Southword Poetry Podcast · Munster Literature Centre

Isabelle Baafi: Chaotic Good

·43 min·3 clips

Isabelle Baafi explains the golden shovel form and reads a haunting poem inspired by Gladys Knight's lyrics.

Faber is where the conversation starts. Patrick sets Isabelle Baafi's debut beside a demanding publishing history, with Muldoon, Heaney, Hughes, and Plath treated as standards rather than decoration. The praise has an edge to it. The host also worries over London's poetry machinery, where major imprints and media attention can skew how poetry in Britain or these islands gets seen. Baafi's work does not sit neatly inside that frame. The conversation soon moves away from reputation and into the craft of poems that can hold pressure without smoothing it out. One sequence gets the room's full attention. Baafi talks about young people learning what public threat, visibility, and vulnerability feel like when police enter the scene. The poem Piggy sits at the centre of that discussion. Its contrapuntal structure can be read down each column and then across them, so the form is doing the same work as the subject. The reader has choices to make. That matters because the poem is not only showing competing perspectives; it asks the reader to decide how those perspectives touch. Choice becomes part of the poem's machinery. Baafi links that structure to childhood books with different possible endings, and to the collection's wider concerns with free will and faith. The tone stays serious without going cold. What comes through is a poetics built around voices trying to coexist when power, fear, and interpretation are not shared evenly. The closing poem tightens the point. Language feels bodily, painful, and necessary, something that can cut the tongue and still act as a shield. The mother's workplace story gives that idea a lived charge. By the end, language is not display. It is a scarce resource tied to dignity, naming, and the refusal to forget another person's humanity.

As heard by us

A debut collection weighed through craft, publishing power, and the politics of language.

Southword Poetry Podcast gives Isabel Baffey's debut collection a thoughtful framing, especially when it places the book against the expectations tied to Faber and the London poetry scene.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want poetry criticism with form, politics, and real stakes.

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