The Cold Tap Sings

ATOMISED: Selected Minimal Poems was published by Trickhouse Press in August 2020. It’s on sale for £3 here.

There are mysteries and magic here, but also plenty of fun and the noggin-scratching satisfaction of a puzzle solved … Across thirty white walls of paper, Boothroyd hangs works of conceptual art.

Joe Darlington, Manchester Review of Books

Boothroyd is not afraid to shift expectations in a creative field which is all too often managed as a space for seriousness or intellectual epiphany. The revelations which emerge from the shifts in Boothroyd’s language … simply cause me to giggle. I believe this to be far more powerful.

Briony Hughes, Osmosis

With this project, begun in 2014 and still ongoing, I break language down into its constituent parts – atomise it – and sometimes fuse it back together. Through wordplay, bastardisation, rupture and erasure, these playful, experimental and revelatory micro-poems, inspired by the work of Aram Saroyan and Ian Hamilton Finlay, fathom worlds within words.

Hey listen poetry is about language first and it’s more artificial than speaking even. So if a poetry is reduced down to its atoms, small clusters of letters, single words and their slight variations, misspellings, mishearings, well that’s important literary work. And hey listen Robin Boothroyd is not only able to do this, which is hard, because the smaller poems get the more every single tiny gesture is exposed, but he has done it with a humour which suggests a great emotional intelligence as well as a linguistic, poetical, intellectual one. Atomised is a concentrated gem of a book. It’s Brain Eno and a whole whale. It’s froth and sore eros. You’d be lucky to see it slowly!

SJ Fowler