Anthony Dunn

Night Shifts

When the boy was all but weightless I watched
nightly foxes from the low hours’ windows,
proving themselves in the driveway snow.

These eight years we’ve been busying ourselves
around the house and garden; we have fixed
the trespassing gap in the corner fence,

closed it to the hedgehogs and housebreakers
who’d make their way from common to crescent
surveilled by no one but the blind-eyed moon.

Now the boy is eight and sleeping, I tend
to my night-sweats and worries, the lights off,
at all the upstairs windows in their turn.

I need you little creatures now. Come back,
come back across the new untroubled snow.

Cleethorpes with Milo

So we call it a day, mid-afternoon
and the sea-light greying with rain, and turn
the car for home, past the tropical zoo,
the land train and the lights along the prom.
Everything is less than I remember –
closed down, turned off, the season over –
is scarcely the place I’d hoped to show you,
the once-home I’m once again driving from.

You read my disappointment from the back,
suggest we brave the downpour one last time,
so through the churning dusk along the pier
this last half hour we slip and cling and tack,
your red coat, yellow hair and blue ice cream
illuminated; wished, and willed, and here.

Antony Dunn’s new collection of poems, Inbetween Days, is due from Valley Press in October 2026. He has published four collections: Pilots and Navigators, Flying Fish, Bugs and, most recently, Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). Antony is the winner of the Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry 2026, the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. Antony is a regular tutor for The Poetry School and has taught many times for the Arvon Foundation. He has been Poet in Residence at the University of York, Ilkley Literature Festival and the People Powered Press. He was Artistic Director of Bridlington Poetry Festival from 2012 until 2018 and lives in Leeds.

 Antony said this about his poems:

‘Night Shifts’ is taken from my new book, Inbetween Days, which inhabits the ‘sandwich generation’ space, caught – for good or ill – between the needs of our children and of our parents, and which exposes to us some of our own most keenly-felt desires. I guess it’s pretty typical of me, this one – taking a perfectly lovely scenario and milking it for its anxieties and nostalgias. But that’s parenthood, I guess…

‘Cleethorpes With Milo’ recounts a day-trip with my young son to the seaside town where I grew up – a wash-out. Milo hated it. I’d given up and started for home, but as we were about to turn off the sea-front road, Milo ‘read my disappointment’ and we gave it another go. It’s a poem from the sentimental end of my register, I’m afraid, but its undercurrent of perceived parental failure is everywhere in my new collection.