Poetry review – SIGNALS TO THE DISAPPEARING SHORE: Kate Ashton is moved and impressed by these poems in which Aidan Semmens confronts dark episodes in world history, both past and present
Signals to the Disappearing Shore
Aidan Semmens
Shearsman Books 2026
ISBN 9781848617209
£10.95
Apocalyptic is the best descriptor for Aidan Semmens’ new collection, and the one that most nearly indicates its gravitas. Signals to the Disappearing Shore should be required reading for younger generations, for here is material of which most now know nothing and yet it will shape their future – the future of us all. Humbling in its quiet authority, range and erudition, this stunning collection serves both as humanity’s memento mori and dire warning, in that order. Here, for the committed doom-scroller and Instagram fan, is some content they really can’t afford to miss.
With the first poem describing migration by boat – “for how else would they come?” – Semmens sets the scene for his all-encompassing circular narrative of human displacement, dereliction, devastation and despair. We soon learn it’s no simple lesson we’re in for, but a full-on historically contextualised report of man’s inhumanity to man, augmented with some consciousness-raising on our more clandestine rapes of pristine nature. A crystal-clear panorama of our incapacity to learn from our mistakes, and the calamities we do our best to forget while we create more.
The numinous sequence A Raga for Enheduana chronicles the constant rise and demise throughout history of female wisdom. In elemental couplet form, this sustained and beautifully modulated piece transcends analysis: it is pure poetic power. The Sumerian poet and high-priestess Enheduana (circa. 2300 BCE) is the world’s first named writer. Credited with having melded the Sumerian gods with the Akkadian, she wrote the first sacred texts, prayers and hymns used throughout the ancient world, creating the founding literary paradigms for today.
Married to the moon, Enheduana
is the mortal embodiment,
a living cultic likeness
of the astral goddess Ishtar Inanna,
consort of the wise one Nanna
whose name may be Sin,
whose crescent horns
herd the stars like cattle
while she, cast alone
into the rebel-held wilderness,
must yet prepare sacrificial feasts
for errant deities
and centuries of dead women
interred beneath the floors.
It is her voice that echoes throughout this book, naming atrocity and perpetrator, ancient and modern alike, juxtaposed in their equal iniquity: ‘Achilles / Menahem / Modi / Netanyahu’. Sometimes her tone is tender… ‘Enheduana sings to herself as she writes / imagining the divinity of strangers, / the strangeness of divinity that inheres / in the sand, the soil / the ripening grain’. Priestess the authenticity and authorship of whose works we have dared dispute, the veiled one, she lost in translation: ‘yet / while we are fated to a place in antiquity / Enheduana composes only modern verse / commands the unhoused exile ‘Sail / your boat to another shore’…
She says ‘Now they bring me funeral gifts,
Am I no longer living?’
Travelling by train through Polish fields of ‘white storks and country people’ to Bia?ystok, we find shoppers and commuters crowding a steel-ribbed footbridge and neoclassical brickwork reminder of the advent of steam in tsarist times, only to arrive at this ‘site of pogrom and transit prison / synagogue incineration and labour camp’ reached by titular ‘Different trains’. Unease creeps into and through us. Urban domesticity fails to provide the safety we crave in “Cities of the lost”, where inhabitants of ‘Dwellings and Apartments’ ‘open the fridge door: we live / in a neat bewilderment between these walls.’ Thus hunted, haunted, we are drawn into the deeper darknesses of our atomic age, this courageous poet’s longtime preoccupation and concern.
Less than a seventy-year lifespan ago, a generation grew up in terror of The Bomb. Five years after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis we were celebrating a summer of love, safe in the knowledge that our leaders had signed a nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Times change, sometimes for the better, and memory may act as catalyst. In ‘Household appliances’ and ‘Protect and survive’ Semmens’ presents unvarnished ‘lived experience’ of the prospect of imminent nuclear annihilation mediated by puerile government instructions for protective measures to be taken at home; propaganda so transparently futile it spread silent terror door-to-door.
The first-person narrator of “Stories about the wind” tells of launch sites buried beneath the desert, ‘rattlers won’t get past the blast doors / to the no lone zone’. Rehearsals are carefully documented, complete with specs: the B61-12 / is a nuclear gravity bomb / the test flight employed / no highly enriched uranium / or plutonium, consistent / with test treaty obligations / in a demonstration of effective / end to end performance’. Aircraft detailed to carry death are named for Hollywood stars, sweethearts, and especially Enola Gay Tibbets, from which pilot Colonel Paul ‘chooses to deliver a Little Boy / in the name of his mother’.
And it’s not over yet. The upgrade, we learn, is a dumb bomb whereby nuclear science has enhanced national security via improved accuracy and lower yield:
targets and ballistic calculations
calibrated to a fine degree of death
unless your walkie-talkie fucks the guidance
fissile plutonium has a half-life
of a thousand human generations
the fires of Hiroshima were mostly caused
by kerosene cookers preparing breakfast
knocked over by the percussion wave
Oshita-chan lived approximately
12 hours after pikadon
(As a word of explanation for that final word, the flash of the A-bomb, 100 times brighter than the sun, is called “PICA”, and the enormous shock wave which came right after the flash is called “DON”. Picadon was a Japanese short animated film made in 1978, the first attempt to portray the Hiroshima catastrophe.)
An opening quote from Winston Churchill almost stops the breath before the poem can be read: “The atomic bomb is not unmanageable as an instrument of war.” The eyewitness describes a test device being ‘wrangled’ beneath a test tower while jokes are made about the possibility of obliterating New Mexico or igniting the atmosphere. ‘Cameras roll, they play / the star-spangled banner / then the countdown / then the flash, my hands / grow warm. It was terrible / it all worked; it was wonderful, / it was bright and beautiful / and I thought of the people / next time.’ That next time is activated by an ‘Operations order’ noting preceding religious services: Catholic first, and thirty minutes later Protestant.
Short resumés follow, written by more who were there, the pilot who dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima on August 6, and one Yoshiro Yamawaki, who watched his father’s factory vanish beneath ‘Fat Man’ on August 9 in Nagasaki. He says they tried to take something for burial, but once outside his father’s burned and bloated body the skull crumbles at their touch and half-burned brains come tumbling out:
‘When I look back at our history, it is very regrettable.
Please look at this photograph.’
We do not keep these things to ourselves. Beneath a majestic volcanic ridge in Nevada lies the concrete-swaddled mass of a reactor, repository of spent nuclear waste that ‘blasphemes against the sky’. Yucca Mountain, sacred to the Navajo Nation, is the site of homework for the obliteration of Hiroshima. Traditional medicinal plants now grow imbued with radiotoxic metals. Handling and processing uranium left Navajo hands exfoliating, deadly particles lodged in skin, hair, lungs awaiting their cytotoxic moment. On and on goes the predatory inventory of acquisition, exploitation and destruction, from pristine Pacific atolls rendered uninhabitable by nuclear tests to British wetlands polluted as nuclear power plants degenerate.
And then there is the plague, its common comeback. Semmens deals with Covid in his book’s long closing sequence with reference to the most enigmatic ancient Greek of all, apart, that is, from the sacred Pythia herself (woman’s wisdom):
Read in a certain way, Herodotus says
what your television never will,
that today’s edicts are the actions
of political dinosaurs, selfserving and vile,
unaware of the numbering of their days.
‘Where does this leave language?’ asks the poet.
And ‘After the minuet’, ‘Is it true that you’re leaving tomorrow?’
Semmens is most closely associated as a poet with modernism, having founded and edited the online poetry magazine Molly Bloom. Of his seven volumes of poetry, each collection adopts a singularly combative attitude towards political and historical world event, meeting Pound’s maxim of “Make it new”. The ethos is one of self-conscious, radical breaking with traditional form and structure so as most effectively to express contemporary sensibilities and preoccupations. The result, in Semmens poetry, is often playful, sometimes overtly hilarious and always deeply serious. Darkness is cloaked in learning, lightly worn, or thrown suddenly into stark relief by a remark in common speech. A terrifying theme may simply be rendered in soft focus – Semmens is also a widely published photographer.
The effect of wordplay and such skilled formal flux is very immediate, often in the form of a sort of bewildered shock as apparently documentary reportage collapses into vernacular or slang. Such verbal acrobatics allow content to find its own best mode of expression while the poet remains in complete control, capable at any moment of returning for a single instance to traditional poetic form: for instance, one collection, The Book of Isaac (Parlor Press, 2013) comprises 56 ‘distressed’ sonnets. A master of controlled experimentation, Semmens is constantly locating and relocating the fulcrum of a poem, circumnavigating detours into historical, psychological, geographical and even theological context.
As regards this latest book, what utter joy, what fresh air rushing in to liberate mind and lungs, there is to be found in this encounter with a poetics of the world. Released from the morbid introspection of confessional poetry and sentimentality posing as ‘nature writing’ that currently pervade the British literary landscape, we find our feet finally on firm ground.
We may not entirely like the view from here, but it’s the only one we’ve left ourselves.
Aug 27 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Aidan Semmens
Poetry review – SIGNALS TO THE DISAPPEARING SHORE: Kate Ashton is moved and impressed by these poems in which Aidan Semmens confronts dark episodes in world history, both past and present
Signals to the Disappearing Shore
Aidan Semmens
Shearsman Books 2026
ISBN 9781848617209
£10.95
Apocalyptic is the best descriptor for Aidan Semmens’ new collection, and the one that most nearly indicates its gravitas. Signals to the Disappearing Shore should be required reading for younger generations, for here is material of which most now know nothing and yet it will shape their future – the future of us all. Humbling in its quiet authority, range and erudition, this stunning collection serves both as humanity’s memento mori and dire warning, in that order. Here, for the committed doom-scroller and Instagram fan, is some content they really can’t afford to miss.
With the first poem describing migration by boat – “for how else would they come?” – Semmens sets the scene for his all-encompassing circular narrative of human displacement, dereliction, devastation and despair. We soon learn it’s no simple lesson we’re in for, but a full-on historically contextualised report of man’s inhumanity to man, augmented with some consciousness-raising on our more clandestine rapes of pristine nature. A crystal-clear panorama of our incapacity to learn from our mistakes, and the calamities we do our best to forget while we create more.
The numinous sequence A Raga for Enheduana chronicles the constant rise and demise throughout history of female wisdom. In elemental couplet form, this sustained and beautifully modulated piece transcends analysis: it is pure poetic power. The Sumerian poet and high-priestess Enheduana (circa. 2300 BCE) is the world’s first named writer. Credited with having melded the Sumerian gods with the Akkadian, she wrote the first sacred texts, prayers and hymns used throughout the ancient world, creating the founding literary paradigms for today.
Married to the moon, Enheduana
is the mortal embodiment,
a living cultic likeness
of the astral goddess Ishtar Inanna,
consort of the wise one Nanna
whose name may be Sin,
whose crescent horns
herd the stars like cattle
while she, cast alone
into the rebel-held wilderness,
must yet prepare sacrificial feasts
for errant deities
and centuries of dead women
interred beneath the floors.
It is her voice that echoes throughout this book, naming atrocity and perpetrator, ancient and modern alike, juxtaposed in their equal iniquity: ‘Achilles / Menahem / Modi / Netanyahu’. Sometimes her tone is tender… ‘Enheduana sings to herself as she writes / imagining the divinity of strangers, / the strangeness of divinity that inheres / in the sand, the soil / the ripening grain’. Priestess the authenticity and authorship of whose works we have dared dispute, the veiled one, she lost in translation: ‘yet / while we are fated to a place in antiquity / Enheduana composes only modern verse / commands the unhoused exile ‘Sail / your boat to another shore’…
She says ‘Now they bring me funeral gifts,
Am I no longer living?’
Travelling by train through Polish fields of ‘white storks and country people’ to Bia?ystok, we find shoppers and commuters crowding a steel-ribbed footbridge and neoclassical brickwork reminder of the advent of steam in tsarist times, only to arrive at this ‘site of pogrom and transit prison / synagogue incineration and labour camp’ reached by titular ‘Different trains’. Unease creeps into and through us. Urban domesticity fails to provide the safety we crave in “Cities of the lost”, where inhabitants of ‘Dwellings and Apartments’ ‘open the fridge door: we live / in a neat bewilderment between these walls.’ Thus hunted, haunted, we are drawn into the deeper darknesses of our atomic age, this courageous poet’s longtime preoccupation and concern.
Less than a seventy-year lifespan ago, a generation grew up in terror of The Bomb. Five years after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis we were celebrating a summer of love, safe in the knowledge that our leaders had signed a nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Times change, sometimes for the better, and memory may act as catalyst. In ‘Household appliances’ and ‘Protect and survive’ Semmens’ presents unvarnished ‘lived experience’ of the prospect of imminent nuclear annihilation mediated by puerile government instructions for protective measures to be taken at home; propaganda so transparently futile it spread silent terror door-to-door.
The first-person narrator of “Stories about the wind” tells of launch sites buried beneath the desert, ‘rattlers won’t get past the blast doors / to the no lone zone’. Rehearsals are carefully documented, complete with specs: the B61-12 / is a nuclear gravity bomb / the test flight employed / no highly enriched uranium / or plutonium, consistent / with test treaty obligations / in a demonstration of effective / end to end performance’. Aircraft detailed to carry death are named for Hollywood stars, sweethearts, and especially Enola Gay Tibbets, from which pilot Colonel Paul ‘chooses to deliver a Little Boy / in the name of his mother’.
And it’s not over yet. The upgrade, we learn, is a dumb bomb whereby nuclear science has enhanced national security via improved accuracy and lower yield:
targets and ballistic calculations
calibrated to a fine degree of death
unless your walkie-talkie fucks the guidance
fissile plutonium has a half-life
of a thousand human generations
the fires of Hiroshima were mostly caused
by kerosene cookers preparing breakfast
knocked over by the percussion wave
Oshita-chan lived approximately
12 hours after pikadon
(As a word of explanation for that final word, the flash of the A-bomb, 100 times brighter than the sun, is called “PICA”, and the enormous shock wave which came right after the flash is called “DON”. Picadon was a Japanese short animated film made in 1978, the first attempt to portray the Hiroshima catastrophe.)
An opening quote from Winston Churchill almost stops the breath before the poem can be read: “The atomic bomb is not unmanageable as an instrument of war.” The eyewitness describes a test device being ‘wrangled’ beneath a test tower while jokes are made about the possibility of obliterating New Mexico or igniting the atmosphere. ‘Cameras roll, they play / the star-spangled banner / then the countdown / then the flash, my hands / grow warm. It was terrible / it all worked; it was wonderful, / it was bright and beautiful / and I thought of the people / next time.’ That next time is activated by an ‘Operations order’ noting preceding religious services: Catholic first, and thirty minutes later Protestant.
Short resumés follow, written by more who were there, the pilot who dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima on August 6, and one Yoshiro Yamawaki, who watched his father’s factory vanish beneath ‘Fat Man’ on August 9 in Nagasaki. He says they tried to take something for burial, but once outside his father’s burned and bloated body the skull crumbles at their touch and half-burned brains come tumbling out:
‘When I look back at our history, it is very regrettable.
Please look at this photograph.’
We do not keep these things to ourselves. Beneath a majestic volcanic ridge in Nevada lies the concrete-swaddled mass of a reactor, repository of spent nuclear waste that ‘blasphemes against the sky’. Yucca Mountain, sacred to the Navajo Nation, is the site of homework for the obliteration of Hiroshima. Traditional medicinal plants now grow imbued with radiotoxic metals. Handling and processing uranium left Navajo hands exfoliating, deadly particles lodged in skin, hair, lungs awaiting their cytotoxic moment. On and on goes the predatory inventory of acquisition, exploitation and destruction, from pristine Pacific atolls rendered uninhabitable by nuclear tests to British wetlands polluted as nuclear power plants degenerate.
And then there is the plague, its common comeback. Semmens deals with Covid in his book’s long closing sequence with reference to the most enigmatic ancient Greek of all, apart, that is, from the sacred Pythia herself (woman’s wisdom):
Read in a certain way, Herodotus says
what your television never will,
that today’s edicts are the actions
of political dinosaurs, selfserving and vile,
unaware of the numbering of their days.
‘Where does this leave language?’ asks the poet.
And ‘After the minuet’, ‘Is it true that you’re leaving tomorrow?’
Semmens is most closely associated as a poet with modernism, having founded and edited the online poetry magazine Molly Bloom. Of his seven volumes of poetry, each collection adopts a singularly combative attitude towards political and historical world event, meeting Pound’s maxim of “Make it new”. The ethos is one of self-conscious, radical breaking with traditional form and structure so as most effectively to express contemporary sensibilities and preoccupations. The result, in Semmens poetry, is often playful, sometimes overtly hilarious and always deeply serious. Darkness is cloaked in learning, lightly worn, or thrown suddenly into stark relief by a remark in common speech. A terrifying theme may simply be rendered in soft focus – Semmens is also a widely published photographer.
The effect of wordplay and such skilled formal flux is very immediate, often in the form of a sort of bewildered shock as apparently documentary reportage collapses into vernacular or slang. Such verbal acrobatics allow content to find its own best mode of expression while the poet remains in complete control, capable at any moment of returning for a single instance to traditional poetic form: for instance, one collection, The Book of Isaac (Parlor Press, 2013) comprises 56 ‘distressed’ sonnets. A master of controlled experimentation, Semmens is constantly locating and relocating the fulcrum of a poem, circumnavigating detours into historical, psychological, geographical and even theological context.
As regards this latest book, what utter joy, what fresh air rushing in to liberate mind and lungs, there is to be found in this encounter with a poetics of the world. Released from the morbid introspection of confessional poetry and sentimentality posing as ‘nature writing’ that currently pervade the British literary landscape, we find our feet finally on firm ground.
We may not entirely like the view from here, but it’s the only one we’ve left ourselves.