Five poems to read with your morning coffee
Five poems to read with your morning coffee
Lucy ThynneMon, June 1, 2026 at 9:00 AM UTC
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poems to read on a break
The greatest casualty of our education system? Poetry. Either you're from an older generation and you know a few lines by heart – whether or not you remember what they mean – or you're younger, and were forced to kill and dissect some verses for your GCSEs. It's enough to put anyone off.
But I think we still have a strong national curiosity about poetry. If only we could "get" it, we would like it. We all know that poetry's important – we just don't know how, or where, to begin.
Enter The Telegraph's poetry series. Every Monday we publish a new poem, contemporary or old, which you can read in the time it takes to have a cup of tea.
I'll give you a brief introduction, to explain who the poet is and what they might be doing. But don't worry, exams are over. As the poet Caroline Bird once said at a reading: "Focus on the feeling first. Let it wash over you." In other words: enjoy.
Jump to:
'Tamil Nadu Summer Aubade' by Tishani Doshi
'Somewhere Far' by Joe Carrick-Varty
'Aubade' by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
'If I can stop one heart from breaking' by Emily Dickinson
'My Father's Language' by Leontia Flynn
'Tamil Nadu Summer Aubade' by Tishani Doshi
Tishani Doshi was about to embark on her poetry career when she was told that she was doing it all wrong. A literary scout had come to visit her writing programme in Baltimore, and, seeing potential in the young Doshi, informed her that she should be writing novels instead. "This was not long after The God of Small Things," she recalled in an interview. "Everybody was looking for the next Arundhati Roy. And I was dismayed that the publishing industry just wanted to re-order and replace."
Thankfully Doshi persisted, and plenty of prizes later comes Egrets, While War, her fifth collection. Poetry is her "default" way of being, she says, but reading these poems, I was struck by how many seemed to come out of something stronger – intense need. This is a narrator overwhelmed by the world's wars and destruction (even though her titles are wonderfully playful: "Coming to Terms with the Metaverse, Which is Making Me Feel Old and Sad".)
Take this poem, "Tamil Nadu Summer Aubade". It's a lovely work that goes back to Doshi's childhood summers in Madras (now Chennai, southern India), when happiness seems to play on repeat: "as though / all of this could be never-ending." But she can't work out how to write about happy memories when so many others lack them: "What to say to those / raised without childhoods?"
'Somewhere Far' by Joe Carrick-Varty
Joe Carrick-Varty calls his first collection "adolescent": it's a former, "painful version" of him. He wrote the majority of the poems while he was in his early-mid twenties, and by the time More Sky was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, when he was 29, "I didn't quite relate to them anymore… like an old haircut or pair of jeans."
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I imagine that now Carrick-Varty is 32, and has a recent second collection under his belt, More Sky feels even more distant. But going back to it last week I was reminded of how raw and exciting those poems are, how deservedly they brought Carrick-Varty to the forefront of the contemporary poetry scene. This poem, "Somewhere Far", is the oldest – he wrote it after finishing his undergraduate degree – and I like it for the simple reason that it achieves what it sets out to do: to convey a place, a person and an old routine.
'Aubade' by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
On March 6 1945, Captain William Killick took his gun to Dylan Thomas's house and shot at every window. They'd just had a tense exchange at the pub, and Killick was fuming. Thomas seemed the pinnacle of bourgeois laziness, lounging around during wartime, inviting London literary types to come to Wales and stay. And then there was his friendship with Killick's wife Vera. Were the two suspiciously close?
Killick did no damage to Thomas himself, but the event provides an intriguing backdrop to Samantha Wynne-Rhyderrch's original new collection, Milk Wood Memoir. The book is set in New Quay, the town in west Wales where Thomas lived in 1944–5 and found the inspiration for his most famous work, Under Milk Wood. Wynne-Rhydderch draws not just on her imagination but on her memories of her grandfather – a New Quay local, who was at Thomas's house the night Killick turned up.
For a flavour of Wynne-Rhyderrch's project, try "Aubade" below. Here we have Thomas taking his last walk through the town before leaving for London, watching dawn break on "this field of pink-tipped / sheaves." It has some gorgeously Thomasian internal rhymes, and introduces the collection's dramatis personae – though it's not entirely clear whether they're there, or "characters" in Thomas's head.
'If I can stop one heart from breaking' by Emily Dickinson
For a long time I had a tiny poem by Emily Dickinson taped above my desk:
In this short Life that only lasts an hourHow much – how little – is within our power
In a way, it's a good summation of Dickinson's life: she wrote much (1,800 poems), though these were often little, flecked with dashes, and hardly any of them were published while she was alive. She preferred to write verses on the backs of envelopes for friends, and mail them alongside letters bursting with feeling.
The poem below, untitled like the majority of her work, also considers the range of our short lives – what is "within our power". To Dickinson, it's kindness above all else: to "stop one heart from breaking… [to] ease one life the aching." That the last line is repeated feels like a rallying cry, a reminder that our life is for others.
'My Father's Language' by Leontia Flynn
Recently an old woman told me about an episode of temporary amnesia she'd had. For 12 hours, she didn't know her name or where she was. She could speak – to ask her husband what she should do – but she didn't know his name either. She'd drifted into their living room like a ghost, and only stayed there because she trusted him.
I thought about this sensation of adrift-ness reading Leontia Flynn's poem, "My Father's Language". Newly republished in her Selected Poems, it's about a much more scarring kind of memory loss: Alzheimer's, or what Flynn describes elsewhere as "the slow, quick-slow disease that left [my father] dead… / I wish he'd had a heart attack instead."
There are many things to admire in this poem, but what impressed me most is how Flynn conjures that adrift sensation without ever saying it obliquely: "The near shore of my father's life... starts to grow faint and vague." We have ended up in the middle of the sea, seeing it from her father's point of view, with no visible slog to get us there. And what a perfectly concise way of putting it – the secure "shore" of someone's life. What terror to be away from it.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
