The Domestic Sonnets

At the heart of The Familiarity

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be publishing a series of Domestic Sonnets — one each week — from a manuscript in progress titled The Familiarity.

These poems sit at the heart of the book. They explore the architecture of shared family life: kitchens, gardens, stairwells, small gestures, silences. I’m interested in the tension between proximity and distance — how people can stand under the same roof and still feel time shifting between them.

The sonnet, with its contained space and inevitable turn, feels suited to domestic life: fourteen lines, a compression, a reckoning.

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Domestic Sonnet I

Sitting on the sofa with my son
scattered artefacts, a halfway home
yarn, jam jar, a thousand puzzled pieces
an orphaned sock in the room
edges frayed, no-one claims or tidies away
a plant he bought my wife, his mother,
we don’t know the name
acaulescent stemmed malachite
expressing itself by unfurling arms over
the evening shifts, unnoticed at first
clay splits on the floor, soil spreading wide
my son’s breath, quickening, against my side.
tanner’s brown pot, cracked, revealing
a thinning charm of rooted tendrils and rot.

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