Jensen is an award-winning journalist, biographer and screenwriter. These poems announce a new phase in his work. They are startling in their simplicity and their honesty – reminiscent of Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson and Seamus Heaney. The poems chart the first three years of Jensen’s relationship with his partner, a non-binary composer and musician. They are love poems, written against the complexity of understanding another person. Together they form a fragmentary memoir of hope, disagreement and love.

WAR AND OTHER COUPLES

In the morning you said you dreamt

Of a piano with ceramic keys

Resting in the hull of a ship.

You said there was war and other couples,

That you were too embarrassed to play.

The moon was very low and big

And when you showed it