ISBN: 978-1-909404-61-8 £5

Poetry Space Pamphlet Prize 2025 winner in debut category

 

Uncompromising and striking pieces about cosmonauts, poems that taught me things I didn’t know, poems about flight and change and the cost of aspiration. Daring playing with form and rhyme schemes, prose poem, well-wrought sonnet, mirror poem, letters etc. Unified around the theme of     exploring space. Some stand-out lines – ‘The beauty of loneliness does not last long’… ‘I will be whole again in my undoing.’ Very impressive. I think it will make a really interesting and unusual pamphlet. The reason I chose this, very narrowly, over the second place was that, while unified in theme, each poem had a slightly different angle, and the human level was moving, deeply felt, memorable and awakening. 

Rosie Jackson, judge

Isabelle Thompson’s pamphlet, Stalin’s Parrot, is one of the most impressive debuts I’ve read in years. Witty, highly intelligent, and deeply moving, these poems begin with the early Soviet space program and by degrees admit the narrator’s presence, at once vulnerable and reverent. Boundaries for human and more-than-human lives appear everywhere: Stalin’s parrot in its cage, Komarov in his spacecraft, the dog Laika in her capsule, the speaker who ‘barely leave[s] her bedroom’. We try to surmount these boundaries through tenderness, through intimacy, through voice, in the kindnesses bestowed on Laika before her journey, in Komarov’s imagined last letter to his beloved wife, in the speaker   envisioning herself at one with birds, ‘to sing, sing, sing’. Refreshingly original and carefully sculpted, Thompson’s poems are at once probing and joyous, yearning and revelatory. 

 Carrie Etter

 

Sample poem

The Interpretation of Dreams

— Isabelle Thompson 2026

I dreamt I was in London, in a beautiful unnamed park,and I was with someone I loved whose face I could not see,and in the daylight sky came a shooting star so fastI stared with wonder. But when it hit the horizon,it exploded in a cloud and I understood. Other explosions followed, rapid and merciless,and there was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.And when I woke I remembered my prayerbefore sleep to the God I am not sure I believe in,my prayer for the Palestinians, my prayer to make me good,and I wondered what it would be if everything wasupside down – if the Soviets had made the first lunar landingand there was no Ukraine, if the moon shone blood redeach night, if every stable place was shaken to its coreand every war-torn country peaceable and safe. A man I barely know tells me that he likes to imagineeverything is real and unreal at the same time,but I can’t think like that. Something must be solid,something must be true, and my dream, delicatelybalanced in the place between sleeping and waking,streaks past me in its fiery train.I do not know what it was trying to say.