POETRY

  • All you ask for on your last Earth night is a glass of water.

    I hope you know what it really means – life thirsts to fill you.

    ​

      Stay with me. Please.

    How the skin cracks around your eyes, blackening with

    the slow dilation of forever. How the milk of your bones

    pours and empties, drowns you from the inside out.

    How brittle you become in the pallid echoes of moonlight.

    Don’t go. Not just yet.

    ​

    There is so much of this world left to share together:

    how we will go to Rome and stand at the feet of Gods,

    Hadrian’s Venus, Saturnalia until sunset, Jupiter burning.

    The depth of history you will miss as you cascade into it.

    How at Ostia Antica we dream of long-dead stars reviving in

    the amphitheatre, chips of stonework, ovation of ghosts.

    Applause and awake.

    All you ask for on your last Earth night is a glass of water.

  • In the car outside the pet crematorium, I fasten the mahogany box with a seat belt in the back, test the tension of it so she doesn’t fling forwards, doesn’t hurt herself. I stroke the brass plate, trace the engraving of her name the way I once did her fur, the colour of caramel sauce on vanilla ice cream and just as cold when I collected her from the freezer yesterday. It isn’t enough now, to strap her in and bring her home like a child, and put her on the windowsill with her brother where they watch me every day with dust for eyes and I, threatening to go on, move about the empty room like a wasp at a window, like a sick thing pressing on the edge of black letters, spelling the name I carry, but can no longer call

I KNOW WHERE THE PELICANS GO

Atomic Bohemian, August 2025

Collins weaves a visceral and arresting thread with memory, trauma, tenderness and transformation through the haunting image of the pelican, a creature both sacred and savage. The poems delve into fractured families, inherited violence, and fragile rebirths, where fatherhood is a storm, childhood a bruise, and love an unmaking. With documentary precision, the poems transform bodies into birds, grief into melody, and silence into storm. […] I Know Where the Pelicans Go is a soaring, unflinching meditation on survival, inheritance, and the strange, sacred rituals of becoming human.

 

WHISPER NETWORK

with Caleb Nichols, funded by Bangor University, March 2023

Whisper Network was produced in response to a call for work exploring the way trees communicate with one another, as part of the exhibit At Eich Coed / Tree Sense at Pontio, Bangor University, North Wales. Written collaboratively and at a distance, Briony Collins and Caleb Nichols engage in a transatlantic poetic conversation centred in locatedness: from the Treborth Botanical Garden in Bangor to the Leaning Pine Arboretum in San Luis Obispo, California and landscapes and ecologies beyond.

Unavailable for purchase. Copies can be requested.

cactus land

Atomic Bohemian, July 2023

cactus land is a sharp, wilful collection of confession and poesy that sticks inside you. This collection is as personally devastating as it is defiant to false praise, prophets, profit. If you’ve read Briony Collins before, you’ll comprehend this metaphor of picking at the splinters she sneaks inside your psyche. Collins is the colloquial commander of inquisitive cognisance, dualistic gratitude, and translating muffled pleasure and humane terror into words and stanzas and symbols. Poetry exists to wring out whispers. Collins, like a scorched land of cacti, endures.

 

BLAME IT ON ME

Broken Sleep Books, August 2021

Briony Collins’ Blame it on Me is an extraordinary collection of poems that focus on the death of her mother, when she was just five years old, and the ensuing family upheaval. Collins’ poetry moves mellifluously, sensitive to the sound of words, infused with a delightful music. Collins believes, to quote her favourite poet Jim Morrison: “You should stand up for your right to feel your pain” – in Blame it on Me, that’s exactly what Collins does.

THE BIRDS, THE RABBITS, THE TREES

Broken Sleep Books, April 2023

In The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees, Briony Collins deconstructs a year of grief and an abusive relationship through her evocative poetry. Pink daisy chains and letters to mum clash with broken thumbs and Bundy black eyes as Collins expertly weaves between the light and dark of a life of loss. Her cutting yet delicate language leads the reader on a journey through pain to empowerment.