Something New: Alternative Poems for Alternative Weddings

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.

Caroline Bird’s selected poems, Rookie (2022), draws on two decades of work from one of the UK’s most popular poets. She won the Forward Prize for her collection The Air Year (2020), and has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.

Rachel Long is a writer and founder of the Octavia Poetry Collective for Women of Colour at the Southbank Centre in London. Her debut poetry collection, My Darling from the Lions, was published by Picador in 2020 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Costa Book Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.