ISBN: 978-1-915108-40-1
Published 4 March 2026
70 pages
“This collection has got everything – philosophy, myth, elegy, hilarity, grace, tenderness, pain and wisdom, all in brilliant proportion.” —Rachael Boast
*
Little Griefs
The hamster buried in the back garden
in a perfume box from Miller Harris.
A fall of jasmine. Or leaving Paris.
The ingenue and what once she starred in.
How the truth bears down if you eschew it,
paying grave visitations nightly.
Or how the small child who hugged you tightly
now claims her own world and stretches to it.
These things, and more, make up each little grief.
How you would spare her even just one tear!
No need to reason, or profess belief,
to know these moments don’t disappear,
but like angels dancing, on their pin,
the little griefs grow great. Then grow again.
*
“There is much to admire in Andrew Neilson’s poetry – its sober aplomb, for example, its musical exactitude, and the humane steadiness of its gaze at love and mortality.”
—Sean O’Brien
“This is splendidly lyrical poetry, in unpretentious yet still emotionally affecting language.”—Matthew Paul
Little Griefs by Andrew Neilson
Rec.
There are days, of course, I don’t know what to say.
Sometimes it’s plain wonder, like this late sun
set over the rec against a full moon –
the interplayof bare trees and our stilt-walking shadows.
More often though, come find me at a loss
as the future flatlines all around us,
rolling newsit’s easier to deflect or deflate
with the full range of absent-minded routines
our domesticated comity
allows for.Perhaps that’s why I’m attracted to this
simplified landscape, with its single hill
and the looping path for runners, lovers,
and dog-walkers(occasionally, all three at once),
taking in that sparse wood, a moated isle,
the municipal al fresco gym –
but largelythe blank sky and a rippling sheet of grass
fitted to each point of the compass.
The rec is a manageable arena
for tired thoughtsand on this ghost of an afternoon
it’s the ghosts I’m mostly thinking of:
how in the middle of my life I find
them crowding in.Moon mirrors sun. Between them, long shadows.
The rec itself is a kind of mirror,
and if confronted with such things we are
known to pause,looking beyond, to scan who else is there,
that’s just what happens when we’ve lived a little
and we have lived a little of what our
ghosts did not.*
Screen Time
Petty relations with petty people in petty cities
—J.R.R. Tolkien on the InfernoLike Guido da Montefeltro, encased
in lamenting flame, or Benjamin’s Angel
watching a single catastrophic swell
as the present itself is displaced,you swipe through the posts, read the updates,
with a flat white steaming on Formica.
There’s a sound in your head – a roar, like a
joy-ridden Audi, or tectonic platesgrinding up against the gist of themselves –
and you think this world, everything which moves,
the tic and spasm on the screen which proves
cataracts of bluster, in frothing shelves,is slowly going crazy. A cat pic
has quite recently called you a libtard,
so when you press to ‘like’, you press too hard
(even browsing feels psychosomatic)and look up from the feed. Night has fallen
with a skyline so clear it is flawless,
all the stars ghosting in their bright solace.
After a moment, much is forgotten.Yet the firmament’s yawning whatever
feels cold too. Distant. Creeping, comes the fear
and the music the stars would have you bear.
Everything happening at once forever.Andrew Neilson was born in Edinburgh and lives in London. He works in prison reform and co-edits the digital poetry journal, Bad Lilies, with Kathryn Gray (badlilies.uk). A pamphlet, Summers Are Other, was published by Rack Press in 2025. Little Griefs is his first collection.
