RACHAEL BOAST

Photograph courtesy of Rachael Boast

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Rachael Boast (born 1975) is a British poet and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Suffolk, she studied at the University of Wolverhampton before earning an MLitt and PhD from the University of St Andrews. Her debut collection, Sidereal (2011), won both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize, and her later collections include Pilgrim’s Flower, Void Studies, and Hotel Raphael. Her most recent collection is Volvelle (Picador, July 2026). Rachael is also the editor of Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2025).

Her poems are quietly metaphysical and musically precise, often turning on moments of encounter; between self and otherness, voice and silence, the visible and the unseen.

Sudeep Sen, Poetry & International Editor

Totemic

And when I lean in to look
I see only fragments

as though looking into a river
of rainfall, tall sisters

of the hour before sleep
rooting into whatever can be

distilled from washed-out
dog mercury until desire

is a slipway, a brevity,
will void squarely.

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Self as Otherness, as Rain

Walking around the house to listen
to the whispering at the windows,

listening for this nearby guest
who never quite arrives calling me

to the windows on both sides listening.
Silent the rooms without me

looking in as otherness, as rain
slanting towards the sill to reach you

with each whispering of rain
and every leaf it falls through.

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Black River

The river at night breathes out
insatiably dark in sleep.

I have an hour or so
to observe the way she dreams.

It seems untimely. Staying up
this late for the ritual

of how stillness is restored.
‘Out of water all life comes.’

It will seem possible
to ask the right questions.

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La Guida
after Fellini

Cut to the autostrada, a ring road carnival,
a circle of hell on route to fires by the verge 

deflecting anarchic colours onto the mirror
balanced on the back of a truck. Cut

to a descent through suburban layers
of sub-soil past underground rivers

through the city of the dead to a room
of fading frescos seen through a hole

in the wall. Mark the disappearing eyes
of the ancients. Cut to their replacements

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Broken Rule

Here is a road map of the winds
detailing where they prefer to bluster

or billow, fallen leaves whipped up
shoulder high or dancing where Urania’s

piped madrigals silver-tongue the walls
and rooftops, and where the stops are –

if any. So be it boreas, zephyr, ventus, pneuma,
there’s nothing for it but to open the doors

in the front and back of the chest and
let it pass clean through you – like this

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Aldeburgh Beach

The sea takes over
from human speech

its flung rhythms seize
on what we don’t know

what we can’t say
and drown us out

our gaze skims
gives up and tries again

as waves we disappear
and yet remain

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To the Chief Musician

In a dream you walk past that rock
which looks like a ruddy boy

whose hands are busy extracting ore
from encore and when you wake

something is coming out of the dawn
with a secret to tell you. How can you

go back to sleep? The king calls out
for his favourite musician. His bones

aching to the core know what happens
to the king happens to the kingdom.

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Yellow Archangel

The river is the love we look down into
then walk on through sounds

that move from tree to tree in long voices
of lost time. The way you observe me

in secret only to let the secret show.
Here is the benevolent yellow

palace of adulation nettled at the verge
of the evening who’s name I had to look up

in the widow’s book of hours. Below us
a gust opens the water like an envelope.

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Standing Desk

I’m at my standing desk
which is a window

which is a view
a moment in time

I don’t know when
looking onto a garden

the path to the house
reflected in glass

it seems I could walk out
over this elaborate bridge

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Say Something Else

My path is night flower, stones […]
You call me and then silently […]

You call and then […]
Luck is a thunderstorm.

What began there had word
of things to come.

Your face is an ellipse.
I keep thinking something is […]

Fibres are snapping one by […]
Say something else. My path is […]