I live in Cirencester, am married with two children and six grandchildren. My professional career was in Social Work and Welfare. I have four books of poems: The Canticles of Spring, The Light Will Always Return (both published by Tim Saunders Publications), At The Storm’s Edge and A Different Land, published by Palewell Press, the second published in 2022. I have won the Gloucestershire Writers Network first prize for poetry. I have also been published in Acumen and have had more work accepted by Indigo Dreams. Previous work has appeared in The Cannon’s Mouth, Riggwelter, Morphrog, Brittlestar, The Curlew, Makarelle, Writeresque, Erbacce, I am not a Silent Poet, Fly on the Wall and Voices for the Silent. In 2021 and 2023, I read at Cheltenham Poetry Festival and Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2022 and 2023.
My books
When did humans begin to feel inspired by the sounds of the natural world to create human song and rhythm?
How much was inherited from our primate ancestors?
Whatever the (probably) unknowable answer, song is both around and within us.
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The Orkney poet George Mackay Brown described poetry as “the interrogation of silence.” It is a profound statement for all its brevity. For me, that silence is the work of hidden springs which have been fed by direct personal experience and the emotions generated by love, friendship, grief, music, the natural world, landscape and the work of artists and creatives.
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"Complex, erudite and immensely readable poems from a writer who uses a rich linguistic palette to address timeless and contemporary themes. These multi-layered poems are a deeply satisfying read - fusing musicality, lyricism with fascinating themes and motifs. Frank McMahon’s poems have a rare and precious power, they inspire and inform in equal measure. An important poet with much to say," Anna Saunders - Poet and Founding Director Cheltenham Poetry Festival
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News
There is no doubt that The Canticles of Spring is a profoundly thoughtful and powerful collection, writes Nigel Kent, poet and reviewer. Read his review here: Review of ‘The Canticles of Spring’ by Frank McMahon
On November 22 I will be running a book stall to promote my work at the Corn Hall in Farringdon, Oxfordshire, from 10am - 3pm.
On November 29 I will be doing the same at the Park Campus in Cheltenham, part of Gloucestershire University.
Also at Chipping Norton, Art and Talking Gallery on December 8 at 7pm.
On November 29 I will be doing the same at the Park Campus in Cheltenham, part of Gloucestershire University.
Also at Chipping Norton, Art and Talking Gallery on December 8 at 7pm.
On November 14 I read my prize winning poem, Pomegranate, at the Poetry Together National Event, held at the Aviva Studios, Manchester.
"What a great day in Manchester, honoured to read my prize-winning poem, Pomegranate, to over 500 students, teachers and grandparents. Gyles Brandreth was a superb compère."
"What a great day in Manchester, honoured to read my prize-winning poem, Pomegranate, to over 500 students, teachers and grandparents. Gyles Brandreth was a superb compère."
REVIEW OF THE CANTICLES OF SPRING
By Nigel Kent
One of the pleasures of living where I do is its proximity to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, home of a vibrant poetry festival. One of its star turns last year was Cirencester poet, Frank McMahon. I have heard him read his poetry on several occasions. More recently he has been performing poems from his fourth collection, The Canticles of Spring, (Tim Saunders Publications, 2025). I couldn’t wait to review it.
The first thing that strikes you about McMahon’s poems in this collection is the polymathic knowledge that underpins them. There is a familiarity with ancient history that informs the poems in the Museum section, such as Market Opportunities and Neolithic Axe-Head. There is the knowledge of myths that is most notably deployed in Ancient Music, a retelling of the Orpheus-Eurydice story, which imagines her relentless pursuit of a reunion with him through the ages and culminating in the present. There is the understanding of classical music and jazz that is so movingly deployed in the war poem, Pastoral, after Symphony no 3 by Ralph Vaughan Williams and in other poems specifically on the subject, such as Jazz Variations. Three Voices. There’s the rich botanical knowledge that makes for vivid descriptions in nature poems, such as Where I walked. And, of course there are the intertextual references in poems such as The Periodic Table (In Memoriam Primo Levi) and in Du Fu Comes to our Home, the latter a work which imagines a conversation with the 8th Century, Chinese poet, Du Fu.
This impressive, broad frame of reference supports poems that seek to make sense of human experience. The range of themes explored is equally diverse. At a time when the fashion is for collections and pamphlets on a specific theme, I found this a refreshing change. All poetry’s universal concerns are here. Let me give you a flavour. In Love Song McMahon captures the capacity of a loving relationship to provide a moment’s respite from the hardships of day-to-day living: the moment of union is when ‘the weight of the world is a feather and we are simply/ the fall and rise of breath and touch.’ The nature of these hardships is explored in Entropy in which he articulates the struggles in a time of austerity: ‘A well-ordered house/ burgeoning on emptiness/ where food or heat or light/ are the flip of the last remaining coins.’ With these few telling details in sparse, economic matter-of-fact verse the poet makes us think how poverty has become a fact of life, almost inevitable, unchangeable, accepted. Another burden for some, explored by McMahon, is motherhood. In Lead Weight we experience the start of the day from the perspective of a mother with post-natal depression, who struggles to rise from her bed. She is overwhelmed by the demands of her new role: ‘I want today to end before it starts/ to hide in sleep, the curtains fully closed, to calm the jagged rhythms of my heart, escape from what the world will next impose// or bloody well demand.’ This isn’t laziness or indicative of a lack of love for her child (‘I want to move towards him. But I can’t’): it comes from anxiety (‘the jagged rhythms of the heart’) of not feeling up to the job and from physical exhaustion (‘My head’s all fuzz, limbs lead’). Then, of course, there are the nature poems, such as Where I Walked with its rich sensory descriptions of the environment: ‘Chestnuts baptise new leaves in argent-azure flow, elevate/ their candles, tinged with pink to their spire’s crux/ and apex.’
Many of these poems are uncompromising in their portrayal of human experience. Yet there is a playfulness too in this collection, an intellectual playfulness, most evident in the verbal riffs on specific themes such as in the sections, Weather and A Nest of Tables, in which McMahon takes a subject and explores its poetic possibilities. In the latter the subject of tables inspires poems on subjects such as flooding (water table), children’s imaginative play (an upturned kitchen table acting as a boat), the ‘personal, /impersonal’ experience of the operating table; and the quasi-religious experience of devoted snooker players (the snooker table). The ingenuity and originality of such flights of imagination are impressive and thoroughly engaging.
My favourite poem in this section, Table An Amendment, characterises for me one of the most compelling characteristics to be found in this collection and that is compassion. It is the quality that prevents the reader from being overwhelmed by the sometimes bleak portrayal of aspects of our existence. The poem begins with details of the suffering that asylum seekers have endured, ‘the whim// of bomb or bullet, panga or poisonous gas.’ It goes onto remind us of the risks they have taken to find security for their families, through the rhetorical question that demands that the reader places him/herself in the same situation: ‘who would not dare the perilous journey// to a place of greater safety/ your family gathered within your arms?’ It concludes with a second rhetorical question that invites the reader to join with him in condemning the heartlessness of the bureaucracy of the asylum system: ‘Why should we now condemn them/ to linger in Kafka’s prison/ until until until?’ Compassion is thus a route to alleviating their suffering.
It is the same compassion that produces the happy ending to the Orpheus-Eurydice retelling referred to earlier, and I suspect it is what enables McMahon to take on so convincingly the voices of others from the present and the past. As a consequence, there is some remarkable writing in this collection. Bloodland is a perfect example of when McMahon’s empathy combines with considerable poetic skill to produce a horrific description of an ancient battle. He writes, ‘Silence falls for a moment on fevered/ sweat, swallowed gall and bile, shatters/ at the first axe crack and deep-throated/ bellow as with eldritch shrieks they surge/ upon each other to hack and slash/ and splinter, hewing limbs like winter timber. sever and thrust through skull.’ The horrors of the battle are realised in full sensory detail: these are the sounds, the sights, the touch, the taste, the smell of hand-to-hand combat written in breathless verse that conveys the relentless action in the scene. McMahon places himself in the battle and draws us in alongside him. It is grimly authentic but only possible I suspect because of his ability to put himself in other's shoes and feel their suffering.
There is no doubt that The Canticles of Spring is a profoundly thoughtful and powerful collection. In his introduction McMahon writes, ‘I do not think that poems can change the world but they can be another voice for compassion and social justice.’ If this is the intention inspiring these poems, then all I can say is job done! This is an important, memorable work that must be read.
Frank McMahon lives in Cirencester. His professional career was in Social Work/Welfare. He has three other books of poems: At The Storm's Edge and A Different Land published by Palewell Press, and The Light Will Always Return published by Tim Saunders. He has won the Gloucestershire Writers Network first prize for poetry and he been published in many magazines and anthologies, including Acumen, Indigo Dreams, The Cannon's Mouth and Erbacce amongst others.
One of the pleasures of living where I do is its proximity to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, home of a vibrant poetry festival. One of its star turns last year was Cirencester poet, Frank McMahon. I have heard him read his poetry on several occasions. More recently he has been performing poems from his fourth collection, The Canticles of Spring, (Tim Saunders Publications, 2025). I couldn’t wait to review it.
The first thing that strikes you about McMahon’s poems in this collection is the polymathic knowledge that underpins them. There is a familiarity with ancient history that informs the poems in the Museum section, such as Market Opportunities and Neolithic Axe-Head. There is the knowledge of myths that is most notably deployed in Ancient Music, a retelling of the Orpheus-Eurydice story, which imagines her relentless pursuit of a reunion with him through the ages and culminating in the present. There is the understanding of classical music and jazz that is so movingly deployed in the war poem, Pastoral, after Symphony no 3 by Ralph Vaughan Williams and in other poems specifically on the subject, such as Jazz Variations. Three Voices. There’s the rich botanical knowledge that makes for vivid descriptions in nature poems, such as Where I walked. And, of course there are the intertextual references in poems such as The Periodic Table (In Memoriam Primo Levi) and in Du Fu Comes to our Home, the latter a work which imagines a conversation with the 8th Century, Chinese poet, Du Fu.
This impressive, broad frame of reference supports poems that seek to make sense of human experience. The range of themes explored is equally diverse. At a time when the fashion is for collections and pamphlets on a specific theme, I found this a refreshing change. All poetry’s universal concerns are here. Let me give you a flavour. In Love Song McMahon captures the capacity of a loving relationship to provide a moment’s respite from the hardships of day-to-day living: the moment of union is when ‘the weight of the world is a feather and we are simply/ the fall and rise of breath and touch.’ The nature of these hardships is explored in Entropy in which he articulates the struggles in a time of austerity: ‘A well-ordered house/ burgeoning on emptiness/ where food or heat or light/ are the flip of the last remaining coins.’ With these few telling details in sparse, economic matter-of-fact verse the poet makes us think how poverty has become a fact of life, almost inevitable, unchangeable, accepted. Another burden for some, explored by McMahon, is motherhood. In Lead Weight we experience the start of the day from the perspective of a mother with post-natal depression, who struggles to rise from her bed. She is overwhelmed by the demands of her new role: ‘I want today to end before it starts/ to hide in sleep, the curtains fully closed, to calm the jagged rhythms of my heart, escape from what the world will next impose// or bloody well demand.’ This isn’t laziness or indicative of a lack of love for her child (‘I want to move towards him. But I can’t’): it comes from anxiety (‘the jagged rhythms of the heart’) of not feeling up to the job and from physical exhaustion (‘My head’s all fuzz, limbs lead’). Then, of course, there are the nature poems, such as Where I Walked with its rich sensory descriptions of the environment: ‘Chestnuts baptise new leaves in argent-azure flow, elevate/ their candles, tinged with pink to their spire’s crux/ and apex.’
Many of these poems are uncompromising in their portrayal of human experience. Yet there is a playfulness too in this collection, an intellectual playfulness, most evident in the verbal riffs on specific themes such as in the sections, Weather and A Nest of Tables, in which McMahon takes a subject and explores its poetic possibilities. In the latter the subject of tables inspires poems on subjects such as flooding (water table), children’s imaginative play (an upturned kitchen table acting as a boat), the ‘personal, /impersonal’ experience of the operating table; and the quasi-religious experience of devoted snooker players (the snooker table). The ingenuity and originality of such flights of imagination are impressive and thoroughly engaging.
My favourite poem in this section, Table An Amendment, characterises for me one of the most compelling characteristics to be found in this collection and that is compassion. It is the quality that prevents the reader from being overwhelmed by the sometimes bleak portrayal of aspects of our existence. The poem begins with details of the suffering that asylum seekers have endured, ‘the whim// of bomb or bullet, panga or poisonous gas.’ It goes onto remind us of the risks they have taken to find security for their families, through the rhetorical question that demands that the reader places him/herself in the same situation: ‘who would not dare the perilous journey// to a place of greater safety/ your family gathered within your arms?’ It concludes with a second rhetorical question that invites the reader to join with him in condemning the heartlessness of the bureaucracy of the asylum system: ‘Why should we now condemn them/ to linger in Kafka’s prison/ until until until?’ Compassion is thus a route to alleviating their suffering.
It is the same compassion that produces the happy ending to the Orpheus-Eurydice retelling referred to earlier, and I suspect it is what enables McMahon to take on so convincingly the voices of others from the present and the past. As a consequence, there is some remarkable writing in this collection. Bloodland is a perfect example of when McMahon’s empathy combines with considerable poetic skill to produce a horrific description of an ancient battle. He writes, ‘Silence falls for a moment on fevered/ sweat, swallowed gall and bile, shatters/ at the first axe crack and deep-throated/ bellow as with eldritch shrieks they surge/ upon each other to hack and slash/ and splinter, hewing limbs like winter timber. sever and thrust through skull.’ The horrors of the battle are realised in full sensory detail: these are the sounds, the sights, the touch, the taste, the smell of hand-to-hand combat written in breathless verse that conveys the relentless action in the scene. McMahon places himself in the battle and draws us in alongside him. It is grimly authentic but only possible I suspect because of his ability to put himself in other's shoes and feel their suffering.
There is no doubt that The Canticles of Spring is a profoundly thoughtful and powerful collection. In his introduction McMahon writes, ‘I do not think that poems can change the world but they can be another voice for compassion and social justice.’ If this is the intention inspiring these poems, then all I can say is job done! This is an important, memorable work that must be read.
Frank McMahon lives in Cirencester. His professional career was in Social Work/Welfare. He has three other books of poems: At The Storm's Edge and A Different Land published by Palewell Press, and The Light Will Always Return published by Tim Saunders. He has won the Gloucestershire Writers Network first prize for poetry and he been published in many magazines and anthologies, including Acumen, Indigo Dreams, The Cannon's Mouth and Erbacce amongst others.
NIGEL KENT: Poet and Publisher
Today it is my great pleasure to welcome one of Gloucestershire's finest poets to reflect on a poem from his latest collection, The Canticles of Spring, Tim Saunders Publications, 2025.
“The Periodic Table.”
( In Memoriam Primo Levi )
I met him in the chapters of this book.
It was as if he said, come close, sit and let me read.
And I could interpret every phrase and word with ease enough
to let me glide along the cadence of his diction
until I came to Gold through which
he led me, stumbling, to what they called
“the arsehole of the world”..
To honour him I had to follow
this modern Dante through and beyond.
How could I attempt to comprehend
the arc of his life
unless I tried to enter through those gates,
“Arbeit Mach Frei.”
Se questo e un uomo.
A carriage on the Underground, crammed, bodies perspiring,
a new smell from vents overhead, lungs tightening,
a child sliding down the wall, hands letting go.
To honour him, I had to follow.
In this sewer is there a grille or pole
to cling to, let you gnaw or share a nub of bread
found in the wash of melted human flesh
or scraps of gristle furred with ash on broken bones?
Smeared walls carry the echoes of wheels
grinding slowly to a stop, running feet, ghost whispers.
In this tunnel how do you not lose
the text of your moral core, abandon the hope
of a map to the homeland of your former self,
to the healing river?
h
hh
ho
hol
holo
holoc
holoca
holocau
holocaus
holocaust
holocaust
holocaus
holocau
holoca
holoc
holo
hol
ho
hh
h
Impossible transactions.
My political awakening came as I watched the March on Washington in 1963 and thrilled to the oratory of Martin Luther King. It brought the shock of learning that one community was being oppressed by another.
My first knowledge of the Holocaust was factual and limited. I did not begin to take in the extent of its horrors until I met the Hungarian partner of a work colleague. She told me that she had survived the Selection in Auschwitz because she spoke German and persuaded the doctors that she was not pregnant, that her distended stomach was caused by hunger.
Her simple account left me speechless.
But I began to feel an irresistible moral compulsion to find out more: books, documentaries, films like Shoah, and then Primo Levi’s forensic analysis in If this is a Man, and his later book, The Drowned and the Saved. Through those I really entered both the dark heart of the Holocaust and the astonishing humanity of prisoners and those who survived. The horror that a government and citizens could plan and carry out the extermination of fellow citizens, people they had known and who had been colleagues and friends was just too enormous to fully comprehend. Surely it could not happen again? And yet, new genocides were happening: Cambodia, Rwanda, The Balkans.
And racism and anti-semitism is alive in our own country.
When I was working with the Red Cross listening to asylum seekers, telling their stories, why they had fled, was another powerful reminder of repression and persecution.
In 2017, a trip to Berlin led me to the place where the Nazis began the burning of books.
I felt a sudden, powerful physical and emotional sensation, history coming fully alive. I had studied the Weimar Republic at University but it could not convey the palpable combination of location and history which I felt as I studied the memorial to those events.
“Ghosts gather, tug at your sleeve politely / plead that you read the Book of the Dead. / Its opening page lies at your feet. Descend / to lamentation’s rainbow. / "
Viewing the monument in Budapest to the murder of Jews was a further jolt. Out of these intense moments came two poems, Berlin 1933 and Shoes, published in my first book, At the Storms Edge, ( Palewell Press.)
My poetic voice was maturing and a re-reading of Primo Levi’s book made an even deeper impression. I felt a deep urge to honour his life and work, to try to imagine those moments before extermination, to praise his humanity. Hence this poem, for me the most important in the book. And perhaps, subconsciously, I was provoking readers and listeners to say, “this matters, you need to know so that you can spot the warning signs here and elsewhere.”
Am I in danger of overstatement? Think how rancorously divided we were over Brexit. The murder of MP, Jo Cox. Violent disorder about asylum-seekers in hotels. The condemning of judges in the right-wing press for upholding the law. In the words of Sir Michael Tippett, “I must know my shadow and my light.” Artists must be willing to address full on the worst of our individual and collective selves, even if only in private conversation or introspection.
After the end of the war, Theodore Adorno said,”After Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry. ” I think we must continue to write because in the face of evil silence might imply consent. We must add our voice to the chorus of protest, warning and lament.
Postscript: The poem was written before the dreadful events in Gaza. I can only conclude that the government of a nation which came out of the Holocaust has thrown away its moral compass and humanitarian empathy
Read my review of this outstanding collection next week (Sept 27, 2025)
Today it is my great pleasure to welcome one of Gloucestershire's finest poets to reflect on a poem from his latest collection, The Canticles of Spring, Tim Saunders Publications, 2025.
“The Periodic Table.”
( In Memoriam Primo Levi )
I met him in the chapters of this book.
It was as if he said, come close, sit and let me read.
And I could interpret every phrase and word with ease enough
to let me glide along the cadence of his diction
until I came to Gold through which
he led me, stumbling, to what they called
“the arsehole of the world”..
To honour him I had to follow
this modern Dante through and beyond.
How could I attempt to comprehend
the arc of his life
unless I tried to enter through those gates,
“Arbeit Mach Frei.”
Se questo e un uomo.
A carriage on the Underground, crammed, bodies perspiring,
a new smell from vents overhead, lungs tightening,
a child sliding down the wall, hands letting go.
To honour him, I had to follow.
In this sewer is there a grille or pole
to cling to, let you gnaw or share a nub of bread
found in the wash of melted human flesh
or scraps of gristle furred with ash on broken bones?
Smeared walls carry the echoes of wheels
grinding slowly to a stop, running feet, ghost whispers.
In this tunnel how do you not lose
the text of your moral core, abandon the hope
of a map to the homeland of your former self,
to the healing river?
h
hh
ho
hol
holo
holoc
holoca
holocau
holocaus
holocaust
holocaust
holocaus
holocau
holoca
holoc
holo
hol
ho
hh
h
Impossible transactions.
My political awakening came as I watched the March on Washington in 1963 and thrilled to the oratory of Martin Luther King. It brought the shock of learning that one community was being oppressed by another.
My first knowledge of the Holocaust was factual and limited. I did not begin to take in the extent of its horrors until I met the Hungarian partner of a work colleague. She told me that she had survived the Selection in Auschwitz because she spoke German and persuaded the doctors that she was not pregnant, that her distended stomach was caused by hunger.
Her simple account left me speechless.
But I began to feel an irresistible moral compulsion to find out more: books, documentaries, films like Shoah, and then Primo Levi’s forensic analysis in If this is a Man, and his later book, The Drowned and the Saved. Through those I really entered both the dark heart of the Holocaust and the astonishing humanity of prisoners and those who survived. The horror that a government and citizens could plan and carry out the extermination of fellow citizens, people they had known and who had been colleagues and friends was just too enormous to fully comprehend. Surely it could not happen again? And yet, new genocides were happening: Cambodia, Rwanda, The Balkans.
And racism and anti-semitism is alive in our own country.
When I was working with the Red Cross listening to asylum seekers, telling their stories, why they had fled, was another powerful reminder of repression and persecution.
In 2017, a trip to Berlin led me to the place where the Nazis began the burning of books.
I felt a sudden, powerful physical and emotional sensation, history coming fully alive. I had studied the Weimar Republic at University but it could not convey the palpable combination of location and history which I felt as I studied the memorial to those events.
“Ghosts gather, tug at your sleeve politely / plead that you read the Book of the Dead. / Its opening page lies at your feet. Descend / to lamentation’s rainbow. / "
Viewing the monument in Budapest to the murder of Jews was a further jolt. Out of these intense moments came two poems, Berlin 1933 and Shoes, published in my first book, At the Storms Edge, ( Palewell Press.)
My poetic voice was maturing and a re-reading of Primo Levi’s book made an even deeper impression. I felt a deep urge to honour his life and work, to try to imagine those moments before extermination, to praise his humanity. Hence this poem, for me the most important in the book. And perhaps, subconsciously, I was provoking readers and listeners to say, “this matters, you need to know so that you can spot the warning signs here and elsewhere.”
Am I in danger of overstatement? Think how rancorously divided we were over Brexit. The murder of MP, Jo Cox. Violent disorder about asylum-seekers in hotels. The condemning of judges in the right-wing press for upholding the law. In the words of Sir Michael Tippett, “I must know my shadow and my light.” Artists must be willing to address full on the worst of our individual and collective selves, even if only in private conversation or introspection.
After the end of the war, Theodore Adorno said,”After Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry. ” I think we must continue to write because in the face of evil silence might imply consent. We must add our voice to the chorus of protest, warning and lament.
Postscript: The poem was written before the dreadful events in Gaza. I can only conclude that the government of a nation which came out of the Holocaust has thrown away its moral compass and humanitarian empathy
Read my review of this outstanding collection next week (Sept 27, 2025)
