Longlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2026

The world we encounter through Matthew Welton's poetry is one where kitchen radios, coffee cups and bicycle bells lead us to bramble blossom, rubbly clouds and paving slabs overrun with ivy. Such images are layered with reflections on how the things around us manifest a kind of 'thinginess' – as Welton puts it – and how this creates the context for our thoughts.

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.

The book's two-line stanzas are strung together to a form a drizzly British renga – fragments are alternately justified to the left and right margins so that the book progresses like a long zig-zag line. Much like Matthew Welton's other books, these formal innovations occur with a kind of quietness that results in an absorbing reading experience. As Welton's walks asked of him, so his subsequent poems ask that you escape into the minutiae of life.