Holly Winter-Hughes

Holly Winter-Hughes, Guest to Saturday’s Poetry Breakfast on 15th November 2025

You dialogue out small talk, and truth stays too heavy to
surface. You watch him butter toast as if piling anything
up could start a wall.

He strokes your hair from your eyes like he’s scared of
hurting you — that’s when you learn to close your lids
before the flinch.

And you let hours soak through you, although something
is calling you back, to your bed and clothes and darker
toast from seeded loaves.

You know that leaving will force the dam, that as soon
as you step outside, he is monster.

But you can’t save him.

So, you let water carry you, lift you with it, forgetting
who dropped you into the flood to start with.
You float and flow, until your mouth is an ache of salt,
and land a memory.

from It Takes 44 Hours (for Something Dropped in a River to Reach the Sea)

I have read about a third of Holly Winter-Hughes’ 2025 publication How to Leave a Body. The .pdf version cannot (on me) have the same effect as print; on Saturday 15th November I hope Holly will bring plenty of For Sale copies with her when she reads at the Reading Room, Dudley Central Library, 10.00. I will finish the book, and then start again. Like songs that come to you unbidden after a few listenings, I want this poetry to inhabit my head.

Rhapsodising, when presented with such a good thing as this, is easy to do, to fall back on words such as grace, directness, elegance, language that has been worked – which is indeed the pleasure of the reading for me. I could go Eng. Lit. and talk about Winter-Hughes’ extraordinary skill with metaphor, so subtly blended into the discourse to be indiscernible in the thrust of the narration. The way that meaning springs to mind, on different levels.

What affects me most is the degree of poetic imagination. True to the title, the body is central to each part of the work. As in the opening poem, Home Making (when your body throws you out) the body becomes an entity so misused by others that the spirit migrates from it, to inhabit a world of nightmarish memory. The return to the body is a reinhabiting of the future, a different future, perhaps one of hope.

The extract above comes in the second of five sections, entitled ‘At War’. I took the poem as a representation of the experience that follows abuse, the slow realisation of what has actually taken place. Through the extended metaphor of water, the steady push upon it of gravity, that will ‘force the dam’, the flow taking to the wider infinite space. Winter-Hughes is discussing interpersonal relationships here, the possibility of freeing oneself from whatever denies the human spirit. When, though, carried by river and tide, land becomes ‘a memory’, another, more final freedom is implied.

This is a poet of daring, wit and absolute purpose. Not to be missed.