Book Review: Michael by Mariah Whelan — A Relentless Modern Poetry Collection That Eviscerates Family, Masculinity and Post-Brexit Britain

From the first lines of Michael (Broken Sleep Books), it’s clear this isn’t your average modern poetry collection. Mariah Whelan doesn’t offer poems. Rather, she offers scenes, storms, voices that creep under collars and into lungs. This is contemporary poetry not just about politics or the personal, but how both are sewn into the fabric of bodies, landscapes, and speech. The form is hybrid: drama meets verse, monologue meets chorus, and it’s deployed not for aesthetic novelty, but as a way to excavate the fractures inside a man, a town, a country. Michael is an act of literary analysis via haunting, by regret, by rain, by the relentless chorus of history.

The central achievement of this poetry anthology is how it renders generational trauma not as concept, but as weather. The chorus, a ghostly Greek-style ensemble, declares: “We are a chorus that moves like water.” That motif becomes literal and figurative, dripping through sleeping heads, flooding through dreams, saturating every interaction between Michael and his daughter. In Act One, Scene One: Night, Michael trudges the moors, describing his map and compass rituals with military precision. “It’s like reading, walking this valley,” he says. “It’s like reading a book—proper, old history—right here trodden into the ground.” This isn’t nature writing. It’s pathology. Michael trusts terrain and tools more than people. Whelan’s language captures this perfectly, muscular, unornamented, efficient. But underneath? Erosion. Emotional illiteracy as sedimentary inheritance.

Whelan’s textual scalpel is sharpest in the way she anatomises masculinity (of particular interest to this reviewer) particularly in Act One, Scene Two: Morning. Here, Michael attempts to fix a lawnmower, spiralling into a tirade about language, the EU, his daughter’s “privilege” and the absurdity of safety labels. “There are all these words around it,” he says, “She has put all these questions around it. But it is the same simple thing at the centre.” The lawnmower becomes a symbol for modern masculinity unravelling under the weight of change. What Whelan shows with brutal clarity is how men like Michael wield logic like armour, a defence against their own irrelevance. The monologue isn’t tragic; it’s tragicomic, and Whelan captures both notes without sentimentality.

But Michael doesn’t just dismantle the patriarchy, it mourns it, too. I’ve written on this myself. In Entr’acte, the titular character confesses: “I didn’t know how to love my sons, / it was like trying to hold a plastic bag of water.” It’s one of the few moments the guard drops. The metaphors here, tactile, slippery, futile, are some of Whelan’s most devastating. They reveal not a villain, but a man warped by the structures he’s inherited and passed on. The real violence in this contemporary poetry isn’t physical. It’s the violence of language failing, of speaking in radio static while the people you love walk away from the transmission tower.

So where does Michael sit in the current landscape of independent publishing? Squarely at the cutting edge. This is a modern poetry collection that doesn’t ask for space in the canon. It makes its own, somewhere between Caroline Bird’s theatrical surrealism, Joelle Taylor’s fury-driven lyric, and Raymond Antrobus’s excavation of sound and silence. What Mariah Whelan achieves here is rare: she makes the political private and the private mythic. Michael is theatre for the page, a broken hymn for a broken country, and a blistering success for contemporary poetry and independent publishing alike.

About the Author

Mariah is a poet from Oxford, UK. She is the author of ‘the love i do to you’ which won the AM Heath Prize. She has been Poet-in-Residence at The University of Cambridge, a Fellow in Creative Practice at UCL and is one of the founding editors of bath magg.