January is proving to be an excellent month for poetry, and we are delighted to share extracts from Imogen Stirling’s epic Love the Sinner, a longform collection that narrates one night in the life of a modern Scottish city, peopled with characters navigating frailty, love and resilience. There will be performances of Love the Sinner later on in the year, and we’ll definitely be booking tickets.

Poems taken from Love the Sinner
By Imogen Stirling
Published by Verve Poetry Press

Greed
20:00hrs

Once heralded The Murder Capital of Europe (!)
Obesity Centre (!)
Time to upset the titles and rewrite the narrative
with gentrification.
Not on our watch,
not if Pret a Manger has a say.

40,000 children living in poverty

The city’s hidden secrets are threatening its Commonwealth prowess,
its cultural status.
Downgrade, reframe and you’ll see instead that
the kids here will scare you.
She can watch them from her window,
pre-pubescent villains running hoodlum doused in boredom.
Ghosts of Greed’s childhood, she sees her brothers
in their eyes, her parents in their cries.
Their teeth are broken glass,
watch them bare their shards and laugh.

[sung]
Avert your eyes, pick up the pace
You’d make no difference anyway
Rather save attention for an H&M spending
After a hard day
Hardly a sin, is it, hardly a sin, is it?
Is it? Is it?
Hardly a sin, is it?

Ties fixed so tight, they’d choke the love in you,
dull the voice in you,
skew the thought as you pay
£8 for espresso and croissant
to wash down the anti-depressants:
normalised sedatives for 9-5 addicts,
for apathy criers,
disquiet deniers.
Greed knows that hand-to-mouth living
lacks the glamour of the movies
when there’s nothing in your fridge
and Instagram pics of your notebook and coffee
won’t cover your rent. See,
once you’ve got money,
there’s nothing like it.
This round’s on me becomes motto of victory,
makes your heart swell with the thrill of success
and forget where you came from;
start afresh, score out the rest.
Get your foot on the ladder,
my god you are climbing.
Once you get a head for heights,
t h e v i e w f r o m t h e r e ‘ s s u b l i m e.

[sung]
Avert your eyes, pick up the pace
You’d make no difference anyway
Bottle it up for the sacrament of happy hour
After a hard day
Hardly a sin, is it, hardly a sin, is it?
Is it? Is it?
Hardly a sin, is it?

Squint, just there –
and you only see rooftops and not the debris.
If you squint, just there –
makes the figures on the street
look a bit less human
and a bit more trash.
We say people make us but
what people make us (?)
what people don’t make it (?)
as we airbrush the streets and
romanticise the guilt away, won’t look it in its face.

Greed remembers the stomach plummet day
her brother turned up to reception,
a spectre
of sallow skin and furrowed brow, eyes sharp and darting.
She hailed security, pretended not to know him.
Power hanging by a thread, she lives with the
Sword of Damocles grazing her neck
and will guard what she has earned with feral rage,
raise the blade
to whoever dares to take it.
No care that her family’s stories
tell this city’s history, stand rooted in legacy.
For no one is sacred in this modern world,
we’ll blot them out and write new gods,
put the casual in casualty,
make them submissive and mute them on Twitter.
They’ve given you all, city,
what’s their reward?

(sung)
Avert your eyes, pick up the pace
You’d make no difference anyway
Rather save your two quid for a Starbucks indulgence
After a hard day
Hardly a sin, is it, hardly a sin, is it?
Is it? Is it?
Hardly a sin, is it?

The streets outside are raucous, she tells herself,
the streets outside are toxic.
There’s sanctuary in corporate solitude,
she tells herself.
Alone after dark in her ivory tower block,
she makes a toast to memory,
denial leaving stains
at the bottom of her
glass

Pride
22:50hrs

He woke up and there was peace,
like a perfect vacuum.
Horizontal in a room that smelt of space,
that brought him grace
from usual daily mornings laced with friction.
Her body tensed with frosted animosity
that he attempts to melt with puns and coffee vapours
as they sit in breakfast table stalemate,
conversation long evaporated
into disinterest.
She is a heavenly statue, cold and
impassive.
The house hangs heavy on her word –
but not today.
This morning brought forgotten respite,
eased into the day
with open heart and gentle wake,
just his arm
draped tender
over
his waist.

Pride is Man.
Sweet routine of morning run and night-time gym,
exfoliate for perfect skin then beers to rough it up again.
Grad job, new wheels and FIFA on Sundays,
he plays the role perfectly, down to a tee.
They see him a modern Adonis,
all carpe diem and signature flawless.

They see him a modern Man,
all techno and dick jokes.
His girlfriend is beautiful, they make quite the pair.
She’s the talk of the office,
‘golden’
they call them,
all couple goals hashtags.
It makes him feel smug, it defines him.
Tries to keep this in mind
as the boredom starts biting,
the interest starts dying,
he sees her eyes wandering
and they argue more than they talk.
And though he’s not really that bothered,
he holds on to her still like a crucifix.

Because he is Man
and this morning’s duvet clings to the blood
of punctured ego, it’s gooped and sticky,
holds him down like a fist.
This room looks different to him,
the same space
where they’ve smoked
and they’ve talked
and they’ve studied
and laughed
for as long as he’s known,
his best friend, his gaff.
Now it looks like a trap, now he looks
like a bad decision. Always so easy
in his skin;
he sees him now still slick with midnight sweat
and cheeks flushed rose
with baby blush, what is he dreaming of?

Adam and Adam,
they lay tight, ribcages pressed
with umbilical closeness.
He makes him think poetry.
He is Man,
he is Man,
is he Man, when
nothing even happened,
they just talked and fell asleep, he was so kind,
you see. She’d locked him out their place again,
refused to see his face
again.
He bought them beers, he rolled a spliff,
he listened.
Pride can’t remember the last time
that somebody just listened.

But he is Man
and everywhere he looks now
everything seems phallic,
everywhere he looks, it feels like
someone’s laughing.
They are stone-carved god men
moulded through history
to be what they are today.
They are Strong Men, Hard Men, Tough Men
yet everything’s fragile,
one step out of line and identity’s shattered,
all they have worked to maintain.
Pride has rainbows coursing through his veins
and he feels shame
and he feels clarity
and the river is staggering,
certain to break any moment.

He should cry out
but his throat is choked with words of love
and hate and loneliness.
So all he can do is
hiss through his teeth at him
as he blinks the day awake.
And spit at his goodness while his stomach
twists at the thought
of the guys at work
and the girl at home
and their words
and their looks
and he’s scared
and he’s sick
and he just wants
to hold him.

Love the Sinner by Imogen Stirling is published by Verve Poetry Press, priced £9.99.