Holding the House: Why Domesticity Matters More Than Ever in Contemporary Poetry

There’s nothing wrong with the grand themes: the wars, betrayals, apocalypses that have fuelled poetry for centuries. We still need them. We still publish them. But right now, something just as urgent, just as devastating, is happening much closer to home. In the scalded teacups. In the slow bruises of old armchairs. In the silences at cluttered kitchen tables. Domesticity isn’t the tame backdrop some still sneer at; it’s a terrain where tenderness and devastation collide daily. The beauty is in the banal, and the best modern poets are brave enough to stare it in the face.

Domestic spaces are emotional battlefields.

Ellie Rees captures this beautifully in Modest Raptures, where even the act of pegging out washing becomes a confrontation with absence: “I stand at the washing line / pegging out newly washed winter clothes, / then at the back of my head / nothing…” (Gone). Grief isn’t grand here, it’s quiet and suffocating, stitched into the domestic fabric.

Likewise, in Echoes, I don’t need a deathbed scene to mark loss; it’s all there in the everyday language of interruption: “Your Granddad’s not well; / he doesn’t have long” (Diagnosis). The moments that wreck us usually arrive when we’re holding a hedge-trimmer or buttering toast, not standing at a battlefield’s edge.

The “small” is where the universal lives.

Lucy Heuschen knows this too. In Badge (Loggerheads), she sketches the fragile thrill of early pregnancy in just a handful of lines, where a secret “bright little badge” tucks itself discreetly onto a lapel, a world-shifting moment disguised as an everyday commute.

I chased a similar truth in Figs (Echoes), where loneliness and need are caught not in grand gestures, but in sneaking, naked to the kitchenette, “eating figs from the refrigerator”, barely noticed by the sleeping house. The big stories, love, loss, survival, they live in the smallest, stickiest gestures we half-forget we’re making.

Domesticity isn’t trivial. It’s where survival lives and dies in slow motion.

Real readers are tired of abstraction.

They don’t want castles in the air anymore. They want the story the coffee rings tell. Kyla Houbolt’s Clear Plastic Raincoat (Surviving Death) makes this point without needing a sermon, just the image of a father, recently dead, still wearing his “clear plastic raincoat… whom we still recognized clearly.” No ornate metaphors, no grandstanding grief, just the absurd, stubborn poetry of a man refusing to be forgotten even in death.

When poets trust the everyday, they find something that abstraction can’t touch: a cut-glass honesty that lands immediately, like a stone in the gut.

Forget the battlefield. Real poetry happens in the hallways we pace at 3 a.m., wondering if anyone will notice we’re missing.

Writers like Ellie Rees, Lucy Heuschen, and Kyla Houbolt are proving that domesticity is not a side note. It is the main event. If poetry is going to stay urgent, if it’s going to land blows rather than just pose prettily, it needs to be written where we actually live: among the kettles and radiators and half-forgotten shopping lists.

The big themes are still with us; but they are breathing through small rooms now, not grand theatres.

We would do well to listen.