“Poetry is beautifully immediate, potent and visceral,” he says. “It’s intoxicating and exciting, thrilling and now.”
Devonald’s poems feel alive on the page. They arrive with velocity but linger with resonance, each line cut with intent. Much of his work begins in the subconscious, dreams, meditations, early-morning fragments, but the process is not without discipline. When a subject demands a firmer hand, Devonald meets it head-on.
“There are political poems I need to write. To respond to the riots, the Ukraine war, the devastation of Palestine. Some things are more important than flow and magic. Poets have an obligation to stand up for what is right.”
His poetry does just that. Whether writing about social injustice or the intimacy of illness, Devonald’s work is anchored in empathy. His poem The Day Before You Forget It All Completely was highly commended by The Passionfruit Review in 2024 and also shortlisted by Saveas Writers in 2023. It captures the slow erosion of memory and identity with painful elegance. The same poem appears in his debut collection, The Land of Passing Snow, a quiet meditation on dementia, forgetting, and what remains when memory falters.
“We all eventually forget and are forgotten, just like passing snow,” he says. “This isn’t about flinching from truth. It’s about seeing trauma in a wider context, within a life that is vibrant, miraculous and beautiful.”
The Day Before You Forget It All Completely
I play you a symphony of memories, a mosaic
of the past to swim in, one last time.
I play you audio from old friends and family,
show you old Hi-8 recordings on the big screen,
Christmases, birthdays, but not your marriage.
I furnish the past beneath your feet, red carpets
elegant and sublime, for you to embrace and charm,
to have and to hold, from this day forth.
Till tomorrow, anyway. Perhaps. If we’re lucky.
I bring you necklaces, bracelets and ornaments,
all the times you spent searching the country
for the finest wind chimes, jewellery and furniture.
I read you poems that used to make you happy,
a poem published at a train station, a love letter
to life, liberty and you, always you, waiting.
I cut fruit for you, the way you like, present a bowl
filled with cheese and chocolate, you loved your treats.
Tea and sympathy, passing on through, passing on.
You know who I am, for the very last time.
You talk about me as a child, so painfully quiet,
how I’d stand behind you when the relatives came.
You still run and play in the craters during the war,
still hide in burned out homes, play hide and seek,
make the best of things, growing up so happy.
You remember dances and dating, such a catch,
fun and fabulous car rides and music, living
your best life, laughter and love, embraced.
All this history, all of it, fading, fading, so fast.
We try to touch it, hold it tight, but like running water
it rushes past so quickly now, erased, erased.
I can see it all, rubbed out, face blanked, confused,
left with silences, bewilderment, aware that something
is missing, somewhere, something vital, important, blessed.
Silence slips in. You always hated silences.
Highly commended The Passionfruit Review and shortlisted Saveas Writer's - All In the Mind
Crystallising the Moment
Before turning his focus to poetry, Devonald worked in theatre, television and film. That background continues to shape the way he sees and writes. His poems are deeply visual, each line framing a scene or revealing a hidden gesture.
“I crystallise moments of crisis, regrets or joy. I pause and analyse them in a very intimate way, prying and precise.”
This commitment to close observation gives his work its emotional weight. The Roses of Heliogabalus, a finalist in the Tickled Pink ekphrastic competition, draws on classical painting to interrogate decadence, history and decay. Help! I’m Trapped in My Computer, which won the 2023 Heart of Heatons poetry and flash competition, offers a surreal, humorous take on digital identity and existential drift. In both cases, his lens is sharp and unflinching.
Devonald’s poems are also frequently recognised for their lyrical strength. His haiku sequence Nature Sings Thirteen Haiku For You was shortlisted for the Allingham Festival Poetry Competition. Kindness Epidemic was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2023 and previously won the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition in 2022.
He cites Pascale Petit and Aoife Lyall as major influences, particularly their ability to handle complex emotional and political themes with elegance and restraint. “Aoife is utterly fearless. She writes with such verve and silence. In a few lines, she reveals what is normally hidden. My work attempts to do the same, although through very different topics and causes.”
Belly Of The Beast
Hard to explain the violence of loss,
easy to see the consequences delayed,
but in the moment it shatters the night,
foxes shriek as screams cut through us.
Our warm house is locked up as a prison,
shielded inside the rib cage of a giant blue whale,
imprisoned with no permission to speak out loud,
all windows sealed shut, locks broken in denial.
We didn’t know exactly when we were eaten,
but we certainly have been swallowed whole,
perhaps when we dreamed strange troubled sleep?
Transformed ourselves into the belly of the beast.
Whale’s rib cage expands and flattens all our needs,
surface areas grows for attachment and sorrow,
they suck and drain us bone marrow deep,
silence consumes our parched lips to despair.
We gradually grow with every falling breath and sigh;
eventually we are Jonah, accepting our place in the world,
floating through grey endless days inside the gigantic fish,
watching and waiting for the distant shallow shores.
We hope one day we might be free, wish for a time
when damage turns into memory; remorseful, easy to see
violent consequences deep, violence becomes violence becomes
loss, a tomb slips silently into the gullet, a shift to regrets.
A Voice Forged in Dream and Image
Devonald’s writing often emerges from a place between waking and dreaming. He drafts by hand, then types and revises again on paper, reshaping the language until it becomes distilled and charged. He avoids heavy-handed thematics in favour of suggestion and shadow.
“When I try to assign meaning or narrative to a poem, it often loses its magic. My poems are at their best when they just are. It’s up to the reader to assign significance to the shadows.”
This openness allows his work to remain fluid and unpredictable. He has described it as “a love story in reverse, a life forgotten, a strange dream remembered at 3 a.m.” That dreamlike logic sits alongside stark social commentary. His work frequently explores themes of injustice, mental health, marginalised voices and the undercurrents of contemporary society.
There is a visual painterliness to many of his poems. As Draco Amethystus noted when including Devonald in an anthology from Storm Dragon Publishing, “They’re like word versions of beautiful paintings.” It is a description the poet embraces.
The Land Of Mist and Snow
The land of mist and snow,
the land of silence and solitude,
the land where all our lives play out,
all begin and end with sleep.
We are silhouettes here, soft shadows,
a murmur in the breeze as snowflakes scatter,
just sparkling stars, just children playing,
just snow on snow on snow.
We are distant memories here, muffled,
cocooned, just silent songs spread widely,
swaying in the purple twilight of winter,
drifting, dreaming, dancing our lives away.
The land of dreaming shadows,
the land of forgive and forget,
the land where we meet again,
all end and begin with sleep.
The Work of Remembering
Devonald’s poems continue to be widely published in journals and anthologies across the UK and internationally. His piece In the End We All Become Stories was recently featured in the 2024 Hippocrates Awards Anthology and received a commendation in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry. Let the River Run Free was shortlisted by the Oxford Canal Festival Poetry Competition, reflecting his growing presence in the landscape of contemporary ecopoetry.
As poet-in-residence with Haus-a-Rest since 2022, he has developed new forms and experimented with tone and format, always seeking ways to tell the untold. Visual art continues to be an important influence, providing new ways of seeing the world and understanding language.
“I wish to evoke a sense of enchantment, like waking dreams. To mesmerise and beguile. Poetry has the power to do that. It can be the change. That’s the challenge, to create something innovative, to reveal the profound, to see through.”
In The End We All Become Stories
The hospital was next to the graveyard
beside the church, it was a good arrangement
covered so much of our needs without fuss.
We could be saved, consoled and healed
in one small trip, Gods of doctors hubris,
Gods of God, and sleeping angels all at once.
Atoned of our illnesses we sat in the church
felt the centuries there, so many prayers
fighting with the stained glass dragons.
We walked gently amongst the gravestones
spoke so many names of the dead out loud
just in case Sartre’s Huis Clos was correct.
Maybe the dead would have a window
on the world now, perhaps see the living
and learn the lessons required for significance.
Or maybe we we’re just the dead already
casually ambling in someone else’s hell
glimpsing heaven as we returned to hospital.
