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6th January, 2023

Friday Poem – ‘This Year’ by Ben Wilkinson


This week’s Friday Poem is ‘This Year’ by Ben Wilkinson from his collection Same Difference.

This cover shows an abstract painting made up of dark blues and greys with a face-like smudge in the centre. A splash of red, green and yellow flecks go up the left hand side. The text reads: Same Difference. Ben Wilkinson.

Carefully crafted, and charged with contemporary language, the poems in Same Difference play with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue, keeping us on our toes and asking just who is doing the talking. Throughout, Ben Wilkinson ‘steps into the shoes’ of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96), reframing his voice for modern readers. Brimming with everyone from cage fighters and boy racers to cancer patients and whales in captivity, Same Difference is gritty, darkly ironic and often moving – a collection for our times.

This Year If we could gift each other moments I’d wrap up that bauble sun we felt warm our backs to the tip of Mam Tor. I’d box the two hours spent tracing the tinselled reservoir, no two miles the same as we ran and ran, trails deserted, no sound but our own good hearts and honest footfall. I’d ribbon that first jog up Ringinglow, this city held as if the snow globe we’d shake. And I’d nestle under the tree those loops of a floodlit track, a reminder that what’s done is done, and of dark-bright moments still to come.

Same Difference is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Watch Ben Wilkinson reading ‘This Year’ on our Youtube channel:

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