The Friday Poem on 4th July 2025

Jane Routh reviews 'The Last Corinthians' by Matthew Paul (Crooked Spire Press, 2025).

Old Man of the Woods

Now of all hopeless things to draw, I should think the very worst is a fine fat fungus.
Beatrix Potter, Journal, October 1892

Beatrix unpacks a hamper crammed with mushrooms,
Shipped to West Brompton by Mr Charles McIntosh,
Retired postman of Inver, Perthshire: the Blusher;
Forest-floor fresh, gills the colour of Beatrix’s flesh.

She watercolour-paints the comeliest, pocked like toads;
A fussy but rather pleasing arrangement, which turns out
Better than earlier attempts, at Old Man of the Woods,
Slimy Spike Cap, Goblet and Orange Birch Bolete.

At Michaelmas, Beatrix, her brother Bertie, parents,
Cousins and all the household entrain at King’s Cross;
By dusk attain Dunkeld. She takes the reins of a horse
And carriage to marshal the cavalcade to Dalguise House.

Sniffing the mizzly air, Beatrix rises early, to rendezvous,
Unchaperoned, with Mr McIntosh. Nervous, whiskered
Polymath, he leads her into Hatchednize Wood, to pursue
The sulphurous caps and stipes of Herald of Winter.

Withal the chasm in age and class, friendship based on
Fungal taxonomy grows. Bertie says, ‘Mac would be some
Catch.’ Beatrix ignores his puerility; illustrates her tales
Of rabbit–children trapped in perilous scrape after scrape.

She marries a Cumberland solicitor–farmer, and throws
Herself into husbandry: by stewarding Herdwicks below
The sharp escarpment of Troutbeck Tongue. They chomp,
Her flock, on Liberty Cap; gurn, as one, like Mr McIntosh.

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‘Old Man of the Woods’ is from The Last Corinthians by Matthew Paul (Crooked Spire Press, 2025) — many thanks to Crooked Spire and Matthew Paul for letting us use it here.

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Judged by its cover, this initial publication from a new poetry publisher could disappoint those who pick it up for cricket poems (cricketers do feature – but not until the penultimate poem). It’s a book whose cast of characters is much more various – especially in the first of its three sections, any one of which would make a coherent pamphlet in its own right.

Matthew Paul titles his first section ‘Heydays’, with tales of the likes of a gambler, a spy, an asylum inmate, Beatrix Potter, Cecil Beaton’s gardener, Mike Yarwood, Picasso, Alfred Bestall (‘The Rupert Man’) as well as from characters in Edward Burra’s paintings. ‘Nitpickers’ is a poem which lifts off from Burra’s painting of the same title. The viewpoint starts high up, looking down on a Paris street where a group of prostitutes sit outside their workplace “and for a moment”

stop what they’re doing; not their actual day-to-day work,
because the Conseil would not permit it en plein air,
except, peut-être, during Carnaval, bien sûr,

in order to “comb and wrest // spanking blood-black lice and skulking eggs.”

No fewer than three of Burra’s paintings, as well as the artist himself, feature in The Last Corinthians; serendipitously, the book is published just as Burra’s work is exhibited at Tate Britain from June to September this year.

Matthew Paul’s interest in art also gives him a poem about Eric Hebborn (which acknowledges a 1991 BBC programme ‘Portrait of a Master Forger’). In ‘A common Hand’, Hebborn’s skill is acknowledged – even in the RA, where “he wins every prize” – and his views are clear:

[...] ‘The real criminal, if there is one,
Is he who makes the false description, guiltier by far
Than had he manipulated the nib himself.

and

[...] Enjoy art, without worrying whether
Attributions are correct.’

Matthew Paul likes to end his poems with a flourish. Alas, for Eric Hebborn:

[...] Out in Trastevere three icy nights later,
He stumbles, soaked in Chianti Classico Riserva,
Down a cobbled passage, to his blunt force demise.

Leaving the forger stretched out on the cobbles, Part I has primed us to expect accounts of quirks and wry moments (even if rhyme and half rhyme are occasionally prioritised over an easier flow of language and more natural line breaks). The book changes gear into its second part, ‘Black Forest Gateau’, with a gathering of personal poems.

‘OYF 747L’ (Matthew Paul has some good titles) opens Part 2 with an Austin Maxi sold to his father, even though he “didn’t appear the chap to drive a passion wagon”. This section ranges across Mum and Dad’s habits, holidays, friendships, visitors, school (and what you can get up to in ‘Double Chemistry’) and first jobs. For some readers, ‘Reversing the Charges’ will evoke an Oh-yes-I-remember-that response; those in the alphabetically coded generations will probably be mystified by:

[...] ‘Putting you through,
caller’ initiates a hullabaloo
of under-rehearsed performance: endearing
greetings hollered like we’re both hard of hearing—

There’s a curious attraction to this sort of recognition factor for older readers, one which Matthew Paul details himself in ‘Spent Matches’, a poem in which Grandma and Granddad visit “The second Thursday of every other month”, when:

[...] We watch Grandma’s must-see,
Crossroads, then ours: ‘Top of the Flops, I call it,’
says Granddad. The outfits, songs, presenters
and Legs and Co. baffle him into silence, except

when Julio Iglesias butchers ‘Begin the Beguine’.
‘Artie Shaw!’ he cries; and his and Grandma’s
memories spool back to bulletins on the wireless

In ‘Passing Places’, the book’s third section, we move forward in time through Dad’s illness and into imagining in ‘The Bidding’ how he might have bid at auctions “for late-Georgian / Toby jugs” – the same way he acknowledged another driver giving way by “raising / His trigger finger an inch” and, after his death, into musing in ‘The Drinks Cabinet’ – “In this day and age, / who still drinks Bols apricot brandy liqueur?”

We’re also taken out walking – to the woods near Rotherham, to the Lake District’s ‘Innominate Tarn’, and to Bleasdale in the Forest of Bowland. But Matthew Paul remains a thorough-going people poet: from the top of the woods, he and his wife can see Sheffield’s lights and hear the steel mills, which allows him an interjection about when his in-laws, “Pat and Ted, // moved out of earshot of Attercliffe’s perpetual / hammer, they couldn’t sleep soundly for months.” ‘Innominate Tarn’ is a place to stop for lunch and consider Wainwright wanting his ashes scattered there. ‘Bleasdale’ holds a memory of lapwings, but also of “friends, who’d stayed / in the farmhouse annexe, for zazen”.

People there are a-plenty in the long title poem, which takes off from the name on the “cricket bat slumped at the back of my father’s shed” as lament and tribute to “the last footballer-cricketers, / swapping jerseys and shorts for whites come May”. The lament is that today, young people who excel at more than one sport, are not able to play like Chris Balderstone who:

[...] reached fifty by the close,
unbuckled his pads, and within the hour was bossing

midfield for Doncaster Rovers. Next day, a hundred
in the bag, he snapped up three quick wickets to clinch
Leicestershire’s first County Championship pennant.

It’s interesting here how well the language flows and how easily Matthew Paul shifts this poem around, from his father’s bat to its maker-player, to other dual career-players (“and, for a short while, too, Ian Botham”). Then it's on to “nostalgia-mongers” bemoaning that gifted children now have to choose between sports, whereas back in the day “We all had friends in our childhood who were naturally / gifted at every game. At secondary school I sat behind […]”. And at this point, the poem becomes personal, describing the “classy opening bat” and the thirty-five-yard free-kick the schoolmate netted. Finally the poet closes with one of his typically accomplished flourishes:

But I would’ve shanked it over the bar, the ball spinning
to a stop on a well-dug hole, in a waterlogged allotment.

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Jane Routh has published four poetry collections and a prose book, Falling into Place (about rural north Lancashire) with Smith|Doorstop. Circumnavigation (2002) was shortlisted for the Forward prize for Best First Collection. Teach Yourself Mapmaking (2006) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. She has won the Cardiff International and the Strokestown International Poetry Competitions. Listening to the Night was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2018. A pamphlet, After, was published by Wayleave Press in 2021. Her latest collection is The Luck (Smith|Doorstop, 2024).

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Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked as a local government education officer for many years. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, has just been published by Crooked Spire Press. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and is co-writer / editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

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As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021. If you like Jane Routh’s writing, try her review of The Silence by Gillian Clarke (Carcanet, 2024), or (here on Substack) her review of Okapi by Fiona Moore (Blue Diode Press, 2024) or read our review of her fourth collection, The Luck.

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