#TheWhiskeyShot: Poet Spotlight (Wave 2) – George Sandifer-Smith

George Sandifer-Smith isn’t interested in neat conclusions. His poems don’t arrive with a moral or an arched eyebrow—they come with an edge of introspection, a flicker of memory, a phrase that refuses to let go. “I think—this might sound like a bad thing, but stay with me—my work has a lot less humour in it than it used to,” he says, not apologising, just noting the shift. The voice now is steadier. More grounded. Less inclined to wriggle out of emotion with a punchline. “I realised a poem wasn’t like a joke—it doesn’t need a direct summary at the end that ties it all together.”

This quiet refusal to spoon-feed the reader is part of what makes George’s work linger. It demands space. Not volume. He traces a pivotal moment back to writing response poems, entering into dialogue with the voices of others. “I was able to get a sense of a multitude of voices working together,” he says. “That’s stayed with me. It’s changed how I approach the page.”

Ideas don’t announce themselves, they whisper, mid-gnocchi or halfway through Doctor Who. A phrase dropped into his phone becomes the seed. But from there, it’s interrogation. “Is it the first line that builds out? Or the final line it’s all moving toward?” A draft flows in stream-of-consciousness, then he starts hunting for the spine. “Credit to Samantha Wynne Rhydderch for that term,” he adds. The spine, what holds it all together, can betray the prettiest parts. “Sometimes a lovely description you’ve grown attached to doesn’t work in favour of that spine. You have to lose it.”

There’s no preciousness in George’s process, just craft. Even the posture of writing shifts the shape. “Sometimes I’m at the coffee table, hunched over a laptop—probably not great for the back. Sometimes it’s in bed, notebook in hand.” Writing by hand changes the rhythm, he says. “Line breaks feel different, you get a jolt when transcribing—it reshapes the poem whether you like it or not.”

And then there are the golden hours. Rare, hard-earned. A quiet hotel room. A writing retreat. That fragile peace where poetry feels like possibility rather than pressure. “But in the meantime, with life and work, we make do.”

Music is another thread through George’s work, guiding not just tone, but image and pace. He came up with the Manic Street Preachers in one ear: no love songs, just sharp political poetics. That ethic lingers. “Even now, production and melody can pull me toward a particular landscape.” Aphex Twin equals city at night. Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci is time travel through memory. Sound, for him, is a portal.

Memory itself plays a central role. Not memoir. Not nostalgia. But something more slippery, something flickering at the edge of sense. “Memory is sometimes a rumbling of sensory details without specific speech or dialogue,” he says. Poetry lets him dig. Nights Travel at the Right Speed, his first full collection (Infinity Books, 2022), dropped as he left his twenties behind. “Reading it back—after the inevitable publication blues—helped me take stock. Some of that nostalgia, I could lay to rest.”

His publication credits speak to that evolution: Empty Trains (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), “Sea of the Still” (Dark Confessions, Black Bough, 2021), “The Wreck of the Empress” (Poems from Pembrokeshire, Seren Books, 2019). He’s contributed to Anne-thology and Reels: Cinematic Poetry, a writer tuned into both the politics of language and the aesthetics of scene.

George Sandifer-Smith doesn’t write for easy catharsis. He writes to test memory’s architecture, to see what breaks and what holds. He trusts the reader to follow him without a map, and rewards those who do with the kind of quiet devastation only real poetry can offer.