Thriving on ‘the humdrum’: Michael Laskey

Nicola Healey on Michael Laskey’s Collected Poems

Jun 12, 2026

The publication of Michael Laskey’s Collected Poems by Smith/Doorstop coincides with his receiving the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry at the beginning of this year. As well as consistently publishing his own poetry across four decades (he is now 81), Laskey is well known for co-founding and directing the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, co-editing the magazine Smiths Knoll for twenty-one years, as a poetry tutor, and as publisher of The Garlic Press, which mainly features work by poets from Suffolk, where Laskey lives.

This edition combines Laskey’s six existing collections and fifteen new poems. Until his recent royal accolade (which ‘completely astonished’ Laskey), his poetry had not gained the public recognition some felt it deserved; an endorsement on the back of the book by Stephen Fry says: ‘Michael Laskey is one of England’s finest poets you’ve probably never heard of.’ Typically, a Laskey poem is a quiet one – and quiet work is often unjustly overlooked or sidelined. This is a pity: Laskey’s poems, I feel, have real lasting power.

I read almost the whole of this 385-page collection outside on a sunny April day, the setting enhancing the poems, and vice versa. I found I then wanted to read the collection again more slowly – as an ‘off-duty’ reader rather than a critic – simply because the poems were a pleasure to engage with and I wanted to spend more time with them. Laskey is a poet who celebrates, even ‘thrives on’, he explains in ‘Quotidian’, the ‘everyday, the humdrum, dull for some’: ‘small’ pleasures; humble, ordinary experience. Craig Raine has called him ‘our poetic Alan Bennett – a genius of, as it were, biscuit barrels and wry grief.’ As Andrew McCulloch has pointed out though, on introducing Laskey’s poem ‘The Lawnmower’ as the TLS ‘Poem of the week’, ‘The world Laskey describes may be familiar […] but its images are far from cosy’ or complacent: the interplay of real familial emotions and failed connection that he often depicts, especially between parent and child, is (in McCulloch’s brilliantly exact observation) ‘softly tragic’. He is like a more domesticised Larkin – a poet who also had the sensitivity to see, and to reveal, the beauty and the interest in the so-called ‘dull’ moments of our lives. As Larkin remarked in an interview with John Haffenden: ‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace, I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’ Laskey’s own attention to the commonplace extends to the word itself: he wittily points out in ‘Quotidian’ that he doesn’t like this ornate, Latinate synonym: ‘not a word / I’d choose, actually one I avoid – / […] it contradicts / what it means’. Obfuscation is not part of Laskey’s poetic project.

A book with a teal cover. The text reads 'Collected Poems. Michael Laskey.'

As well as poems on the everyday, the sea, and Laskey’s natural environment, poems on mortality – both his own and that of loved ones and lost friends – are threaded through the collection like a trip wire. In ‘Letters from my Mother’, for example – from Laskey’s first full collection, Thinking of Happiness (1991) – the speaker regularly receives letters full of ‘cheerful humdrum prose’, ‘bland with facts’, and ‘unevent- / ful life’ that leave her son never actually knowing ‘what went on / inside her head’ – that’s ‘left out / as if of no account’. The poem suggests this self-repression is born of fear: ‘No hint that she’s afraid / it’s cancer’. Laskey’s poems increasingly become a way of ‘keeping in touch / with growing numbers of the dead’ (‘The Barrow’).

Perhaps Laskey has been surrounded by death more than most. ‘Living with the Doctor’ (his wife is a retired GP), also from his first collection, shows how death becomes normalised to doctors, as regular as cooking or cleaning: ‘Once a week I suppose, like a white / wash or my cauliflower bake, / somebody living here dies’. Against such a backdrop, death is forced to co-exist with domesticity: ‘We’ve had to develop / a voice that can cope with death // properly, yet fit it in / over our bowls of soup’. This could be his ars poetica, being exactly what Laskey has achieved with his poetic voice and oeuvre. Laskey’s poem states that this is ‘Privileged knowledge for me – a broadening, a warning’: it has, at a remove, widened and sharpened his vision.

Laskey’s clear-eyed poems on mortality throw his relishing of ‘the everyday’ into relief, make sense of it. Knowing that death is silently everywhere, in the background, in his peripheral vision, he realises his task is to savour what we have in the limited time that we have it; to quote Larkin again, he sees that ‘Days are where we live’.

There are many charming intimate poems, celebrating his wife and family. Often these merely take notice of moments of silent domestic harmony that would otherwise pass unrecorded. ‘Summer Arriving’, from The Man Alone (2008), is one such poem. The speaker is woken by a bee or a wasp, which is then disposed of by his wife in what becomes a vision:

[…]

and there you are before me

with a handkerchief reaching up

to enfold it and shake it out,

wearing nothing at all

but light. And now silence.

Here, as elsewhere, Laskey is a master of restraint, his line breaks always deftly controlling the emotional charge of a poem and the way it subtly unfolds to the reader. ‘A Late Wedding Anniversary Poem’ (Thinking of Happiness) similarly records a gentle, reverent, thoughtful intimacy, showing the couple to be invisibly united even when their practical days follow separate paths:

I tucked your second best bra

in over the radiator

so that hurrying to dress

you might almost feel me press

a warm hand around each breast.

In ‘Changing on the Beach’, from Laskey’s most recent collection Between Ourselves (2022), Laskey writes that his wife (it feels safe to assume the poem is autobiographical) has ‘kept [him] / in poetry all [their] married life’. On the Poetry Archive website, it states that ‘Laskey was also the main carer for the couple’s three sons in their pre-school years’; this explains the number of poems on domestic life across this collection – unusual from a male poet.

His sons’ upbringing features in several of these poems; on looking up Laskey, I was fascinated to learn that his third son, Jack, grew up to be the actor who played DS Jakes in Endeavour (the brilliantly stylish prequel to Inspector Morse).

One of my favourite ‘domestic’ poems is ‘On My Own’ (The Man Alone), which records the difference in the speaker’s lunch-time habits when his wife is present. When he is alone, he eats standing up, ‘whatever’s in the fridge, hard cheese, / some scrapings of hummus’; when she is there, he makes an effort with ‘fresh bread’, ‘ring[s] the changes’, ‘surprises [her] / with rollmops, an avocado, last week / artichoke hearts’, taking time over basic, thought-through ingredients: a simply-prepared salad acquires a ritualistic, almost sacred air.

A photo of a grey haired man wearing a black beret and a red jumper. There are trees in the background.

There are many poems on food – on soup, eggs, oranges, ratatouille, a stuffed aubergine – both from Laskey’s present and past, reminding us of the centrality of food to our daily lives (even if we don’t speak or write about it). ‘Fried Potatoes’, from The Man Alone, recalls his mother cooking, ‘standing / interminably at the stove’. He writes about what people’s days actually involve, and what is needed to sustain them. ‘The Day After’, from his second collection, the T. S. Eliot-shortlisted The Tightrope Wedding (1999) – shows how food is still needed even when communication is not: ‘It’s sometimes too soon / to speak about things, but you’ve got to eat.’ One of the best is ‘Living with Lemons’, from Laskey’s fifth collection Weighing the Present (2014). A series of vignettes in praise of lemons – ‘surely / you always keep a lemon in?’ – the poem concludes with an amusing detail about the writer and clergyman Sydney Smith, who moved in 1809 to Foston-le-Clay in Yorkshire, a place ‘“so far out of the way” / he wrote to friends in London / “I am twelve miles from a lemon”’.

Laskey’s tender and touching poems make the moments of hardness or brutality all the more arresting. Several poems touch on social breakdown, such as the moving ‘Nightingales’, one of a sequence of ‘Selfies’ in Between Ourselves. The poem begins with the speaker ‘biking back into town’, bemoaning the absence of nightingales in the just-visited wood, though still allowing the ‘warm still evening’ to uplift his fragile mood. He cycles past his local pub, cheered to find it alive with ‘a good crowd of mostly young men’. Upon greeting them with a civil ‘Evening’, the speaker is viciously sworn at, a throwaway remark that lands like violence in a genuinely shocking last line, all the more unexpected for the vulnerable lines that have preceded it.

‘Fear’, in Laskey’s third collection Permission to Breathe (2004) – a collection where, in its reckoning with parental death, Laskey’s theme of mortality is at its most grave and concentrated – is another formally deft poem. A stream of pleasingly specific, highly personal yet recognisable anxieties, both rational and irrational, it anticipates Emily Berry’s poem ‘Some Fears’ in her 2013 collection Dear Boy. Some short poems, especially in Weighing the Present, can seem more just a snatch of thought or feeling – a reflective slither of Laskey’s inner world – but form mosaic-like facets of his vision’s whole. In ‘A Breath’, Laskey remembers an ordinary breeze, ‘the briefest touch’ – ‘It was next to nothing, a ripple / of air, a breath of a breeze / through the window’ – which has nevertheless inexplicably remained special to him, this ‘cool / fluky flow of air that I’m still / feeling the afterglow of / days later’ – which will be felt for as long as the poem lives. Laskey’s understated poems are like this breeze, their afterglow quietly remaining with the reader. I thought of Wordsworth’s vivifying ‘gentle breeze’ in The Prelude, which sparks ‘A corresponding mild creative breeze, / A vital breeze’, the breath of inspiration.

Laskey is a poet who is writing for himself in the best sense of one who has to write, in the way that one has to breathe, as a way of being in the world. He favours clear language and being understood: ‘I want language transparent’, he writes in ‘Callipygian’, so as not to obstruct the view. His poems are authentic, alive to detail, carefully crafted and precise, emotionally honest and never flashy; he cares more about faithfully honouring experience than in doing elaborate or experimental things with form and language. This makes him, to me, a true poet.

The poem ‘Cucumber’, from Laskey’s first collection, contains one of the best, most delightful and unique metaphors I have ever read:

Cucumber

cut for us, bleeds

minute plasma beads;

shows us its useless

rose windows […]

A cross section of a cucumber is exactly like a rose window. It does what a great metaphor should do: makes us see both objects afresh, instantly and always. In this way, poets minutely remake the world. Rose windows symbolise spiritual wholeness, the circle being a symbol of infinity. It is a wonderfully natural image, emblematic of Laskey’s ever-observant eye and delicate touch that honours our daily lives and elevates the domestic far beyond the everyday.

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