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
Available soon. Publication date May 1st 2025  

Listen to Robin reading some of the poems in the book

“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

9 May 2025 – Lewes (launch)

13 May 2025 – Eastbourne Poetry Cafe

9 June 2025 – Arundel Arts Junction

24 June 2025 – In-Words, Greenwich

7 October 2025 – Ouse Muse, Bedford

26 November 2025 – Chichester Poetry

12 December 2025 – Poets Cafe Reading

15 January 2026 – Needlewriters, Lewes