At Nigerian weddings, attendees 'spray' the dancing newlyweds with bank notes, money to be put towards their new life together. The breaking of the glass is a famous Jewish wedding tradition, and of course everyone knows about things old, borrowed and blue. The list of nuptial traditions is endless. Yet when it comes to finding the right poem for your celebration, too often the same old options appear. Something New reinvigorates the wedding-poem anthology with one hundred fresh and exciting choices to reflect the weddings of today.
For these poets, the weight of history is an invitation to elaborate on what editors Caroline Bird and Rachel Long call 'the endless uniqueness of the heart', to rewrite and reimagine everything a union of two people can be. Ranging from the sincere to the surreal, these poems celebrate marriage equality, joyful idiosyncrasy, and the simple domesticity of married life.
Ian Duhig and Clare Shaw offer slant interpretations of the wedding vow. 'I want to get high my whole life with you', declares Hera Lindsay Bird, serenading the manic romance of industrial carpet outlet stores and leather hot-pants. Written in 1992, Essex Hemphill's proclamation that 'Every time we kiss / we confirm the new world coming' remains as prescient as it does defiant. Each of the poems in Something New gestures at the true and eternal purpose of a wedding: an invitation to bear witness to love in all its forms.
Rachel Long is a Costa Prize shortlisted poet and founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour, which is housed at Southbank Centre, in London. Rachel's poetry and prose have been published widely, including in Filigree, Mal and the White Review. She is Assistant Tutor to Jacob Sam-La Rose on the Barbican Young Poets programme, 2015 to the present. Her debut collection of poems is My Darling from the Lions.
Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her 2020 collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics. An anthology of 100 fresh and unconventional poems for weddings.
