Poetry Unbound

Open your world with poetry

Over 127,000 subscribers

Exploring the present with the past

and how conversations with centuries are contemporary

Pádraig Ó Tuama Jun 14, 2026

Dear friends,

What stories of living with — and after — dying you told last week. I was moved to read them and moved, as always, to see your interactions among the comments. Thank you.

We released an episode of Poetry Unbound in Conversation this week, featuring two poets — Rachel Mann and Yomi Ṣode — recorded at the StAnza festival in Scotland in 2024. Both poets use their recent books to explore characters from the past. Rachel Mann’s work, Eleanor Among the Saints, seeks to recover a trans woman, Eleanor Rykener, from obscurity, a woman who lived in the late Middle Ages, a seamstress, a sex worker. Rachel, a trans woman herself, feels enormous solidarity with Eleanor.

Yomi Ṣode’s book, Manorism charts the vulnerabilities and nuances of Black masculinity in Britain, in partnership with considering the historical painter Caravaggio. Caravaggio, an Italian painter who died a little more than 400 years ago at the age of 48, is renowned for his painting (such as "The Taking of Christ" in the National Gallery of Ireland). He also murdered a man during a brawl but was spared a prison sentence in exchange for a painting. “The graces and privilege that was offered to Caravaggio, which for me as a Black man, I don’t necessarily feel like I will be offered those graces,” Yomi says at one point during our conversation.

Both of these poets interrogate the present by looking at the past, noting the sophistication, complexity, brutality, and intelligence of history’s characters, and how the dynamics of power, permission, profession, safety, and threat occur in their lives. Rachel and Yomi offer lenses for today and today’s yesterdays; I recommend the episode to you, friends — I have thought about their approaches to the past and present a lot since our interview was recorded. And they have each looked to the past to amplify critical conversations for often-silenced stories of today.

So, here’s this week’s question: What characters of the past — whether known or repressed, family or not — do you turn to? Why?

I have access to some of the stories of my own family’s past: a great-great grandfather who was the sole survivor of An Gorta Mór, that brutal so-called famine that caused the death of a million Irish people from 1845-7, and the departure of a million more. (I say “so-called”, because there was plenty of food in Ireland). That past is blighted by colonialism and all that entails. And yet, I know that to even have access to that past is itself a richness; for many people, their family records were destroyed, the connection of future generations with their pasts was prevented by the undoing of the living and written generations. Whether through family trees or DNA testing, people are rightly keen to trace the way their past reveals something of their present — whether through relations or individuals with whom they find connection or disconnection.

To partially quote an Emily Dickinson poem I’ve quoted before:

The Past is such a curious Creature
To look her in the Face
A Transport may receipt us
Or a Disgrace—

Of the many things I like here (“Transport”, “Disgrace”!) is the noun “Creature”. I think of the past as a beast, alive with interests and claws — claws for cutting, claws for carving, claws for showing, claws for grabbing a hold of willful ignorance.

May the past catch us well and create, not cull! See you in the comments, friends.

PS: My publisher, W.W. Norton, is offering a 70% discount on the audio version of my book 44 Poems on Being with Each Other through June 29, and you can access it here.