Photo Credit: Marina Rodriguez
Scroll Down
…They drop against the ends of names,
Not orderly, but any old how…
Brian Patten, ‘The brackets’
The brackets lie ahead.
For now though, it’s online check-ins.
They make me scroll and scroll
further and further down the screen,
chasing my year of birth.
“‘Scroll Down’, first published in Strix, takes Brian Patten’s poem (see quote above) as a point of departure, warps the theme and then drops it into an Easyjet online check-in.
“It doesn’t somehow fit in the flow of the manuscript of my second full collection, but I’m still proud and fond of it, maybe due to the bridge it forms in my writing from The Knives of Villalejo to my new book, as expressed via its sideways glance at the passing of time. That’s why I decided to give ‘Scroll Down’ a new lease of life in Ben’s Finest feature. I still feel it’s representative of my work and I wouldn’t want it to disappear into the abyss.”
Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. Following two pamphlets with HappenStance Press, he published his first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, in 2017. More recent poems have appeared in The Spectator, The New European, Stand and Wild.
Ben Banyard 