more football”, wistfully regretting being an outsider among boys for whom football was everything, while he was not even able to support the local team because his family treated Saturdays as days of contemplation. That motif of regret threads through the poems, whether in “Family Reunion” — ‘It’s what you want the most, or so you think.’ — or “This poem is the souvenir I failed to buy”, about not buying books in San Francisco’s City Lights bookshop —
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.
Perhaps this reflective voice is inevitable in a debut collection from an older poet: Handysides is a retired GP and although he keeps that detail from most of the poems it surfaces in “Spring morning in the surgery”, showing, quietly, how in the midst of life we are in death. An ordinary day, a patient who has to be told — ‘He needs some tests, he has to be referred.’ There’s a doctor’s side, too —
He may not want to see me after this
– he was OK until he came to me,
I’ll be the one who gave him his disease.
Monosyllables and colloquial vocabulary: this is a glimpse of the every-day of working life, and death.
Handysides reaches an accommodation with his father, as “Crossed threads’”shows, using his father’s phrase ‘It might come in handy.’ when there’s a ‘rusty six-millimetre bolt/ and nut I’ve clocked on the ground.’, something that might be useful. His father would have done the same and he honours the memory of men like that —
Such was their way, these gentle men, who built
their strength through work, who served their time,
learnt to cut square, drive nails straight
craft wood and hammer steel to shape
who never lifted weights for their own sake
their jobs the only gym they knew
books and meeting when their work was through.
Language and subject are well-matched here, as they are throughout the collection The final poem, “Somewhere still to go”, an unrhymed sonnet about his parents’ grave, gives a quiet resolution — and an honest one. Look closely at ‘still’: there’are layers of meaning there. There’s an echo of Larkin in the phrasing, too: Handysides has earlier used Larkin’s “Church Going” as a way into his own poem, and he’s tuned to Larkin’s muted, almost-apologetic tone. It’s an emotion many readers will recognise, I suspect.
I seldom visit: faded plastic flowers
and silk that’s frayed suggest half-hearted care
that wouldn’t really cut it if they know.
But something in the place where less and less
remains of their remains retains its force,
a sense of having come from somewhere,
having somewhere still to go.
He began with a fully-rhymed sonnet; he ends with an unrhymed one. Handysides understands his craft but doesn’t foreground it: it’s organic. This collection blends the small comedies and sadnesses of life very well, and it’s how many of us have lived, with our various guilts and regrets and embarrassments. I’m glad Handysides never played football: if he had we might never have had these poems. This is a collection that could encourage non-poetry readers to re-think the view that ‘poetry’s not for me’ — and one that habitual readers will enjoy. I hope a second collection will follow.