Roger Craik’s poems were awarded Second Place in Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Award for Poetry competition by Paisley Rekdal, and they appear in our Winter 2025 issue. In her commendation, Rekdal writes, “Simply put, Roger Craik’s poems are fresh, original, and display both a strong sense of line and a cutting wit that at times recall, but never duplicate, some of the strongest UK poets I’ve encountered. These poems don’t tell more than they absolutely have to, and they engage and reward a reader’s careful attention. It’s a hard trick to be both mordant and moving, but Craik is able to pull it off.” The poem below opens the selection in our print issue.

Two abrupt
raps at the door and she’s
breezing in as a matter of course
(platitudes galore, the same as yesterday’s)
to plump the pillow, rearrange
sheet and blanket, fiddle at her chores,
then asks, with mustn’t-show relief,
if there’s anything else I need
and if there is, just pull the cord.

Fractured
silence for however long.

One window for world.
Branches. An occasional bird.
Sky.

Home, they told me.

But on the shelf my stalwarts, my
salvation: thirty-nine volumes of John Ruskin,
second-hand, tatty, tired maroon,
a few with slightly bulging spines.

It’s time for them.

It’s time for them, and child’s play to remove
six tiny cardboard wedged half-moons and
down come rattling (Bienvenue, Messieurs!),
pale blue, identical, smooth:
the answerers.

And now those decades-known
words to chant in whispered syllables,
like this, across my hands, like this,
until the final syllable fall
upon my right hand’s little finger and
that’s when:

The answerers, a glass of water. The
answerers, a glass of water. The an-
swerers, a glass of water. The answer-
ers, a glass of water. The answerers…

Roger Craik was born in Leicester, U.K., and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton. Before coming to the U.S. in 1991, he worked in the Turkish universities in Bursa and Izmir. He has written six full-length books of poetry, of which the most recent is In Other Days (BlazeVox, 2021)

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