The Way of the Poet

Roy McFarlane

ISBN: 9781916760424

eISBN: 9781916760431

Price: £14.99

Publication date: 23^rd July 2026

Format: Paperback / eBook

Territories: World

Extent: 180pp

CBV: Creative writing and creative writing guides

Part memoir, part meditation on the art of poetry and what it is to be a poet in the modern age, The Way of the Poet by Roy McFarlane is a journal following the daily life in creative practice.

Full of guidance, encouragement and reflections on the personal, political and radical nature of the craft of writing in troubled times, this will be a ground-breaking book from one of the new millennium’s most inspiring and socially-engaged writers.

Roy McFarlane is a Poet, Writer and former Youth & Community Worker born in Birmingham, spending most of his years in the Black Country and now living in Brighton.

He’s the former National Canal Laureate and Birmingham Poet Laureate. His three collections are published by Nine Arches Press: Beginning With Your Last Breath, The Healing Next Time (shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize) and Living by Troubled Waters.

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Living by Troubled Waters is the third poetry collection by Roy McFarlane– an extraordinary, uncompromising book exploring slavery, colonialism, and the continued tragedies visited upon Black bodies whilst these legacies remain unresolved. In his close examination of the horror of racialised violence, McFarlane examines how the strong currents of the past and present flow side by side. His poems ask us to think about the Black Mediterranean of today as much as we do about the Windrush scandal and the aftershocks of trans-Atlantic slavery, where Black people are still imprisoned, enslaved and drowned as they flee persecution and poverty.

Find out more about Living by Troubled Waters

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