The Mayday Diaries
by Robin Houghton
£12 (pub. 2025)

It starts with an all-consuming job and its associated terrors. But from a life tee- tering on collapse and the aftermath of grief, anger and illness comes reflection, redemption and the joy of everyday epiphanies. Women stand their ground: a mother quietly refuses to take her pills, a Greek hetaira defends her reputation, a sister’s imagined wheelchair ‘always knows where the speed cameras are.’ Take a trip down to Hell with a delusional despot, put yourself in the hands of an unreliable air traffic controller. Relax. Love conquers all.


Praise for The Mayday Diaries:

“Robin Houghton is a poet who really notices things – silly and deadly serious, quotidian and extraordinary, often all at once – and knows precisely how to sift them 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

“There’s so much delight and surprise in these poems. A clarity of diction to- gether 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 every- day wonder at its heart.”

Greta Stoddart

“While Houghton’s foray into American corporate capitalism equips her with a satire-ready vocabulary, she is equally fluent in the idioms of another in- ferno – 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

decree absolute

under a bridge I’m hammered by the smirk of an Overground train
this and the swish of car tyres spraying city dirt at my shoes
remind me of the hour spent in the bathroom this morning
examining my intentions, expecting more from the mirror

here    out of the rain and undercover    here in this passing-through
sort of place where pigeons tuck themselves into brick niches
under this Victorian arch I’m stopped    in a glorious moment
of vacancy    and of the many things I’d like to forget about today

the lawyer between macchiatos dashing off her pencilled Xs
summing up in three pages the greyed-out underwear of my ex-life
you and your bleached-out face blurting grudges for all to hear
how a gull crapped an exclamation mark across my car

the worst was a page left blank intentionally    space for a note to self
or a curse    a lost verse of rage    a speck of nothing at all    a waste

(from The Mayday Diaries)