A Few More Sunrises Yet Before It Ends: Selected Poems

by Martin Hayes

362 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2025

Reviews

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martin Hayes is a stunning poet. Here’s 350 pages that show just how good he really is. As his writing develops over the years he moves away from just tales of the workplace into a profound and far reaching view of work and what it does to our lives. The soulless exploitation in fag-end Britain of being paid less so that a few others can be paid a lot more. This wastes lives and there’s a lot of anger and long term trauma about being in a continuous struggle just to live. There’s also a huge amount of humour, mostly dark and used as a coping mechanism. I found myself reading some of the poems out loud, in my living room I was enjoying them that much. Why don’t poets write about work? It takes up so much of our lives, yet there’s so little poetry and very little as wonderfully written as this. Hayes is undoubtedly one of our greatest poets about work.