Welton Walk: Small Birds Singing

Enter Carcanet’s Welton Walk competition for the chance to win a copy of Matthew Welton’s Small Birds Singing, and have your poem published on our Substack.

To enter the competition, create a response poem to Matthew Welton’s ‘June’ (attached below), and post your poem, alongside your own photo of nature.

Tag us on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, Tiktok or Substack (@carcanetpress) for your entry to count.

Further questions? Email zoe@carcanet.co.uk.

About the Small Birds Singing:

Small Birds Singing is a book-length poem of fragments, drawn from a year’s walking through one city’s green spaces. Over the course of twelve months running from September to August, we accumulate hundreds of images drawn from a closely observed daily existence moving between the home and other indoor places, into the green spaces of the modern city.

June

the twitch of a rabbit’s whiskers; the twitch of the grass in the breeze

the guys at the bike shop who smell like white spirit

on a floured wooden board the dough rises slightly –

sunlight refracts through the goldfish bowl

as if the wight of thought was equal

to the weight of our external world

the thundercloud colour of the newly laid tarmac

we spill a bag of bird seed and we’re ankle deep in ducks

the house where the bins didn’t get put out

the lawn more moss than grass

language is a loose

kind of logic

the blue of the sky; the blue of the sky reflected in the river

weeds coming up through the concrete

the laundry we didn’t fetch in in time

the camping stove on the kitchen table

each word both adds to and

subtracts from the language

by the river, an angler disentangling his tackle

the gaps in the bricks the wasps fly into

guy getting out of the builder’s van, swapping his trainers for work boots

the scribbly pictures we taped to the wall

the two-way trajectory between thinkiness and

thinginess sketched out in smudgy pencil

a bumblebee emerging from a small flower’s mouth

I thread a string through a hole in a pebble and hang it outside the door

my mind’s like fluffy apple flesh

I see the heron’s reflection before I see the heron

language may do nothing but

return to a thing its significance

a kid singing something raspy out of the side of her mouth

from outside the sound of a cycle bell

fallen blossom swept to the tennis court’s edges

a jigsaw we can neither finish nor quite seem to give up on

the idea that when you sing a tune you bring to it something of yourself

which would extend to our understanding of the routes we walk

the river lillies reddening in the sunset

I’m levering the lighter against my beer-bottle cap

the geese waddling around the lake; the geese swimming across it

a coffee-pot on a camping stove

things persist in their

indifference to language

unpainted window frames

the bees’ wings whir

in the cycle lane, a splatter of squirrel

I strike a match against the kitchen wall

things persist in their

indifference to thought

in the apricot tree the sparrows outnumbering the apricots

hire bike abandoned in the yellowing grass

the way the sound of a particular song

will give way to a particular silence

no one gives up

on music

in the limbs of the larches the cuckoo coos loud

a wasp flies out of a gap in the bricks

the buzzards seem so far above us the breezes

around them must be fuzzy with thought

there is no song that isn’t

a collective endeavour

sunlight refracts through the lemonade bottle

a spider web forms in a corner by the door

a beer in the yard; the almost-midnight sky almost dark

the spider plant droops in the soggy soil

thought may invite us to notice things;

thought may invite us to notice nothing

the river surface simmers; the nettle stems tremble

the squeak of our sneakers on the hardwood floor

watering the plant on my desk with the coffee I couldn’t finish

a bumblebee hovering in its rounded-off zig-zags

a solidly melodic line of thought

comes to a discordant conclusion

a melody moving through a brief storm of thought

towards something we might think of as its ending

the rabbit not quite hidden by the unmown grass

a square of white paper on a rectangular desk

no wakefulness without weariness;

no thinginess without thought

outside the kitchen, a pot of blue flowers

and not enough wind to flutter them

the geese swimming across the lake;

the geese flying above it

the certainty in each moment

the the mind is missing nothing

beer cans in the grass, a single yellow poppy

a ruffling of buttercups in the cool evening wind

the shadow of the window slats against the kitchen wall

the fruit bowl becoming emptier, a lemon at a time

Don’t forget to tag us on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky or Tiktok (@carcanetpress) with your response poem and nature photo for your entry to count.

Further questions? Email zoe@carcanet.co.uk.