Art Sonnet Chain, 9: Jacqueline Saphra

June 13, 2026June 14, 2026 W N Herbert Art Sonnet Chain All My Mad Mothers, Art Sonnet Chain, Garm Magazine, jacqueline-saphra, Nancy Campbell, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Nine Arches Press, Poets for the Planet, Sophie Herxheimer, The Poetry School, Tove Jansson, Velvel’s Violin

Where there’s all this to undo, all this to unmake
we dare not be afraid. Time is a wheel
and Tove sees the future turning, breaks
into this madhouse, toyshop of the soul
grown grimy in a world submerged in loss
where children drink the dark like mothers’ milk.
Hell is rising: Heil the tyrant! cry the dolls
as model soldiers gather for the kill
on toy ships, playing with their tiny guns.
Be brave, says Tove, death is round the back
doing trade in poison gas and neutron bombs;
great floods are coming, read the almanac,
raise your sails. Evil will win. Love will too.
It’s possible both certainties are true.

Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, librettist and activist, author of nine plays, five chapbooks and five poetry collections including the T.S Eliot Prize-shortlisted All My Mad Mothers from Nine Arches Press. Her most recent collection, Velvel’s Violin, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Radio 4 Extra Poetry Book of the month. She teaches for The Poetry School and is a founder member of Poets for The Planet.

Tove Jansson’s illustrations and covers for the satirical magazine Garm included fearless criticism of Nazism both before and during World War 2. In the work referred to here, from 1935, she depicts a toyshop filled with dolls giving Nazi salutes.

Read more about Jansson’s anti-fascist art here.

Art Sonnet Chain, 8: Alison Winch

May 30, 2026May 30, 2026 W N Herbert Art Sonnet Chain Alison Winch, Art Sonnet Chain, Darling It’s Me, Lettuces, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Penned in the Margins, Routledge, The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism

Alison Winch writes poems about lettuces and other significant topics, as well as academic stuff on tech, media and markets. Her poetry collection is Darling, It’s Me (Penned in the Margins) and she co-wrote The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism (Routledge).

Art Sonnet Chain, 7: Pascale Petit

May 16, 2026May 16, 2026 W N Herbert Art Sonnet Chain Art Sonnet Chain, Beast, Bloodaxe Books, Ice Tree Canopy, Ice Tree Sonnet, Mama Amazonica, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Pascale Petit, Poetry Book Society, Royal College of Art, RSL Ondaatje Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize, The Forward Prizes, The Laurel Prize, Tiger Girl, Wales Book of the Year

Ice Tree Sonnet

Bring me water, bring me snow, bring me ice.
I’m turning myself into a tree with icicle branches,
my hands leaves like frost on night’s windows,
my skin lace holier than a confirmation veil.
I’ll pack my body’s annual rings with echoes
of our pristine oceans, sea spouts, whirlpools.
And among my glacial roots, one cloud
will remain to sing of its last journey on Earth –
a sound like dewdrops on a crystal stave,
a harmony no man could play. A little girl
will sleep in the cloud’s vapour. And, with
the song of my tree self, I will guide the migrating
birds back down to nest. They have been
circling the skies for years, not daring to land.

Pascale Petit trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a visual artist. Her ninth poetry collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe in 2025, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has published nine poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Mama Amazonica won the RSL Ondaatje, and Laurel prizes. Her eighth, Tiger Girl, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and Wales Book of the Year.

(Image: Ice Tree Canopy by Pascale Petit)

Art Sonnet Chain, 6: Chrissy Williams

May 2, 2026May 3, 2026 azjackson Art Sonnet Chain ANGELA, Art Sonnet Chain, BEAR, Bloodaxe Books, Chrissy Williams, Epigraphs, Flying into the Bear, Free Verse Poetry Book Fair, GOLDEN RAGE, Happenstance Press, Howard Hardiman, Lauren Knight, LOW, Michael Marks Awards, Murder She Wrote, National Poetry Library, New Boots and Pantisocracies, PERVERSE, Poetry Comics, Sidekick Books, Soaring Penguin, Sonnet, The Daily Telegraph, The Jam Trap, Tom Humberstone, Twin Peaks

Chrissy Williams’ first full poetry collection BEAR was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2017. It was selected as one of the Telegraph‘s 50 Best Books of the Year. Her second collection LOW was published by Bloodaxe in 2021.

She has also published the pamphlets Epigraphs (comprising 100 epigraphs as a single poem ); The Jam Trap (Soaring Penguin); ANGELA (Sidekick Books), which fuses together the worlds of Twin Peaks and Murder She Wrote with artwork by artist Howard Hardiman; and Flying into the Bear, published in 2013 by HappenStance Press and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards.

She worked at the National Poetry Library, and for seven years as Director of the annual Free Verse: Poetry Book Fair, and edits the online poetry journal PERVERSE.

She pioneered the practice of Poetry Comics in the UK, and co-edited the UK’s first book on poetry comics for Sidekick Books: Over the Line: An Introduction to Poetry Comics. Her comic, GOLDEN RAGE, co-created with Lauren Knight, was published in 2023. You can read more about it here. She is currently working on her next poetry comics pamphlet with artist Tom Humberstone.

Art Sonnet Chain, 5: Tishani Doshi

April 18, 2026 W N Herbert Art Sonnet Chain A God at the Door, Abu Dhabi, Art Sonnet Chain, Bharti Kher, Bloodaxe Books, Chandralekha Dance Company, Chennai, Madras, New Boots and Pantisocracies, New York University, Royal Society of Literature, The Forward Prizes, Tishani Doshi

after Bharti Kher’s Ancestor

Heart and eye braided in ampersand
the way descendant and ancestor link hands
across waves of mitochondrial inheritance.
Here is an abdomen, a thorax; herd
of stampeding buffalo. Shakti, we say,
for the way energy vaults over bloodlines.
Primordial murmur. My ancestors visit when
I’m stressed. (I’m so stressed). I want to be
carried in a swaddle wrap so I can be seen
by the sky and encircling ocean. I want a sign,
not a rainbow. Where I come from we call everyone
aunty. My great grandmother was part castor bean
plant, part river. O, to be in the world as a body.
To make from the galaxy of this body, a world.

Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India, and publishes poetry, novels, and essays. For fifteen years she worked as the lead dancer of the Chandralekha company and performed all over the world, and as such, the body has been a central preoccupation in her work. Her most recent collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books), was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize 2021. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is a visiting professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi.

https://tishanidoshi.weebly.com/

Peter McCarey: Enemies of Righteousness and Our Great Nation

April 11, 2026April 11, 2026 W N Herbert The Fall of America Carcanet, Collected Contraptions, Find an Angel and Pick a Fight, Geneva, Machiavelli, Machiavelli his Creatures their Silence, Molecular Press, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Oggeti transizionali, Orasho, Peter McCarey, Petrushka, Red Squirrel Press, The Syllabary, World Health Organization

H is a hateful thing. It slew
A thousand of my kin. H is
For hospitals that hid them not
The heads of little children too
Shot through with lead not light. The way
The way you look tonight you’d
Think I took an eye for an eyeful.
I offend you? Pluck me out or try.
A thousand years, you say, in a hundred and sixty
Little souls you ought to know
Not to return to the scene before the second
Strike, the one for luck,
For lucky relatives and absolutely
Clueless hi-viz vesters.

Go home, little dove,
To your peace protesters.

Peter McCarey ran the language service of the World Health Organization for 15 years then left to invent the perfect pandemic, which features in Petrushka (Molecular Press 2017). Seeks a publisher for Machiavelli, his Creatures, their Silence.

His publications include www.thesyllabary.com, also on paper as The Syllabary: A Poem in 2,272 Parts (11 vols) (Geneva, Maison Rousseau et Littérature/ La fureur de lire, 2023); Orasho (Red Squirrel Press, 2022); Oggetti transizionali (Milano 2022); Jouets transitionnels (Geneva, 2019); Collected Contraptions (Carcanet, 2012) and Find an Angel and Pick a Fight (Molecular Press 2013).

Art Sonnet Chain, 4: Linda France

April 4, 2026April 4, 2026 W N Herbert Art Sonnet Chain Art Sonnet Chain, Faber, Linda France, Michael Marks Awards Environmental Poet of the Year, National Poetry Competition, New Boots and Pantisocracies, New Writing North, Newcastle University, Northumberland, Smokestack Books, Sonnet, Startling, The Knucklebone Floor, The Laurel Prize

Linda France’s latest collections include Laurel Prize winner The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack, 2022) and Startling (Faber & New Writing North, 2022), which includes work from her ‘Writing the Climate’ residency with Newcastle University and New Writing North 2020-22. She won the 2013 National Poetry Competition and was Michael Marks Awards Environmental Poet of the Year 2022-23. Linda lives in Northumberland and writes an occasional Substack newletter at lindafrance.substack.com.

Art Sonnet Chain, 3: Tamar Yoseloff

March 21, 2026March 21, 2026 W N Herbert Art Sonnet Chain Aldeburgh, Ana Mendieta, Art Sonnet Chain, Belief Systems, Charlotte Harker, Cholmondeley Award, Formerly, Linda Karshan, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Nine Arches Press, Poetry Book Society, Tamar Yoseloff, Ted Hughes Award, Vici MacDonald

Silueta

(i.m. Ana Mendieta 1948 –1985)

Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last either:
both consigned to earth. And it was earth
you desired, plunging your body in mud
to restage your birth, to mess with death.
You were goddess, idol, wounded animal,
cut-price Ophelia. One more broken girl.
You made a beautiful corpse, smothered
in bud and leaf, ghost-self rising in ether

and here you rise again, rock of your heart
intact. The fall crushed your bones; your spirit
couldn’t be smashed. Blood sister, you bloom
in flame, sprout feathers and fly, incite
a riot of blossom. Here you never die;
we protect you in our gallery of harm.

Tamar Yoseloff’s seventh collection, Belief Systems, (Nine Arches, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is also the author of Formerly (with photographs by Vici MacDonald), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and collaborative editions with artists Linda Karshan and Charlotte Harker respectively. She works as a freelance lecturer in creative writing. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023 and curates the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival.

Peter Daniels: Unfinished Monuments

March 12, 2026 W N Herbert The Fall of America Angel Classics, Ballad of Captain Rigby, Goldsmiths, London Archives, Minneapolis, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Old Men, Ozymandias, Peter Daniels, Salt, Vladislav Khodasévich, Washington DC

Up on their eminences, being
what they might have been but
aren’t: columns accommodate the wind,
flowering creepers colonise a plinth.
Forestalling their own ruin, they haven’t
a clue what happened, being stone, or concrete,
unenhanced by bling.
This is something to hope
when you see the president’s office
in shining trash, and the side of the building
is chugging with cement mixers: maybe
the avenues of Minneapolis can follow
a vista through to Washington DC.
Maybe Ozymandias did bestride the world
but never any higher than his legs.

Peter Daniels has published four poetry collections, the latest being Old Men (Salt, 2024). He has a Creative Writing PhD from Goldsmiths, has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian (Angel Classics, 2013), and as queer writer in residence at the London Archives wrote the obscene ‘Ballad of Captain Rigby’.

Art Sonnet Chain, 2: Kaddy Benyon

March 7, 2026March 7, 2026 W N Herbert Art Sonnet Chain Addenbrooke’s, Art Sonnet Chain, Cambridge, Eva Hesse, Kaddy Benyon, Milk Fever, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Salt, Soft Fruits, The Polar Museum, The Robbergirls, The Snow Queen Retold, The Tidal Wife, Untitled or Not Yet

after ‘Untitled or Not Yet’ (1966), by Eva Hesse

The trouble with beauty is its ugliness
yet without it, no encounter with truth.
We cannot make groundbreaking art unless
we refuse beauty’s ruthless pursuit.

Take Eva, who worked the synthetic edge
of exploration with amoeboid shapes
formed by a bricolage of bits salvaged
from not-yet-perished industrial waste.

She wore her installations like a crown
of bivalves, netted pomelos, glass-blown
fishing floats caught in the drag tides of fear,
of loss, of mockery: Girl sculptor, pah!

Listen, she whispers—and I believe her—
life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last either.

Kaddy Benyon has written three collections of poetry: Milk Fever, The Tidal Wife, and Robbergirls – all published by Salt. She is currently writing her fourth collection, Soft Fruits. Kaddy often collaborates with charities, museums, academics and artists. She has two poems on permanent display in her local hospital, Addenbrooke’s, and she co-created the text and textiles exhibition The Snow Queen Retold for The Polar Museum in Cambridge.