Jane Commane's Blog

 On writing 'disappearing sonnets' (extracts)


like starlings falling is the "sharp and searing" debut poetry collection from Dillon Jaxx, full of bold and precise poems of absence and discovery. We asked Dillon to choose a poem to share here and talk about how it came to fruition. 
The poet shares how their sonnet sequence was 'unlocked', how the idea to invent a new form emerged, and how the repetition and rhythm provide a momentum that makes the poem easy to listen to, despite its difficult subject matter.  




***

In 2024 I was lucky enough to receive a bursary for the OutspokenMini Academy with Joelle Taylor and Malika Booker, and an incredible cohort ofwriters.

The course was brilliant and intense in the best way, but unfortunately,I was quite unwell throughout so didn’t manage to write much new material.However in one of Joelle’s last workshops she asked us to attempt a crown ofsonnets- a sequence of sonnets where the last line of the first becomes thefirst line in the next and so on, and she would provide the line for us to workinto our poems.

Pen poised in anticipation I hear Joelle say ‘my brother hasa knife in his hand’ and could not believe my luck. I was in the process of writinga collection centred around the death of my brother and Joelle had just handedme a big fat key. I was unlocked.

With it came the idea to invent a new form called a disappearingsonnet. A sequence which starts with a fourteen-line poem and loses a lineeach stanza, the last poem being just one line. Each poem also starts with the same first line.

I wrote the entire poem in that workshop and have made onlyminimal edits since. The form allows me to play with words, starting with thetitle disappearing son(net), with rhyme and ideas. The ever-present knife inthe poem is the addiction, the knife edge addicts live on, the danger theyexpose themselves to every time they use, the pain they cause themselves andthose that love them, the destruction but also the tool they hold with whichonly they can cut themselves free.

I like reading this poem aloud, the repetition and rhymesgive it a certain forward motion and dynamism, that makes it -i think- easy tolisten to, even if the subject matter is difficult. As I was editing thecollection I decided to split the sonnet into its stanzas and pepper itthroughout the book, like breadcrumbs, or blood trails, like footsteps or thechorus of a song.

Dillon Jaxx is a queer, chronically ill writer. Born and raised inbilingual northern Italy with an Italian dad and English mum, word play startedearly. Their work explores the aftermath of trauma, illness and grief as wellas the meaning of home, family, identity and language. Their work has beenpublished in Poetry Wales, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review and The Alchemy Spoonamongst others. Dillon has been placed and commended in numerous competitionsin the last three years and won the Rebecca Swift Writing Prize 2022, theBrotherton prize 2024, the Wolverhampton poetry competition 2024, the LiveCanon International Poetry Competition 2025, the Artemisia Arts Prize 2025. 

like starlings falling is available to purchase here

On writing 'Ovulation cycle twenty-one'
Pain Songs, the fourth collection by Daniel Sluman, is written through the writer’s experience of chronic pain, that "threads through my entire experience of the world". Reflecting on love, family andrelationships, the poems also explore intimacy, fertility and pregnancy. 
We asked the poet to share a poem from the book along with insight into its creation. This poem charts anxiety and fears. "Disability and pregnancy/parenting are not things you see represented positivity in culture, and everything in this poem is tenuous, at stake, on the edge of failure, in-the-air between myself and my wife, and our possible future, in a way that I find very pleasing." 

 

***

Like all the poems in Pain Songs, ‘Ovulation cycle twenty-one’ came directly out of the fears and anxieties of the life myself and my wife were living between 2020 and 2023. During that time we had moved house, settling in south London, continued finding treatment plans for our disabilities, and we decided to start trying for a baby. Unlike my previous books, I made a conscious effort to write through my chronic pain in this book, the same pain and fatigue that I am so used to pushing to the side to just get the poem written. This pain threads through my entire experience of the world, and I spent a long time working out how to invite it into the process of writing, I’m happy to see it looming over the work in this book, and even when it’s not directly referenced, I find the clues of its existence in this poem along with many others.

The last quarter of this book is about the journey to pregnancy, and specifically here, about navigating the ambiguity you experience trying for a baby; the kind of faith you maintain between you both that things will work out, that next month might be the month it all clicks into place. Disability and pregnancy/parenting are not things you see represented positivity in culture, and everything in this poem is tenuous, at stake, on the edge of failure, in-the-air between myself and my wife, and our possible future, in a way that I find very pleasing. 

Most of my poems are quite concrete in their immediate context and in the type of language employed, it’s an aspect of my voice I have worked very hard on making as tactile but as real as possible. So poems like these that feel a little different, that risk placing the reader in a less steady implied environment, are pleasing to (hopefully!) pull off. It is strange reading this now, thinking about the precarious nature of things, whilst my almost three-year-old son wanders near me, playing with his trains. Things have changed so much since I started writing this book, and definitely, for the better.

 

DanielSluman is a poet and disability rightsactivist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back and he has three previouspoetry collections published by Nine Arches Press. His most recent book, single window, was released in 2021 and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

Pain Songs is available to purchase here

 

 On writing 'Limestone Quarry, Knaresborough'
Folkish, the debut poetry collection by Kym Deyn is full of folklore, landscapes and legends; "bold, inventive and sardonic". We asked Kym to choose a sample poem and share it here alongside insights into its creation.
We are transported to Knaresborough in Yorkshire, as 'time flattens' and the ancient landscape and its intriguing inhabitants share stories. We encounter ghosts from across centuries, historical figures leaving their mark, and most crucially 'the stones themselves'. 

LimestoneQuarry, Knaresborough

It’s not my fault therocks are insane, I’m just announcing stone-intent. If you weretwo-hundred-million years old and each century was worth less than a grain ofsand if you had been mud and coral in Pangea and saw extinctions and then inthe great yawn of tectonic plates became a little spit of something that oneday would be England, if humans were the latest news, a misplaced handaxe yourfirst trinket, if you watched Romans introduce gods and rabbits, if you sawChrist carried in a book, if you were a sprawl of caves, a castle, a cliff, a seriesof shrines, generations of homes, if you wore a vast forest as a cloak, if youburied a prophet, dug up a saint, if you kissed the last boar goodbye, if youbecame black with soot, if the forest was shorn to a sliver, if the riverwashed you to sand, if the day and night were a spinning top and your voice wasthe great echo of grit, if there was no moving through your history but thehistory was you over and over and over again, wouldn’t you be a mudslide, ahaunt, a great unspoken secret?
***

If you sit me down and ask me to guess the length of a minute,I’ll wander off midway through, come back a half-hour later and ask you whattime it is. For someone this thoroughly timeblind, I have a peculiar obsessionwith it. Deep time, in particular, the way that it passes for a stone or fossilnot measured in days, but in the long yawn of epochs. It’s a scale utterlyunimaginable for any of us.

In Knaresborough (a Yorkshire market town)  when I was a teenager, I met a man who kept avertical garden. A normal garden would stop where it reached the edge of acliff-face, but his simply went on up, dug into it, occasionally supported onwooden two-by-fours. It was a fantastic endeavour in non-euclidian landscapingcomplete with fishpond, at least ten feet up. In front of the garden was hisbookshop, poky and ancient like himself. One year during a summer squall, hetold me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of hauntedfurniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day. Anotheryear, he claimed his garden, his cliffs and the caves under them as thebirthplace of a prophetess.

He said to me that he’d had an archaeology student spend asummer with him. When this had happened, I couldn’t guess. This archaeologystudent spent a summer digging in those caves, looking for the tunnels thatsupposedly ran from there up to Knaresborough Castle. Instead, he found stonetools and Roman coins. Proof that there’s been people continuously living inand around these cliffs for almost as long as there’s been people on thisisland. Time flattens. I see myself returning here at fifteen, at twenty-fiveand all the years between, slipping between Royalists with their muskets,medieval hermits, Georgians on their way to take the waters at Harrogate, Romanlegionaries, and my strange, nimble bookseller. But even that is a short gaspcompared to the stones themselves.

Knaresborough is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which giventhat limestone is formed from calcite and that calcite was once ancientsealife, I figure those cliffs to be about 99% ghosts—scientifically speaking.And look at everything those ghosts have seen!

The last time I visited my bookseller, the shop was shuttered.He had been elderly the whole time I had known him, and I suppose time musthave caught up to him at last. Though, I almost don’t believe it. How can I?When I see him vanishing into those ancient caves, his ghost stories, thatgreen cliff of his own making.

Kym Deyn is a poetand writer of weird fiction who moonlights variously as a tarot reader, alibrarian, and the editor of The Braag CIC, a publisher based inNewcastle-Upon-Tyne. Their pamphletsinclude Dionysia and Unfurl. They have been widelypublished in anthologies and journals for their poetry and prose,including Butcher’s Dog, 14 Poems and StrangeHorizons. They’ve been shortlisted for awards including The Bridport Prizeand recently came third in the 2025 Oxford Poetry Prize. Folkish istheir debut collection. 

Folkish is available to purchase here

 On writing 'Playing tag'
Rishi Dastidar's new poetry collection, Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak, blooms with poems that provide bursts of joy in challenging times. A seriously playful book to savour and treasure.
We asked Rishi to choose a poem from the book and share it here along with the motivations that helped the poem come into being. The poet is inspired, or 'snagged', by a photograph where the subject is of surprise interest for a republican. The resulting contemplation and poem bring life to the human essence of the photo.



Playing tag
Imagine this Polaroid:on the deck of oneof her daddy’s shipsa vanguard princessplays tag, a reveldipping and swayingout of the touch ofnaval cadets, history.Pass it on: you canput down a role, skip fate’sprotestations, let white waterwash away everythingbut the here and now.Shed majesty, for a moment.
***

For the avoidance of doubt: I am republican. (Goodbyelaureateship and other baubles that were definitely coming my way, ahem.)I am fully aware this is a minority pursuit in the UK, and we are more likelyto see Accrington Stanley win the Premier League than a revolution in how wemanage our constitutional affairs. So be it. The head wants what the headwants.

There are many reasons I can offer for having this view. Thedesire for some degree of rationalism in how we are governed. That other placesget along perfectly well as republics. The notion that maybe, just maybe, as acountry, as a species, we are capable of devising a system of symbolicbelonging that doesn’t rest on contested bloodlines and landgrabs. That theambiguity of how power is exercised through the idea of ‘the Crown’ means thatwe do not think hard enough about who actually controls that power.

More than that. A belief that Thomas Paine was right when hewrote in Common Sense that, “Men who look upon themselves born to reign,and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind theirminds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs somaterially from the world at large”. That we can never be a full democracyuntil this weird, medieval anomaly is fixed.

But mostly my objection springs from compassion – thatfrankly, it would be better for the occupants of that gilded cage if they andno one else was ever in it again. And childishness – I simply do not understandwhy you or I could not attempt to become head of state if we so wanted.

And yet: here I am introducing a poem about PrincessElizabeth, as was. I can’t offer any defence for this except I was snagged whenI saw the image below, on board HMS Vanguard in 1947, in a piece by SimonSchama for the Financial Times a few days after she died. It perhaps helpedthat I wasn’t in the UK at the time, but rather in Austria – where no oneseemed particularly bothered about her passing. 

That distance, and the photograph, meant I could see something for the first time: that ‘princess’ was just a label. She was human, just like you and me. Hopefully the poem captures some of that, and brings it to life. Brings her back to Earth.

Of course, this is how the monarchy maintains its grip on our politics, history, imaginations. Turning an exploration into a celebration. Reminding us that there are humans at the core of this institution. Who, if you squint enough, are also like you and me. Just luckier. So let me remind you of another truth. The monarchy is not a mythical gift from God. It is a human invention, like religion, like poetry. And like all human inventions, we can stop using it. If we choose to.

RishiDastidar’s third collection, Neptune’s Projects, was longlisted forthe Laurel Prize, and a poem from it was included in The Forward Bookof Poetry 2024. He is also editor of The Craft: A Guide to MakingPoetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editorof Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s PoetryKitchen (Corsair). 

He is chair of Wasafiri, the magazineof international contemporary writing, and a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust.

Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak is available to purchase here

 On writing 'Light Year'
Light Year by Jennifer Wong is a reflective book of poems charting love, loss and a healing that's buoyed by "trust in change and radical hope."
In the poet's "reflective journey" she explores the meaning of home and kinship. She reconnects with art through song, film, visiting galleries and libraries. She reconnects too with the creativity of writing itself and with friends and fellow-artists, challenging herself to claim "an unsettling but honest territory of self-acceptance and acceptance of others."




Light Year 
I’d pretend we’re looking at the stars three billion years away in Ursa Minor: a galaxy nonetheless: 
starfield on a window from the spacecraft docked to the furthest space station in history. 
Even if a star dies, its light echoes around the cosmos. The space between the stars are not empty but filled 
                                     with filaments of dust and gas. 
As the supernova shuttles through space                           at the speed of light, its echo               expands.
                                      Think of the star factories. 
           do you know the two blue smudges are magellanic clouds?            Can you remember the first image of our black hole                                                              where no light can escape? 
Or imagine a black hole billions of times the mass of the sun? 
For astronauts on the space station, the moon appears to rise and set 16 times each day. 
It takes a 25-second-long exposure with an iso of 3200. 
We need to wait for millions of yearsto build a galaxy cluster like Abell 2025: stripped of their gas, they fall through hot, high pressure clouds. 
Or for someone like me to make an irrevocable decision based on an utter lack of rationale or evidence -
seen from above, the earth’s atmosphere simply glows red and green. 

***

Ithas been a strange journey putting together Light Year. To alarge extent, I started off not knowing what to write about. With LettersHome, I felt more in control of the poems and with where they go, as Ireached for a more coherent sense of home, but even then, I feel that LettersHome cannot quite capture all of me and my longings.

Light Year was born out of that feeling oflack, of trying to understand or grapple with myself or selves. I was in arather dark place of my life, feeling quite unable to reconnect with the moreoptimistic 'me'. I missed the clarity and hopefulness in my older self ingirlhood. At the same time, I wanted to move on to something, somewhere moregenuine, away from compromise. Moreover, I was looking for some form of healingand recovery. And despite everything, I have trust in humanity, in humannature, in change and radical hope. 

Inthis writing process, I came across so many brilliant books that explore ourcomplex wants in life, our sense of love and kinship, whether poems or fiction.In this introspective journey, I realised how I don't really have a veryanchoring place I can call ‘home’, whether as a mother, as a migrant or as alover, and how losing a sense of self-worth has been a difficult feeling tocome to terms with. I had very broken sleep patterns throughout the two yearsof writing, but it is only during these somnambulist hours that I wrote some ofthe core poems (say ‘Alexa’ and ‘Afterward’) in the book where various otherpoems stem from.

Inthe creative process, I discovered that I can make things happen by simplytrying to turn over a stone each time, to give shape to what’s inside, even ifunintelligible. I spent time delving into Canto, Mando-pop songs, soundtracks,and went to galleries and watched films to bring back that sense of joy andintimacy with art or a vision of what art does. Whenever I could, I spent timeon my own. I found myself scribbling again, not so much for competitions ormagazines but for myself, and saw these poems as letters, letters that were notaddressed to anyone in particular, but just a promise that they would be read,perhaps, some day.

Iam so grateful to many kind and like-minded folks, writers in their respectivestages of writing or genres, who recommended books of strength and healing tome, including Jinhao Xie who sent me a copy of the poetry anthology Everythingis Going to be All Right: Poems for When You Really Need Them, while EthanYu from Sacramento gifted me a copy of Love’s Work: A Reckoning of One’sLife by Gillian Rose. Sometimes the writing arrived after some moments offriendship or revival; or I’d return to drafts, to take out or add back somelines after a bubble tea break or watching films with friends like SentimentalValue and Hamnet. I find these gestures of kindness and solidaritywith other friends and fellow writers all so generous and nourishing in helpingme retrieve what I have forgotten, and what I wanted to say and share, and thereading of these poems was made whole through friendship.

Thosemonths when I had the poems brewing in me, I looked up texts and quotes andimages from a lot of libraries, finding inspiration from rediscovering otherlives or art that I could relate to. I am particularly overjoyed to browse somematerials from the Poets House, the New York Public Library, the Bodleian andthe London Library. The peace in those libraries reminds me of something I amfamiliar with, an anchoring ground.  Inthis period, reading and editing the work for Rebecca Swift Foundation has alsobeen a process of healing, of community and revival of spirit, and it made mefeel more able to see where my life is going towards, and why poetry is soimportant to me and others.

Ifelt that this writing experience has helped me fall in love with myself again,to reflect on my position of otherness as a migrant and a mother, and also towrite myself into a resilient self, to be receptive to truth and relationshipswith others while I remain a dreamer. From a college quad, a cascade ofchanging streetlights to the sun-filled interior of an art museum, these poemschallenge me to claim an unsettling but honest territory of self-acceptance andthe acceptance of others.

Jennifer Wong is a Hong Kong-born poet who livesin the UK. She studied English at Oxford and has an MA and PhD in creativewriting from University of East Anglia and Oxford Brookes. She has threecollections including Letters Home (Nine Arches Press). She isthe co-editor of State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast AsianHeritage in Conversation (Outspoken Press, 2023) and WhereElse: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve, 2023). Sheis also the author of Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere (Bloomsbury,2023). She is currently editing Woman, Mapped, aRebecca Swift Foundation women's poetry anthology forthcoming from Fly on theWall Press in mid-2026.

Light Year is available to purchase here.

 

Olivia Tuck’s work has been published by the PoetrySociety and Broken Sleep, and in Propel, Under the Radar, PoetryWales (forthcoming) and Magma (forthcoming). She wonthe 2025 Winchester Poetry Prize, was placed second in the 2023 Jane MartinPoetry Prize awarded by Girton College, Cambridge, and was longlisted for theRebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize. She is an associate editorat Lighthouse.

The Volta
The first time leaving your machine-cooled room
for anything other than food or bureaucracy,
the past week’s nights and days reduced to voids

between surges of light and dark, you meet your body
at the beach, to swim: hold your breath,
briefly become driftwood, cloud-pale, splayed

as if storm-struck, cramps eased, spill of your blood hushed
in the shadows of the jetty, the breakwater – you emerge
before sunset, unshivering, cursing as you run

over land’s white heat; sit on your stained towel,
feral, hair and lashes and mouth salt-crusted,
and the gulf is love, sluicing from your forehead,

pooling in your lap, in silken motion,
and the mermaid’s purse of your life is broken open.


Discover all Primer Eight shortlisted poets here

 

Becky Brookfield is a North West based poetwhose work mixes poetry, theatre, and live art to explore nature, femininity,transformation, and the grittier, darker edges of life. Her writing is sharp,witty, and unflinching, finding connection and absurdity in the messy, everydaysurreal. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester MetropolitanUniversity, and her work appears in Joy//Us: An Anthology of Resistanceand Joy (Arachne Press, 2023).

Sothe chef wants to be friends...

 

Listen / that body you're trying to eat
is empty / you can try to snap my legs
dig out the last of my meat / but I crawled
out of that corpse / a soft pink spider crab /
huddled under my sisters / Summer coast
Pembrokeshire / exoskeleton washed up /
small wreck in your hands / slipped limbs
out from the old coat years ago / I am Kaiju /
Ganime’s cousin glutted on your radiation /
hulking claws bulked on jellyfish stings /
bitter seaweed suppers / Too big for your pots/
I'd wear them like jewellery/ if I smashed
through your kitchen / smeared you in butter
/ pink mess in primrose yellow / broken ceiling
tile seasoning / but you're not worth it /
I am an island in the Atlantic / so far out
barely seeing your knives / whittle away
at my remains / you can't have my brain /

Discover all Primer Eight shortlisted poets here

 

Mymona Bibi is a Bengali-British writer, creativefacilitator, and ESOL teacher based in Newcastle. She is interested inmultilingualism, urban landscapes, inequality, and home. Her writing has beenfeatured in the Ilkley Literature Festival, Magma Poetry, Butcher'sDog, Corridor8 and Hajar Press. She has produced andperformed at events such as the Newcastle Fringe Festival and NOVUM Festival.She is the founder of World Writes - a multilingual community writing group.

Dream
Dream: n.

1. something that is mine.
2. something shameful.
3. my body.
4. my knowledge.

e.g. this time I lean over the metal ledge and squint at freedom in the blurry faces I am so sure I recognise. I lean and lean and tell myself that I can fl y and I tell you that I can fl y and so you push me. I fall onto the shopfl oor as if it were a bed and a relief. The sheets are cooler than the sun of desire on my face against yours. my heart is softer as if the beating is moving away under the covers. far away. until I turn and fi nd your body intertwined with everyone else’s, I’m sure now it is hatred or anger. It is anger, that rock stuck in my throat. I can hear it carving vessels from tongue to chest to the heart that won’t stop beating. this rock scratches your features into the galaxy. far away. this rock smashes the world into silence

Discover all Primer Eight shortlisted poets here

 

Rona Luo is a queer, neurodivergent poet interestedin the spaces between borders and boundaries. Her visual poetry has beenexhibited at Royal Festival Hall, and her writing has appeared in Magma,Propel, fourteen poems, The Massachusetts Review, Honey Literary, and more. Shereceived the Creative Futures Gold Prize in Poetry in 2024. She has beensupported by Tin House, Kundiman, Southbank Centre New Poets' Collective, andPoetry School London.

Forty Two Weeks
Say a ghost is a pet.
It feeds on raw mung beans
straight from the package.
Say a small boat sends
a signal through waves,
through kelp, through
swinging human arms
the fish cannot see.
The boat bumps against
hardened shattered lava
shaped like a nose
without room to mother.
Say a mother strings horror
movie decorations over
the lawn but she must
unstitch a book from its
spine or the stories come
true. Octavia writes them.
Say rain pounds on a tin
roof and soft cheese spills
from its rind. Say a third
trimester checklist ticks
itself and spits out herbs.
Fill a clay pot with vinegar
to dissolve every bone.

Discover all Primer Eight shortlisted poets here

 

Natasha Kinsella is an Irish-born poet andwriter based in Scotland. Her work explores silence, inheritance, and therituals of repair. Her poems have appeared in Abridged, ROOM:A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, Beyond Words Magazine,and New Writers. She was highly commended in the Patrick KavanaghPoetry Award and awarded second place in the New Writers competition.She also works within the visual arts as an advocate and development manager,supporting artists and makers across Scotland.

The Name I Was Never Given
In a photograph he stands
stallion-strong,
driftwood light across his skin,
salt wind hollowing the years
before I was carried here.
Still, salt moves through my veins,
ache arriving already sunk.
I wear their faces-his, hers-
stitched beneath my own,
a tangle of lines and broken eyes.
Bone pulls him forward,
remembering what no one speaks.
Charts reduce him to code,
lines drawn backward
to a country I may never stand on
a portion of blood I cannot measure
but feel.
The marrow holds what names will not.
At night, his country rises-
a black coast veiled in fog,
bone carvings smoothed by touch,
the ocean speaking in vowels
I cannot hold,
greenstone cold in the palm.
Feathers fall from birds
without names.
The wind tastes of old rain.
My grandmother sits among quiet books,
education a polished shell
turning in her hand.
She carries him unknowingly,
names that left him behind
running silent beneath art and years.
The prayers heavy in my mouth,
hands remembering work.
Blood knots tighter,
cloth draws close.
The map forgets.
Bone does not.
Blood carries him forward-
driftwood-quiet,
greenstone-sharp
against the palm.


Discover all Primer Eight shortlisted poets here