Poetry review – 55 DEVOTIONALS (AGAINST ERASURE): Peter Daniels considers Andrew McDonnell’s poems about loss and its inevitability
55 Devotionals (Against Erasure)
Andrew McDonnell
Broken Sleep Books, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-917617-58-1
76pp £12.99
This collection contains mostly prose poems, with a few in verse. The prose is well-tempered to what the poem is saying, sometimes simple information-giving sentences, sometimes focusing more on the texture of words as things. Things are significant, metonymic, building the picture of what these presences and absences create as the landscape of a life in which things and their absence have been noticed. In ‘Devotional for a Patio’ the space outside the pub is an actual thing not a metaphor, the stones having been laid by a man in the pub, who tells this to the young man working there, but “I was in my twenties and didn’t care for the impermanence of things”. In not acknowledging the man’s work he has been “complicit in erasure, and he knew it as his tone turned bitter”. The unregarded patio occurs to him as the same kind of erasure as his awkward lack of feelings in a cathedral with his son, at lighting candles for his own father who built roads and ploughed fields. This poem uses the word “erasure” which is not so present elsewhere, and is also the most connected with religious prayer, but the stance of devotion to the loss, failure, and disappearance of things and experiences is what drives the book.
The background to personal loss is erasure of landscapes as human habitats, in Kent where the poet grew up in the rural working class, and elsewhere. Some are lost to the motorways his father built after leaving farm work, some take a longer duration. “England is just a haunted dancehall where the skeletons circle with empty dance cards” (‘Devotional for West Stow Anglo Saxon Village’). McDonnell looks at how erasure is part of existence – especially the loss of childhood into becoming adult, looking at his relationship with his father, his own with his son, and at the lost child within himself who keeps surfacing despite being his “dead self”: “Tell me, what is the adult?” (‘Devotional for Children’s Corner’). Who is the man himself, and what is masculinity? There are eight poems called ‘Devotional for a Problem of Masculinity’ in which McDonnell plays very effectively with the hidden and blatant meanings of manhood in things, e.g. “These were the masters of a galaxy of spare parts, pipes and bolts and male and female fittings”, or more unexpected expressions for it – “What quivery pink cells I am on the motorway, shimmering in the fast lane like the windows of a distant house at midday.” His fatherhood’s responsibilities include watching his children learn about loss:
The same weekend I watched my children’s sandcastle be broken by the sea.
My son, he points at the waves, but says nothing as words will not stop the
incoming tide.
(‘Saturday in July’)
The opening poem, ‘Devotional for a Writing Manifesto’ sets out the intention of using words despite this, which is particularly with regard to erasure of working class experience:
Let them know we are coming for them with words that are alive. Words
that make us visible. Voices that resist.
Andrew McDonnell has found words a versatile vehicle for registering and remembering what matters.
Aug 7 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Andrew McDonnell
Poetry review – 55 DEVOTIONALS (AGAINST ERASURE): Peter Daniels considers Andrew McDonnell’s poems about loss and its inevitability
55 Devotionals (Against Erasure)
Andrew McDonnell
Broken Sleep Books, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-917617-58-1
76pp £12.99
This collection contains mostly prose poems, with a few in verse. The prose is well-tempered to what the poem is saying, sometimes simple information-giving sentences, sometimes focusing more on the texture of words as things. Things are significant, metonymic, building the picture of what these presences and absences create as the landscape of a life in which things and their absence have been noticed. In ‘Devotional for a Patio’ the space outside the pub is an actual thing not a metaphor, the stones having been laid by a man in the pub, who tells this to the young man working there, but “I was in my twenties and didn’t care for the impermanence of things”. In not acknowledging the man’s work he has been “complicit in erasure, and he knew it as his tone turned bitter”. The unregarded patio occurs to him as the same kind of erasure as his awkward lack of feelings in a cathedral with his son, at lighting candles for his own father who built roads and ploughed fields. This poem uses the word “erasure” which is not so present elsewhere, and is also the most connected with religious prayer, but the stance of devotion to the loss, failure, and disappearance of things and experiences is what drives the book.
The background to personal loss is erasure of landscapes as human habitats, in Kent where the poet grew up in the rural working class, and elsewhere. Some are lost to the motorways his father built after leaving farm work, some take a longer duration. “England is just a haunted dancehall where the skeletons circle with empty dance cards” (‘Devotional for West Stow Anglo Saxon Village’). McDonnell looks at how erasure is part of existence – especially the loss of childhood into becoming adult, looking at his relationship with his father, his own with his son, and at the lost child within himself who keeps surfacing despite being his “dead self”: “Tell me, what is the adult?” (‘Devotional for Children’s Corner’). Who is the man himself, and what is masculinity? There are eight poems called ‘Devotional for a Problem of Masculinity’ in which McDonnell plays very effectively with the hidden and blatant meanings of manhood in things, e.g. “These were the masters of a galaxy of spare parts, pipes and bolts and male and female fittings”, or more unexpected expressions for it – “What quivery pink cells I am on the motorway, shimmering in the fast lane like the windows of a distant house at midday.” His fatherhood’s responsibilities include watching his children learn about loss:
The same weekend I watched my children’s sandcastle be broken by the sea.
My son, he points at the waves, but says nothing as words will not stop the
incoming tide.
(‘Saturday in July’)
The opening poem, ‘Devotional for a Writing Manifesto’ sets out the intention of using words despite this, which is particularly with regard to erasure of working class experience:
Let them know we are coming for them with words that are alive. Words
that make us visible. Voices that resist.
Andrew McDonnell has found words a versatile vehicle for registering and remembering what matters.