Robert Edge writes from collision, the moment two unrelated things smash together in his mind and spark something that demands to be written. Sometimes it’s a line in a song, sometimes it’s another writer’s pain laid bare, and sometimes it’s a memory that shows up uninvited and refuses to leave. “I tend to find I am quite reactionary,” he says. “It could be the lyrics of a song, another author talking about their work, or a memory that decides to squat in my conscious brain without invitation.” Poetry doesn’t come on command, it comes when it’s ready, and Edge has learned not to resist it.
He’s no stranger to deadlines, but poetry has never responded well to structure. “I tend to write better to a deadline for fiction,” he says, “but the opposite is true for poetry.” The spark always leads, and the writing follows. That shift, from structured academic beginnings to raw, responsive creativity, has redefined how Edge approaches the page. “I first wrote poetry as part of a structured creative writing degree,” he explains, “but now I write purely from inspiration.”
One such moment came on a train, after a book launch for Jeff Young’s Wild Twin. Young had just spoken, with aching honesty, about losing his father to dementia. At the same time, Edge was listening to Julia Jacklin’s Don’t Let the Kids Win. The combination, grief remembered, grief witnessed, grief scored by music, hit with force. “The two things swirled in my mind,” he recalls, “and fifteen minutes later I had two poems written on my phone just in time for my stop.” That’s how it often happens: poetry arriving unannounced, demanding space before he even gets home.
Grief is a constant companion in Edge’s work, never performative, never glamorised. Just present. “Grief, and I have an abundance of it to draw upon,” he says, simply. But his poems are not only rooted in the emotional or the autobiographical, they’re often triggered by the visual, by art. He finds inspiration in museums and galleries: the Walker, the V&A, the National Gallery. “It opened my eyes to the Renaissance on canvas,” he says. “Even when it’s not a muse, it is still magnificent.” Art offers not just beauty, but scale and silence, conditions ripe for poetry.
There are no rules to his writing. “Poetry just comes,” he says. “On a bus, a train, on the toilet, on a walk.” That offhand honesty is part of his charm, Edge doesn’t mythologise the writing process. He lets it be messy, irregular, human. Poems arrive when they want to, and he meets them wherever they land.
At its best, poetry lets him step outside himself while staying deeply rooted in truth. “It can be both deeply personal and empathetic,” he explains. “It can help you see the world through the eyes of another and profoundly disagree with them.” But it’s also about compression, how a short poem can hold what a novel might spill. “Importantly,” he says, “as a short form it helps with brevity to express how you feel without writing an essay or a novel on the subject.” That economy, that ability to distil feeling without dilution, is a cornerstone of his style.
Edge’s poetry doesn’t arrive with fanfarebu, t it stays. His work has appeared in All Things Considered: Poised Pen Anthology (2016) and The Broken Spine Artist Collective: 2nd Edition (2018). These publications aren’t just credits, they’re proof that poetry written on trains, in toilets, in moments of profound collision, can find its way to the page, and from there, into the hearts of readers.
Robert Edge isn’t trying to outshine grief, or beautify pain. He writes to witness, to respond, to reflect. And in doing so, he reminds us that the real poem is the one that interrupts your journey, and won’t let go.
