True

Published by Black Spring Press in July 2025
​ISBN 978-1-915406-49-1
Paperback, 22.8 x 15.2cm, 79 pages
RRP £11.99

True is Paul Jeffcutt’s third collection of poetry. The poems were all inspired by true stories from real lives. The sources were news reports, exhibitions, diaries, brochures, sagas, public notices, journals, broadcasts, obituaries and word of mouth. They are not ‘found poems’ – instead, each real-life story provided the launch pad for new work. Ciaran Carson called them ‘discovered poems’. True brings together Paul’s discovered poems, twelve of which have won awards. The book is dedicated to the late Ciaran Carson, founding Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast.

Paul Jeffcutt’s poetry has always been tempted by the coincidental and the accidental, finding strange wonders in juxtaposition and enigma. With ‘True’, this risk-taking reaches a new stage of fluency, insight and daring. Along the pathways of these literally ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ poems, the big themes are explored, in the company of other artists, pioneers, adventurers and plain folk like ourselves. Throughout, the poems cling to perilous supports, delivering messages from this one fragile life across “a lucent tightrope of guile,/balance and pixie dust./On fire, but not burnt.” A joy to read. —Damian Smyth

Paul Jeffcutt writes of the delights of local lore, from Bobby’s Bus Stop in Shetland to the legend of Telling the Bees. Alongside the comic irony of colour charts from a posh paint company and a fella changing his name to that of a cartoon character, we encounter the labouring poor, victims of war, long-gone writers and a high-wire artist. Jeffcutt’s latest collection of poetry proves that his mentor, Ciaran Carson, was bang on – poems are out there waiting to be discovered and recovered from the true stories of real lives. —Rachael Hegarty