learning to be very soft

Available to purchase | Published 1st June 2020

Winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize judged by Mary Jean Chan

How do we confront childhood shame? These poems explore both the childhood moments that never leave us, and the hard exteriors we build up as we get older. When our vulnerability is so often at stake, learning to be very soft becomes vital.

This is a collection suffused with vivid imagery, with various forms of water (“the pool”, “the floods”, “the river” and “the sea”) occurring throughout the text. I admired Waldron-Hall’s ability to hone in on the complexity of relationships through verse at once startling and tender.

– Mary Jean Chan

In these tender, gently surreal poems of boyhood, and brotherhood, and son-hood; Callan Waldron-Hall takes us into the intimate spaces of the body and the sore spaces of shame. There is such care with language here, such stark observation of truths, it’s as though this pamphlet were a lifeguard, jumping in to save us from the mundane horror of our ordinary lives.

– Andrew McMillan

Unsettling, vivid and acutely observed, Waldron-Hall’s poems explore the ways in which a body, a self, can become ‘less than solid’. With tenderness and precision, Waldron-Hall shows us the embodied self learning to inhabit both its vulnerability and its potential, its ‘untouched places’.

– Helen Tookey