Guest Poet: 4 Poems and a Note about Writing from David Briggs

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It's a real delight and privilege to feature exclusive writing and insights from David Briggs, a poet I've long admired. You can buy copies of David's latest collection here:

Buy David's Poetry Books

You can visit David's website here, or visit his SoundCloud page here to listen to his latest recordings.

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A Biographical Note:

Since receiving an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, David Briggs has published four collections with Salt Publishing. The Method Men (2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize, and Rain Rider (2013) was a winter selection of the Poetry Book Society. His third book — Cracked Skull Cinema (2019), a Poetry Wales pick of the year — took him on a reading tour ranging from a Festival of Death and Dying in Somerset to the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, from an American diner in Cheltenham to the Suffolk coast for Poetry in Aldeburgh. David’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies from The Poetry Review to the generational anthology edited by Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010). It has also been translated into Serbian.

A teacher of English in Bristol since the late 1990s, David founded and currently chairs the Writers' Examination Board, which offers the Apprentice of Fine Arts (AFA) in Creative Writing – a post-16 qualification that is currently live in twelve UK schools. David has been poet-in-residence at Bristol University, and from 2019-2023 he was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme. In 2023 he also completed his practice-based PhD research, The Odyssey Complex: Reading and Writing Midlife Poetics and Middle Style at the University of Exeter.

As a recording musician, David released an album of original songs titled Landscape and Liability in the early 2000s. He still performs regularly as a singer-songwriter, and his second album, Goldfinch, is due out in 2026, following a quarter-century hiatus.   

David's fourth book, The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems (2024), is currently available from Salt.

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 A Note About Writing:

In terms of intellectual interest and creative endeavour, I’m butterfly-ish. At any time, I might be working in different forms on several projects concurrently, flitting from one to the other as the mood takes me. Right now, I’m putting finishing touches to an album of original songs, having re-kindled a love of songwriting at some recent writers’ retreats in Brittany. I’m writing a YA novel with a yearling badger as the protagonist. I’m editing an anthology of poems on the theme of midlife, an attempt to pull together some threads from my recent PhD. And, of course, I’m writing poems. I often find that I can bounce from one project to the next, as exploring an idea through one medium typically gives me a new perspective on what I thought I was doing in another. Working in different forms can benefit my practice in all of them. While songwriting, for example, does share some superficial similarities with poetry, they’re also very different. Even so, the essential concision of songwriting is a great discipline that can certainly enhance my approach to writing poems. Similarly, the skills of visualisation and thinking in images that are so essential to poetry can dramatically enhance my prose writing.

Without meaning to be overly reductive, all these activities are really part of one larger, overarching project, which, of course, is about trying to find my way through the world. In that respect, it’s unsurprising, when I reflect back on over twenty years of writing, that I keep returning to similar themes and ideas. In these poems – one new, currently unpublished piece, one from my first book and two from my most recent collection – there’s a recurring interest in subjectivity, a repeating sort-of-Hamlet moment, in which a living consciousness encounters a skull (or some other memento mori) and tries to get outside itself, so as to see itself in third-person, as though that might be a way of getting a firmer grip on its seemingly transient, precarious existence.

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The Poems

HEMISPHERES

from The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems (Salt, 2024), p. 71

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SIOUX SHOES

There they are, on wall-mounted shoe trees

behind glass – sixteen pairs of Sioux shoes,

relics from the massacre of the Great Plains.

It’s been forty years, but here I am again

at the American Museum near Bath,

mesmerized by the embroidered slippers,

the poignant headdress of eagle feathers.

Not the first time I’ve been kicked into

verse by ceremonial moccasins

behind museum glass – it happened once

before at the Royal Ontario Museum

and now again today

in a room I’m so sharply conscious

of having visited before I might

reach out for the hand of my eight-year-old self –

for we stand side-by-side, ghosted by time.  

We’re sure there was a railroad carriage

in the gardens. I have a photograph

somewhere, of me with another boy,

the son of a friend of my mother’s who

must’ve driven us here all those years ago

and whose name I can’t recall. Slouched

on that observation car in our flares

and cable-knit jumpers, fringed by camellias,

we’re staring down the camera – a dutiful

pause in the packed schedule of eight-year-olds.

We’re striking west in the great land grab.

I’ve recalled that day with a sepia-tinged

dissonance every time I’ve driven past

the museum sign. And I’ve lived down the road

for twenty-five years. So why have I waited

so long to return? After the main house,

a cafeteria hot dog, we walk the gardens

and I seek out the railroad carriage.

No one remembers it. And it’s as though

I’ve been uncoupled from something. Later,

I’ll rummage for the photograph

and it’ll be as I recall, only I’d never noticed

the date stamp: SEP 1980.

The month my father was killed. So that was it.

Here I am again with the Sioux shoes.

My childhood and the Battle of Wounded Knee.

The deaths of Sitting Bull and my father.

from The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems (Salt, 2024), pp. 67-68

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THEY MISS HIM MOST WHO LOVED HIM BEST

for Leonard Herbert Briggs

Steeped in sunlight,

this slab of black marble

pinning Earth’s crust to its mantle –

a canvas sheet that might flap free

in high wind – becomes a portal

to Death’s espaliered orchard.

So gently struck, the chapel bell

ordains these rare hours sacred.

Mossed turf. Feet that hitch-hiked

on the steel toes of your Police-issues,

skipped two strides to your one,

turn away from your repose –

only my own height’s distance below.

from The Method Men (Salt, 2010), p. 21

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VANITAS

Jaw down on the bracken in Little Stoke Woods,

the top half of a badger’s skull, greened with rain,

and I guess it must have lain here maybe a year,

just mouldering quietly in Little Stoke Woods,

where I’m out walking after my 50+ check-up

with N. — the health centre’s “vein whisperer” —

walking to enjoy my numbers (blood pressure,

liver function, cholesterol) in woods which,

today at least, are lovely, dark and deep,

sans Oxford comma, just as Frost preferred —

the darkness and deepness being the things

that rendered those woods lovely. Frost didn’t intend

a list of three equally weighted qualities, but

a dependent clause. And as I bend to retrieve

this curved upper half of a badger’s skull

from the bracken and fungi of Little Stoke Woods,

and hold it aloft in a parodic memento mori,

like some rustic Hamlet, I twig that this moment

of whimsy is a gift derived from my numbers.

For my numbers are good — a surprisingly healthy list

of equally weighed qualities — and I realise too

that I might view this badger’s remains

in a different light, read along the more obvious grain

of their meaning, like whichever editor it was

who added that obvious but superfluous comma

to Frost’s otherwise perfect line. The same man

who had it re-inscribed after Frost’s return to dust,

when he was merely a skull incapable of protest –

no choice but to suffer that mad knave to knock him

about the sconce with an Oxford comma.

A whole badger skull might be thought by some

to resemble a full stop, but here, today,

in Little Stoke Woods, I hold merely the upper half —

a curved head bone dangling by its eye-sockets.

And as I let it swing freely from my fingers, I see it

hang on that horizon visible through the tree-line

of these lovely, dark, and deep woods

like a comma — a superfluous Oxford comma

in an otherwise perfect line.

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What was your favourite poem, line or image from David's poems?

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