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It starts with an all-consuming job and its associated terrors. But from a life teetering on collapse and the aftermath of grief, anger and illness comes reflection, redemption and the joy of everyday epiphanies.
The Mayday Diaries published by Pindrop Press.
ISBN 978-1-7384059-4-7 May 1st 2025.
“Robin Houghton is a poet who really notices things – both silly and deadly serious, quotidian and extraordinary, often all at once – and knows precisely how to sift those things so that only tight, resonant poems fall out. She makes ‘the debris of our private lives’ newly familiar and honestly strange, and never solely for sport, though she is playful too. The Mayday Diaries is a stylistically and thematically dextrous triumph in four unyieldingly inventive movements, and I don’t write that lightly.” —Rory Waterman
“The emotional power of ‘The Mayday Diaries’ has no designs on the reader: rather than being about any one idea it instead represents a conversation with the mercurial circumstances of an intensively lived life of work, love, illness and grief. While Houghton’s foray into American corporate capitalism equips her with a satire-ready vocabulary, she is equally fluent in the idioms of another inferno – that of Dante– and the poems that show his influence are transcendent. Houghton writes with poignancy, humour, formal versatility and, most of all, a refreshing self-awareness that circumvents both self-aggrandizement and self-pity.”
—Kathryn Maris
“There’s so much delight and surprise in these poems. A clarity of diction together with a playful reach and sense of experimentation, a formal agility and, for all their dramatic storytelling and beguiling sense of humour, a persistent subtlety, an emotional tension in even the most light-hearted or casual lines. What do we feel when we hear the word Mayday? Alarm, fear, intrigue. And what do we hope to find in a diary? Intimate confessions, the inner workings of a psyche trying to make sense of the world. The unusual conflation of these two words in the title of the collection evokes perfectly the intense and everyday wonder at its heart.”
—Greta Stoddart
Forthcoming readings
(events include an open mic unless otherwise stated)
7 October 2025 – Ouse Muse, Bedford: The Eagle Bookshop, 16 – 20 St Peters St, Bedford MK40 2NN. 7.45 for 8pm
26 November 2025 – Chichester Poetry: Jubilee Hall, The New Park Centre, Chichester, PO19 7XY
15 January 2026 – Needlewriters, Lewes (no open mic)
27 June 2026 – Ver Poets, St Albans
Past readings
24 June 2025 – Telltale Poets at In-Words, West Greenwich Library, 7.30pm
9 June 2025 – Arundel Arts Junction
13 May 2025 – Eastbourne Poetry Cafe
9 May 2025 – Lewes (launch)