Tom Branfoot’s debut poetry collection ‘Volatile’ launches at Hyde Park Book Club – Preview

Image Credit: Tom Branfoot.

When does one begin writing a debut collection? How do these ideas form and when do poems begin gestating? ‘Volatile’ is my debut collection of poetry, which I started writing in 2022, but which began in childhood, not knowing what to do with the complex emotions that stem from watching an alcoholic parent in a downward spiral, powerless to halt the decline. 

The word ‘volatile’ comes from the Latin volare meaning ‘to fly’, in the Middle English period it was used in plural to signify ‘birds’ or ‘creature that flies’. Titling the book ‘Volatile’ gave me a framework to understand interconnection, complexity and interdependence in human and non-human biomes, to think through the tangles between ecological, economic, personal and political crises. 

This book was written while housesitting for friends, on interminably delayed trains, from the passenger seat on the M62, in an extortionate flat where the roof caved in and in which rain fell through to the kitchen, on overlong buses shuttling around West Yorkshire, in Chetham’s Library, in Manchester Cathedral, in short-term rentals in London, Rotherham and Bradford, hiking in the Lake District, and on walks with a head full of futurelessness. 

Image Credit: Tom Branfoot.

‘Volatile’ sprung forth from indeterminacy, from feeling unmoored with nothing tangible to grasp onto, feeling the wet floor get lower and lower. The collection’s aims to speak through and to the vicissitudes of working class life and the torsions of dispossession, expropriation and extraction that constitute our thickening polycrisis.

Reflecting on this collection, I suppose that powerlessness to mitigate personal catastrophe found its extrinsic mirror in living through an unprecedented epoch. Since the 2008 financial crash and the ensuing austerity programmes, we’ve all been made to acclimatise to worsening conditions by those in power with no concerted effort to reorganise the broken system. Like the leaking roof which the builders fixed without mending the structure, rainwater still rushed through the plastered wound.

I wanted to write a book that thinks through these interconnections, that considers how politics effects nature and how crisis impacts interiority and form. Poetry provides a unique space to constellate complex ideas in this volatile present, especially when language is reduced to a market tool, misused to dehumanise people or obfuscate suffering. Especially when language is policed and criminalised. The ability for poetry to make meaning from our basic tool of communication, to expand our understanding of the thinkable and the sayable, is where its dynamic, abiding power lies. 

Image Credit: Tom Branfoot.

On top of that, it’s a community-forging device. I’m grateful to be a part of the thriving literary ecosystem in West Yorkshire and proud to run the innovative and experimental poetry reading series ‘More Song’ in Bradford. More Song has connected me with so many vital and prominent writers as well as a local community of people who believe in this ancient technology’s capacity to cut through the mess we’re in and spark an unlikely light. Let’s gather together, despite everything, and make something radically beautiful happen.

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Tom Branfoot launches his debut collection of poetry ‘Volatile’ at Hyde Park Book Club on Friday October 23rd from 7pm with readings from J. R. Carpenter and David Dobson, followed by a Q&A and celebrations.

Image Credit: Tom Branfoot.