Hard Drive

My first collection ‘Hard Drive’ is published by Carcanet in June 2023.

Here are some endorsements from poets who kindly read my manuscript.

“This is a heart-stopping debut of real emotional force and poetic intelligence. Paul Stephenson approaches the elegy through a kaleidoscopic, inventive, and genuinely moving use of form. The disorientating world of grief is captured with a blade-like precision, and yet Hard Drive is also full of hard-won light. Stephenson looks death in the eyes, and holds his nerve like few others.” Seán Hewitt

“Like Douglas Dunn’s Elegies, Hard Drive is a masterpiece of love and grief. A brilliant and innovative formal poet, Paul Stephenson here applies his great gifts, with heart-breaking clarity and bravery, to the most unfaceable of subjects. The result is poetry of great impact and generosity which, by looking unblinkingly at every aspect of grief, allows us to know our own. The collection is a beautiful hymn to the human capacity for love and, like all great poetry, makes us feel less alone.” Jonathan Edwards

“Paul Stephenson’s debut collection is a wonder. He engages with the subject of grief with wit, intelligence and tenderness – and has imbued so much life and colour into the memory of someone who has passed. This is poetry for anyone who has ever lost someone. Warm and touching, this is poetry that celebrates and mourns those deep connections that we make in life.” Niall Campbell

“Bereavement is the saddest club to which to belong, the saddest territory to annexe. No one is ever prepared for stepping through this portal of loss. These meticulous and attuned poems spare neither reader nor the poet, nor should they. This collection is a stoic and grounded narrative telling of deep-rooted love and loss, of witness and grief. Grief is cast here as praise and loving appraisal upon the death of a life partner. With mordant and exact wit, with compassion and insight, this poet turns a wry and observing eye and sensibility upon regions of fathomless loss. Formally varied, adept in their imaginal reach, the poems honour life at every juncture, even as they mourn a life and a world thrown into sharp focus by the pitiless light shed by death. Equipoise is achieved throughout between personal and official dimensions of a death (these booby-trapped with forms and documentations). Paul Stephenson brings all the tender mechanisms of language to sustain the weight of grief: this is an extraordinarily moving and accomplished collection which I know will command the attention it so richly warrants.” Penelope Shuttle

In anticipation of the book a few poets have been kindly commenting:

Paul Stephenson’s poems invariably combine a zest for language with layered insight and a kick in the emotional ribs. In other words, his first full collection will be the real deal. Matthew Stewart, Rogue Strands

You know how they say ‘long awaited’ – well this one truly is. Kathy Pimlott

Feedback on the book from the first few readers:

“I have just finished reading your book and was completely blown away. Such a beautiful, unique and important book. An exploration of death and grief is an enormously difficult thing and I thought the range of forms and techniques brought a different facet to the events and emotions and the recording of details that perhaps normally go unnoticed or unrecorded were utterly individual and moving. It is a book I shall return to many times I know and I hope it gets the recognition it deserves.” Ilse Pedler

“I have just read Hard Drive cover to cover. It’s bloody brilliant. I didn’t read the back cover before I started – I just jumped straight in, so it was quite a shock – even from the first poem, and then progressively more so over the first few. So well put together as a collection and incredibly moving throughout. Absolutely wonderful poetry.” Zoe Walkington

You know how sometimes you read a book and you can’t put it down. Either you’re moved, exhilarated, or – worryingly for my neighbours – screaming out loud because you love the poems so much? Paul Stephenson’s debut collection Hard Drive, released in June through the always brilliant Carcanet, is just that book. It’s a complex book; written after Paul’s partner suddenly died, it looks at grief, loss, and the bureaucracy of death – something that can often be unfairly complicated for queer people. The poems are just so powerful, whether documenting the bone shaking devastation of losing your love or grief’s ability to surprise you at the most unexpected turn.

And there’s incredibly tender and funny moments too as Paul looks back at the early days of their relationship, the messy and often tumultuous period of early love, the building of a life together. There’s a great poem titled “When We Were a Jackson Pollock” that uses the great abstract expressionist artist as a cipher for queer people creating their relationships outside of formal boundaries.

“so you and me might stand it upright hang the dizzy drips and flicks

to fill a wall ceiling to floor with the now the instant

being taken by the automatic the unthinkingness of us.”

I love that poem so much; the abandon of those first few days of new love is so exciting, where the blank canvas in front of us all could be filled with anything. There’s a real exuberance to Paul’s writing as he celebrates “our colours” splattering all over the canvas.

“not thinking for a moment or holding back”

Gah! So good.

As much as I love “…Jackson Pollock”, the poem I’ve picked as the Poem of the Week is “Grief, It’s Not What It Used to Be”. It’s clear eyed in its depiction of the undulating power of grief and is packed with such incredible imagery that I found especially powerful. And the underlying realisation that grief doesn’t disappear, that you don’t ‘recover’; grief is always there in differing forms, often infuriatingly so. I found it especially moving and hope you do too.” Ben Townley-Caning, Fourteen Poems

I wanted to get in touch to say I have just read and loved your collection. I think it heart-breaking, beautiful, playful, inventive, pure and above all, simply astonishing and thoroughly your own poetry. Huge congratulations Paul – it is just brilliant. Matt Howard

This is such a brilliant, moving and memorable collection of poems, gorgeously filmic & for anyone who has lost anyone – almost everyone – a must. Lisa Kelly

New poetry for July: dismantling identity, addressing loss, death of the author’s youth

From one upending to another: in Hard Drive, the sudden death of Paul Stephenson’s partner, aged 38, sets off the narrative held within this collection, with a literal hard drive being just one of many metaphors for this loss: 

our life is out there                  somewhere

on a hard drive                        some place

Stephenson sustains this exploration at roughly 120 pages; no wonder, when “Grief is twice the size of Texas and three times the size of France”. It is huge, and all-consuming, with the reader swallowed up in it, too, although the poet is also self-aware: “PAUL STEPHENSON, Minister for Sadness”, as he calls himself in one of the book’s final poems. Humour is just one of many notes within this multifaceted book, but worth touching upon because it may be contained ‘within’ grief. Grief is not a monolith, despite its size and 120 pages does not equate to continuous sameness, despite a focus on loss – there are shades and shades within it, as the reader will discover here.

Throughout the book, the poems are fine and thoughtfully formed, with excellent use of devices such as repetition, rhyme, and wordplay, as in The Hymn Of Him: “The app of him, the bop of him, the cap, / the cop of him, the cup of him, the dip”. Again, despite a general crystalline clarity of form, and focus upon a singular topic, there is plenty to surprise and excite the reader in these pieces; just as bikes might “become wondering” or “become displacement”, so, too, may poems. A taut, tragic, yet also inventive and inspiring collection indeed. Review in Buzzmag by Mab Jones, July 2023

What a brilliant book Hard Drive is: deft, focussed, witty, emotive, expansive, controlled… I can’t tell you when I have enjoyed a collection so much. Very well done! Robert Seatter

I could talk about individual poems or the unique forms (and the compelling narrative behind them) but that would be like eating a splendid meal (where the company, the taste, smell, texture, lighting and conversation are all better than ever before or since) and only recommending individual ingredients. It needs and deserves to be read as a whole for its coherent lyrical intensity. Isabel Palmer

There is so much power and pain and love packed into the poems…. A beautiful and delicate web of a book and will be loved by many. Jacqueline Saphra

I’ve been able to spend some more time with Hard Drive and can say how I admire the skill and guts and heart that has gone into your book. Somehow the poems manage in different tonal qualities to speak to that vastness that encompasses grief, loss and celebration of life and love. Katie Griffiths

Poems so grounded and alive with love and humanity. Penny Sharman

Your wonderful book ‘Hard Drive’ is inspiring, the writing having such clarity and being so well structured. And the emotion of it all being held there, a delicate and terrible thing. Robbie Burton

The Irish Times, Stephen Sexton

Under the Radar, Jennifer Wong

I read at Brussels Writers Workshop on October 17th. Review by Alexandra.