Martin Hayes was born in London and has lived around Edgware Road all his life. This major traffic artery running north from Marble Arch was once part of the Roman road Watling Street. Countless people (and animals) lived, worked and died along the historic route, making it an apt starting point for discussion of an awe-inspiring collection by a poet preoccupied with life, death and work. 

Since leaving school at 15 Martin Hayes has worked in various jobs but it’s his role of control room supervisor at a same-day courier service that fuels his creativity. He’s worked in the industry for over 30 years and the poems in this collection cover every aspect of working life, from shift patterns, commuting, staff versus management, the gig economy and job insecurity.

This hefty 350-page Selected Poems comprises selections from previous collections When We Were Almost Like Men (Smokestack, 2015), The Things Our Hands Once Stood For (Culture Matters, 2018), Roar! (Smokestack Books, 2018), Ox (Knives Forks And Spoons Press, 2021), Underneath (Smokestack Books, 2021) and Machine Poems (Smokestack Books, 2024).

Smokestack’s founder and editor Andy Croft has written the perfect foreword, referencing self-taught working-class poets of the early 20th century such as Scotland’s Joe Corrie and Lancashire cotton mill worker Ethel Holdsworth. Inevitably Robert Tressell is mentioned but Croft places Hayes somewhere between American blue-collar poets, including one of Hayes’ poetic heroes, Fred Voss, and ‘outsider’ poets John Clare, DH Lawrence and Benjamin Zephaniah. 

The collection is set out with capital letters for titles, poems in lower case, save for proper nouns, and there’s little or no punctuation. The reader is introduced to many characters, from dispatch riders to a neighbour living with dementia, and Hayes’ choice of form unites the poems’ inhabitants with one voice. The strength of this voice matches Hayes’ passion for his subject: the repetition of a long working week, sliced up into shift patterns. 

There’s humour of the darkest hue throughout but Hayes is powerfully sincere about the helplessness of the precariat and fear of being left behind by technology. In the poem ‘Last rites’  

     the look of laid-off 53-year-old men

     unable to stop the tears

     welling up inside their battered eyes the sight

     of their broken bodies

     walking out into the sun

     for the last time the stink

     of death as they start to split mocking us

     still employed controllers that at least

     they are now free again the pain

     ripping them up the three kids and woman

     they haven’t told yet the nine years left

     on their mortgage and endowment payments

 

Alan Morrison in his extensive essay/review writes of the irony of Hayes’ job title of controller, “given the poet’s sense of employee powerlessness". The poem ‘In between controlling jobs’ describes the numbness of being out of work but concludes with a new job:

     happy that at last we have got back a destiny

     that can be held in a pair of hands

     which will keep our minds from screaming

     all of the god-damn time

 

Brief but regular moments of exhilaration are captured in ‘Friday afternoons’:

 

     the laughter and jokes

     that get a little bit louder, a little bit

     riskier

     as we can smell the weekend

     now marching uncontrollably forwards

     just over the other side of that little hill

 

Hayes has no time for career poets and in ‘Fuck off darlings’ writes:

     we need

     a different raging

     other than your obscure metaphors

     your complicated words

     your irrelevant plots

 

In contrast to such writing, Hayes uses clear metaphor in ‘The telephonist who works more than 36 hours a week’:

     there is a hole in her hull and she is tilting in the harbour

     unable to go out to sea anymore

     she is letting in water 

     and every month the hole just gets bigger 

 

The highlight of this volume is the 28 poems that make up Ox, which Alan Morrison describes “as a kind of composite working-class reimagining of Ted Hughes’ Crow merged with George Orwell’s Animal Farm”. After Roar was published, Hayes received a written warning from his employers. In an interview with Here Comes Everyone magazine Hayes explains that Ox is “a kind of fable, using metaphor, allegory and fairy tale". 

Hayes’ oxen work hard all day for the Farmer, drink at night, enjoy brief but precious hours with Cow and wish not for Friday afternoon but for the far field. In ‘Ox at the gates of Heaven’ Hayes lists Pol Pot, Mussolini, Thatcher, Blair and:

 

     the drone 

     of an Obama

 

     the empty testes 

     of a Trump

 

     the lullabies

     of a Marine Le Pen

   

     then God’s final judgement

     

     a bolt through the head for all 

 

Hayes moves beyond London to Ypres, Orgreave and Chinese factory assembly lines in this brilliant, absorbing book. He pays tribute to the working-class struggle of the past, present and, in Machine Poems, the unsettling future.

A Few More Sunrises offers inspiration and comfort to readers ground down by work and current affairs. As Hayes writes in ‘Ox begins to give up’: 

     put your dreams away

     and make the most of it

     there’s nothing you can do about nothin’

 

Martin Hayes, A Few More Sunrises Yet Before It Ends: Selected Poems, Broken Sleep Books, £13.99

 

Elaine Cusack was born in Gateshead and started writing and performing poetry in her teens. She has worked in journalism, out of print bookselling, local government and in care homes. Recent publications: The Princess of Felling (2019), Loose Threads and Sacred Spaces (2021) and Don’t hassle me with your sighs, Blyth (2025). Elaine graduated with an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University in 2025. She lives in south Northumberland and now works out of local libraries, supporting small businesses www.elainecusack.com