Tessera

Andrew Neilson

@andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social

Little Griefs out now. Director of Campaigns @thehowardleague.bsky.social Co-florist @badlilies.bsky.social andrewneilson.uk

294 Posts605 Follower 387 Folgt

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2d ago

Festival-goers of Edinburgh! Our co-florists, Kathryn Gray and Andrew Neilson, will be reading poems in a cracking lineup on Wednesday, 26th August. Wine, candlelight, poetry...

Les Bijoux:
Poetry at The Boundary
KATHRYN GRAY
ANDREW NEILSON
AMY JO PHILIP
RACHEL PLUMMER
ROSS WILSON
26th August 2026 6.30 Doors Open
397 Leith Walk
Wine, candlelight, poetry

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3d ago

Thanks to The Scotsman and Scottish Poetry Library for today's Poem of the week.

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 6d ago

Apropos of something, don't let institutions, in favour of an overwhelming focus on vulnerable individuals, off the hook.

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · last wk.

I’m not myself eligible for this, as despite being Scottish I am not resident in Scotland, but I couldn’t in all conscience apply for it even if I was.

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2w ago

Getting ready for the poetry open mic night

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3w ago

Delighted with this Stateside review of Little Griefs! open.substack.com/pub/maryannc...

A review of Little Griefs by Andrew Neilson

To be filed under: What the heck, I'll publish it myself

open.substack.com

Matthew Stewart @roguestrands.bsky.social · 4w ago

Keith Douglas wrote this gorgeous poem 86 summers ago (in the midst of the Second World War). It still resonates hugely today...

Canoe

Well, I am thinking this may be my last
summer, but cannot lose even a part
of pleasure in the old-fashioned art
of idleness. I cannot stand aghast

at whatever doom hovers in the background
while grass and buildings and the somnolent river
who know they are allowed to last for ever
exchange between them the whole subdued sound

of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate
can deter my shade wandering next year
from a return? Whistle, and I will hear
and come another evening when this boat

travels with you alone towards Iffley:
as you lie looking up for thunder again,
this cool touch does not betoken rain;
it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.

Keith Douglas

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 4w ago

Michael Longley's Holistic Detective Agency, via Seamus Perry in @lrb.co.uk

violence: it is an expression of what Long-ley once called 'the fundamental intercon-nectedness of all things'.
The maxim, which may appear to have a metaphysical solemnity to it, looks like a quotation, which it is; but it is highly characteristic that it should come from Douglas Adams's comic novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987). The phrase was brought to Longley's attention by his wife, and then
'for reasons numerical and poetical I appropriated it.' 'When I read it, people sit and look serious,' he told an interviewer. 'And the joke is, it's terribly funny, it's meant to be very funny.' It appears in a poem called
'According to Pythagoras', which is indeed a comic poem about claiming authoritative knowledge and the mangled beliefs that the ancients entertained about the animal kingdom ('did you know that/Hyenas change sex?'). But it is a joke about something that came to matter more and more to Longley.
'Interconnectedness' has an ecological ring to it; in the great second phase of his career, this became his defining theme. 'I hate the term but I suppose in some ways I'm a "nat-ure poet",' he told Clive Wilmer.
It is an identification triumphantly confirmed in Gorse Fires, but there are nature poems from the start, and one landscape in particular. 'Leaving Inishmore' in No Con-
doubt about the answer when it comes to Longley:
With my first step I dislodge the mallards Whose necks strain over the bog to where Kittiwakes scrape the waves: then, the circle Widening, lapwings, curlews, snipe until I am left with only one swan to nudge To the far side of its gradual disdain.
in 2010. waterbil mer flo violenc to irra
Pas its fu orali ful si
Once more he resembles MacNeice, who fron
reported in a memoir of his childhood that
neve
the phrase 'the West of Ireland... still stirs ma:
me, if not like a trumpet, like a fiddle half his
heard through a cattle fair Longley found
mc
himself similarly drawn to the region: 'find-
ra
ing my way for ever along/The p…

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · last mo.

Emptiest ever beach

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · last mo.

I'll take this, with thanks: "Neilson is particularly good on the realities of the world's weight in conflict with the frail optimism of art and artistic temperament." Review of Little Griefs in The Dark Horse.

78. The Dark Horse - SUMMER/AUTUMN 2026
the linin o his trackie huid; he is a dim beast in a sea o empties,/lane disgulshit daverin star' (a lone dishevelled wandering star); the guid chiel and 'Sinéad' of the Neilson, unlike the young man and woman in Yeats's original, are exhorted to take up their Dyson and Magic Mop, a comic recommendation and contemporary update which also, more seri-ously, matches Neilson's pragmatism in the face of the failed romance of Ferg's monie mysteries. Neilson is particularly good on the realities of the world's weight in conflict with the frail optimism of art and artistic temperament. His poems are an interesting combination of both; he expounds very well those implacable moments/realisations Robert Frost would call 'too much world at once; one can imagine these as being like news of a major artistic disappointment, for example, arriving for a cash-strapped young poet on a sunlit spring morning, or the bleakness of a disordered artistic life—but also its potential marvellousness-vulner-able against the workaday world and its reassurances of routine and (one hopes) security. In the second of a five-part sequence 'Lines, an elegy for Lumsden (of which more later), weeping for the dead poet who 'schemed
I. the impossible dream, Neilson writes:
Howling depends on sounds and words reduced to sounds
and from this realisation certain life choices arise.
Roddy, no fan of those, preferred words arcane and thicketed |....])
The collections last five poems (bar a coda, the tetrameter sonnet "The Debuf, a wry account of a volume Remaindered in the Eighth Circle, - surely a too-severe punishment for a mediocre first book?) all connect with either Lumsden or Donaghy in significant ways. 'My Alphabet' is a remarkable, at points enigmatic, Abecedarian sestina, with the repeated end-words, necessary to the form

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Peak Telegraph.

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🇺🇸 American poetry friends! I have a fellowship at the James Merrill House this November, which is exciting for me, but I am also thinking of visiting New York for work reasons just beforehand. If anyone can help me organise a poetry reading in NYC towards the end of October, please get in touch!

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Scotland!

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2mo ago

OUT NOW: Issue twenty-four: 'Hopes Unspool' badlilies.uk/issue-twenty-four

Issue twenty-four — Bad Lilies

Issue twenty-four of Bad Lilies

badlilies.uk

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Very sorry to hear this. I was once assaulted and slavered on, in the nicest possible way, by Roy's dog Buster. www.thetimes.com/article/9fcc...

Roy Hattersley, former Labour deputy, dies aged 93

The politician and journalist published more than 20 books, including biographies, histories and memoirs

thetimes.com

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Next weekend!

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

An excellent review of the recent Seamus Heaney annotated Collected by one of my poetry heroes, Edna Longley: Edna on the Heaney Collected drb.ie/article/when...

When More is Less - Dublin Review of Books

When More is Less - % Dublin Review of Books

drb.ie

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Anne is a poet I have always thought was brilliant and so I am obviously happy with this verdict! 🙏

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden would have been 60 today. I wrote this version of the Tang-era Chinese poet Du Fu with Roddy in mind and, much to my surprise, the Jamaican-British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson went on to use it as an epigraph to his Selected Prose. Perspective.

Winding River
after Du Fu
Spring fades with each blossom flying in the wind.
Ten thousand points now float, grief and beauty limned.
Passing is the petal, fallen are my eyes.
Only wine, a skinful, will see my gaze rise.
The hall by the river, a kingfisher's nest,
the hall which is a tomb where unicorns rest.
Joy is the only law worthy of study.
What use immortal fame to mortal body?o I'm

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Claire Tomalin's The Time-Torn Man is excellent but I'm surprised she doesn't draw a connection between this infamous passage in Jude the Obscure and one of Hardy's best later poems.

1875-1905
Hardy continues, "Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him... But nobody did come, because nobody does.'i° I have put the last words in italics because this is not a true account of life Hardy is not only coercing his plot, he is generalizing falsely. There are times when nobody comes, but there are also times when somebody does come. For example, Hardy himself had been helped to learn, not only by schoolmasters but also by Horace Moule and William Barnes, and encouraged by his architectural masters, and he had made other friends who read the classics with mim for pleasure. A good many people had come along for him
Retum
not at h
Nett
CODSEE
griefs nev

Nobody Comes
Tree-leaves labour up and down,
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night. In in
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.
A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own, Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
And nobody pulls up there.
9 October 1924
10 up in in

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Poem for today...by Robert Hayden.

The Whipping
The old woman across the way is whipping the boy again and shouting to the neighborhood her goodness and his wrongs.
Wildly he crashes through elephant ears, pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat pursues and corners him.
She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather to woundlike memories:
My head gripped in bony vise of knees, the writhing struggle to wrench free, the blows, the fear worse than blows that hateful
Words could bring, the face that I no longer knew or loved....
Well, it is over now, it is over, and the boy sobs in his room,
And the woman leans muttering against a tree, exhausted, purged-avenged in part for lifelong hidings she has had to bear.

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It's so hot I am unironically wearing this to protect my poor noggin.

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Poetry reading. In June. In London. Super company. Please join us. 🙏

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It's beautifully and relentlessly sunny in London. I don't have much in the way of poems in Little Griefs featuring the sun, so here's one featuring the moon instead. The final part of 'Dates with the Fates'. Buy a copy here! www.bluediode.co.uk/product-page...

iii) Atropos
We meet at a '7os Berlin café - there's Bowie and Eno and Osterberg - and I'm wondering what it is I should say, when she flicks a bang then speaks with a surge (we're all looking her way)
So typical of Generation X
to persist with the ruse of having sex.
The children are growing. The children are growing But here, on the corner of Hauptstraße, the children are dying. The children are dying.
Above us, the moon is sole amasser of all that is falling
in the dying fall of the urban night this side of Lou and his satellite.
It could be worse. You could be a Millennial.
Her lovely throat convulses with a laugh.
Look up to say something trivial.
Her stare shears through like an aftermath.
The moon's bright aureole
shines only once on those who winnow.
When it mantles her hair. That's how I'll know.

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Poetry reading. In June. In London. Super company. Please join us. 🙏

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

No need to go back far into the history of our isles to find the love of punishment engrained in all things British. Reading Claire Tomalin's 'The Time-Torn Man', her biography of Thomas Hardy, I'm only 40 pages in and not only has the child TH already viewed a hanging (1/2)

Andrew Neilson @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Thank you @matthewepaul.bsky.social for these kind words on Little Griefs, which I have only just seen. matthewpaulpoetry.blog/2026/04/05/w...

Lastly, I must again mention Andrew Neilson's Little Griefs. It includes all nine of the poems in his 2025 Rack Press pamphlet Summers Are Other, which I (very favourably) reviewed, here, for The Friday Poem. Like Ryan, more so, in fact, Neilson is a technically adept poet, with an easy command of form and register. It seems incredible that it took him so long to find a publisher willing to take on his poetry, especially with endorsements from poets as celebrated as Rachael Boast and Sean O'Brien. We are living in odd times. 'Casualties' opens with a quick question then a 10-line sentence across two and a half fully-rhymed quatrains, with lines alternating ten and eight syllables, thus:

Ever felt like this? You've gate-crashed yourself in the manner of Banquo's ghost, now shaking thy gory locks at thyself even as you open the post,
or brew a coffee or take the meetings (in body if not quite in mind), or any of a million other things you do for no reason, resigned
to do it this way because that's the way you have always gone and done it.
It takes a hefty amount of skill and practice to write like this. The opening query is reminiscent of the opening of Michael Donaghy's poem
'Liverpool'(Ever been tattooed?') - though I should confess that I used that poem as a model of sorts for one of mine (Kingston', in my first collection). The long sentence is beautifully controlled across its fluid enjambments - read it aloud and hear how it rolls.
There's plenty more terrific poetry in the book.

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Clouds are brewing even as it is approaching summer because our next issue is developing with all due drama and it drops NEXT MONTH. Subs window to follow...

Bloodaxe Books @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social · 3mo ago

'These are poems worthy of deep and lengthy excavation.' - @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social, in @prospectmagazine.co.uk, on the expanded edition of Scenes from a Long Sleep: New & Collected Poems, published on 10 April to mark Peter Didsbury's 80th birthday. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/book...

Books in Brief: what to read this May

From the travails of Lena Dunham to one of the great Hull poets, here are this month’s short reviews

prospectmagazine.co.uk