Nic Aubury was born in Watford in 1974 and grew up in the Midlands. He studied Latin, English Literature and French at secondary school and then read Classics at Oxford University. He worked for a few years in advertising before becoming a teacher of Latin and Greek. He had a chapbook, Small Talk, published by the now defunct Nasty Little Press in 2011, a book which was named by Sophie Hannah in the Sunday Express as one of her books of the year for 2011. His first full collection, Cold Soup, was also published by Nasty Little Press in 2013. Some of his poems were included in the Carcanet anthology New Poetries VI (2015) edited by Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey. His poems also appeared in the Penguin anthology The Poetry of Sex (2014) edited by Sophie Hannah. His most recent collection Ignore It All and Hope It Goes Away: Poems forModern Life (2022) is published by David Fickling Books and is accompanied by illustrations from popular comic artist Moose Allain. The poem Decline and Fall was chosen as a Poem of the Week in the Guardian newspaper in 2015. He has performed his poetry at various festivals including Port Eliot, Latitude, the Cheltenham Poetry Festival and the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Recently he began producing a weekly four-line poem for the New European, a weekly, liberal, explicitly pro-EU political and cultural newspaper and website, formed in the wake of the Brexit referendum.
Nic Aubury lives in the English Midlands with his wife and three teenage sons.
ON THE BRIEF POEMS OF NIC AUBURY
I first came across the poetry of Nic Aubury in Sophie Hannah’s anthology The Poetry of Sex. His two poems included there (see the first two poems below) were among the briefest poems in the book, but they were also among the most incisive. I was intrigued, so I sought out more. I discovered he posted some of his brief poems on his Twitter account. Although they may owe their provenance to other more renowned light poets – my formative poetry experiences were (inspired by) two gifts from two different girlfriends: Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope and Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash – they have an original, peculiarly English touch. Like Wendy Cope, he has an assured and ironic sense of social niceties. And like Ogden Nash, he has a wonderful sense of the peculiarities of language. (See, for example, Otherwise and Rhyme Nor Reason below). He has, also, an assured sense of the manner in which social media can effect and sometimes infect the language of communication and the language of poetry. Writing a weekly 4-line poem for the New European, he can compress as much into one brief witty sentence as other contributors cram into a lengthy article. Concision is all.
While he has written some longer poems, he is at his best when he is most compressed, often using formal conventions of poetry to undermine formal conventions of society. I am very interested in metre and form. I have found most success I think in seeking to exploit the comic tension between formality of structure and informality of language. I try to pare ideas and jokes down to their simplest, sparest expression, which is why I write so many short poems. Like a Jaffa Cake, a tasty morsel of orange jam on a sponge base covered in a hard chocolate shell, the poems of Nic Aubury have a tasty morsel of truth on a moral and social base in a hard shell of metrical, rhythmic and rhyming language. Whether a Jaffa Cake is a cake or a biscuit is debatable, subject to tax conditions. And whether the pieces I have posted below are poems or epigrams may be equally debatable. Whatever they are, however, they are as pithy, as palatable, and as pleasurable as a packet of Jaffa Cakes. Taste and see.
ILLUSTRATING THE POEMS – MOOSE ALLAIN
Alexander Allain, known professionally as Moose Allain, is a British illustrator who lives and works in Devon with his wife, Karen. He used to work in London as an architect specialising in urban regeneration until he moved from a traditional job to the seaside to make a living from his creativity. He and his wife run a thriving business based on Moose Allain’s world of playful, off-beat cartoons, crazy puns and reflections on what’s going on in his life and the world. Having once contributed to the UK’s successful Olympic bid and designed murals for a beauty salon in Mexico City, he has since created animations for the BBC, illustrated the Pointless quiz show book and had cartoons published in Private Eye and The Literary Review. He helped to co-produce the video for Lost Worker Bee, a song by the band Elbow. He has built his Twitter community to over 78 thousand followers and made it the core of his business. He has provided the illustrations, some of which are featured below, to Nic Aubury’s full length collection Ignore It All and Hope It Goes Away: Poems for Modern Life (2022) published by David Fickling Books. Describing his work, he says it’s about playing around with lines. They may be drawn lines or they may be written lines. The poet writes lines; the artist draws lines. In this book they reach a comic concordance.
Brief Poems by Nic Aubury
Casanever
To most men, the notion
of ‘romance and mystery’
means clearing the porn from
their internet history.
***
The Couple Upstairs
Their bed springs start to creak;
their ardour has awoken.
That’s twice at least this week;
their telly must be broken.
***
The Level
We must have trust and honesty,
So look me squarely in the eye
And be completely straight with me,
Unless it’s bad, in which case, lie.
Nic Aubury discusses his poem and the benefits of grudge-holding with Sophie Hannah. The transcript of their podcast is here.
***
Otherwise
The owl is not the wisest bird,
in spite of what you might have heard,
for, if he were, I think – don’t you? –
he’d say ‘Too whoom’ and not ‘Too whoo’.
***
Rhyme Nor Reason
You can’t rhyme “plough” with “cough” or “rough”,
Or “thorough”, “through” or “though”;
Hough foreigners can learn this stough
I troughly wouldn’t knough.
***
Ode to Joy
The pleasure of one’s own success
could never quite transcend
that higher form of happiness:
the failure of a friend.
***
XXX
Written to mark the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web
The sum of all the Posts and Tweets and Comments there have been
since nineteen eighty-nine has categorically dispelled
the notion that there might be some relationship between
the truth of our opinions and the zeal with which they’re held.
***
The Jaffa Cake Temperance Paradox
I’ve eaten far too many; I should stop.
I’d have to stop if all of them were gone.
They’d all be gone if someone ate them up.
So probably I ought to carry on.
***
Honesty
By a low cottage wall that was bordered with phlox
On an old garden table with rickety legs
Was some produce for sale, and an honesty box,
So I posted a note: ‘I have stolen your eggs’.
***
Opinion Piece
We nowadays accept as true
that, never mind its merit,
the fact we have a point of view
obliges us to share it.
Creation Theory
Whoever thought a baby’s head
would fit through a vagina
Does not deserve the epithet
‘intelligent designer’.
COUPLETS
Cold Calling
The poet never used his two-bar heater;
there wasn’t any money in the metre.
***
cogito ergo … hmm
I’m in a philosophic traffic jam:
I overthink, therefore I under-am.
***
midnight rumbler
If snacks aren’t meant for eating in the middle of the night,
then tell me why the fridge has got that helpful little light.
***
Thx & rgds
However important you are, or how stressed,
you’re never too busy for vowels, I’d suggest.
***
Emoticon
Semi-colon, right-hand bracket.
Smiley face? I’d like to smack it. 😉
***
Depending
The seventeen-to-twenty-fives
are grown-ups ’til the bill arrives
***
The Joneses
For middle-class people, contentment depends
On securing the envy of middle-class friends.
***
On Wooing
Correcting her grammar
Will rarely enamour.
HAIKU
doomsday haiku
our digital world
will end in mutually
assured distraction
***
0° haiku
The present is the
point at which liquid future
freezes into past.
***
Haiku for an ex
Every day since you
left, I have missed you – but my
aim is improving.
***
Granny’s Advice Haiku
If you haven’t got
Anything nice to say then
Post it on Twitter.
***
doomsday haiku
our digital world
will end in mutually
assured distraction
***
Country Gent Haiku
The meaning of some
Phrases is unaffected
By spoonerism.
***
Equinox
Not what you get when
You cross a horse with a cow,
Disappointingly
***
Imitation haiku
The sincerest form
Of flattery is, of course,
Your friends’ resentment.
***
Poets Haiku
If all the poets
were laid out, end-to-end, it
wouldn’t matter much.
THE NEW EUROPEAN POEMS
Tomb Of The Keyboard Warrior
O, here lies here a hero of online debate!
He fearlessly made up his mind in a second
and, quoting some facts that he’d heard from his mate,
he died on the hill of the stuff that he reckoned.
***
Post Mortem
When scientists compile the latest list
of species now extinct, their grim report
will surely mention something sadly missed
but quite died out, alas: the unshared thought.
***
Hot Or Not
When choosing an outfit, our offspring pay heed
to the stuff that they’ve seen on their Instagram feed,
to advice from their friends, to their own inhibitions,
but not to observable weather conditions.
***
The Hardest Word
The usual English way of saying “no”
is saying “yes”, not sleeping for the next
however long in fear you’ll have to go
then pulling out courageously by text.
***
Same Difference
Determined to avoid the fate of waking up dismayed
to find that we’ve become our dad or mum,
we make ourselves the people who our kids will be afraid
of waking up to find that they’ve become.
ILLUSTRATED POEMS (Illustrations by Moose Allain)
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All poems © Nic Aubury. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Illustrations © Moose Allain. Reprinted by permission of the illustrator.
***
LINKS
Nic Aubury regularly posts his poems on his Twitter account
Reviews of Small Talk on Sphinx Review
Reactions to Cold Soup on Goodreads
Reactions to Ignore it All and Hope it Goes Away on Goodreads
Nic Aubury discusses one of his poems with Sophie Hannah
Ignore it All and Hope it all Goes Away on the David Fickling Books site
The website of artist, cartoonist and prolific tweeter Moose Allain
The Twitter site of Moose Allain
All poems © Nic Aubury. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Illustrations © Moose Allain. Reprinted by permission of the illustrator
Brief Poems 
