Poetry Corner: Unsworth Invites Us to Stay Awhile
I was excited to receive a copy of Stay Awhile, having already encountered several of its poems—not least “Silo Auto”, which I had the pleasure of reading at Other People’s Poetry this summer. Even the title offers a kind of ease: an invitation to sit down and settle into a collection that Fran Lock has described as “alive and open” and Tom Branfoot as “tender, funny, and forthright”. Both are right.
At its heart, Unsworth’s collection explores the intersection of the personal and the public: the way our inner architecture meets the tangible architecture of the places we call home. In Stay Awhile, the poet remains in an ongoing conversation with these spaces—and asks the people who inhabit them a pressing question: do you recognise what is happening to you?
“a cooling tower cannot be embarrassed
but it can be annihilated”
Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the whole thing can be read as love-letter to working class life. The life in which things largely happen to people, and yet those same people are able to find ways in which to remain proud. Whilst this is hinted at in several poems, there are a handful that are simply screaming this (if you’ll pardon the pun) from the rooftops. Penthouse, one of the collections shorter poems is about longing for a beautiful view and comes crashing down with one swift reality-affirming line: “but that is not my life”. Later in the collection, forces through another volta and asks us “then why am I not free to walk here[?]” whilst comparing herself to an abandoned building.
That tension between endurance and erasure is carried not only by what the poems say, but by how quietly they say it. The cooling tower can be annihilated without embarrassment; the speaker can long for a penthouse view while knowing that it is not her life. Unsworth allows these contrasts to stand without overexplaining them, and their restraint gives the collection much of its force.
And to me, what is most striking, is the way in which the message is delivered. It is quiet, delicate. Like a cup of tea after a long day at work. Like accepting you were a kid that had to go to work for financial independence, because some didn’t, and at one time believing it to be a sign of maturity and not the material conditions in which you were brought up.
Unsworth is a poet that is telling the truth about who she is and what she experiences. Careful and understated, her work here is evocative of someone that knows precisely what it is they want to say and how they want to say it. That alone is admirable in an age when the world so often feels as though it is near collapsing beneath the weight of its own nonsense it is so quick to shout at anyone and everyone.
Published by the Knives Forks and Spoons Press, based in Merseyside, Stay Awhile is a collection that quietly calls on us to pay attention to our surroundings so that we might better understand ourselves. Its tenderness never softens its scrutiny of place, class and belonging; instead, its restraint makes that scrutiny more persuasive.
