“Right from the start you can feel her skill with pace. She propels the reader forward with bursts of vivid imagery. We journey through flowers, time, the body and even temperature in some lines and in the next we land in intimate domesticity, perhaps a more literal place. This flitting use of imagery takes the reader from the breadth of the world and what’s in it to very close and personal places in just a few lines, and it’s a skill Sophia uses in a number of poems…It is a book about absence, and about the presence that absence can carry”
The Ruin. The Ruin. The Love. published in Poetry Ireland Review
The Blackbird Is Stuck On Alarm, published in The Winged Moon
Love In A Time of Extinctions, finalist in the Mslexia competition
Girl Behind Glass - shortlisted for the Live Canon International Poetry Prize
Girl Behind Glass can be read in the Live Canon Prize anthology https://www.livecanon.co.uk/store/product/2024-prize-anthology
Heronless, poems by Sophia Argyris, published by Palewell Press
Sophia’s latest poetry pamphlet Heronless, is published by London-based Palewell Press in March 2025.
You can order a copy direct from Sophia, or through the publisher here: https://palewellpress.co.uk/bookstore/environment/hrnl/ (this is also available on amazon etc, but please order from the publisher or myself if you can).
Words about Heronless:
How to grieve for a dying world whilst still finding joy in its beauty? How to come to terms with the loss of a parent? These are some of the questions raised by Sophia Argyris’s pamphlet. The poems in Heronless evoke family, love, loss and a desire for connection between the realms of the human and the more-than-human. A dead mother becomes a moon jellyfish, a fox names the world, and a cave teaches us how to love.
Corinna Board, author of Arboreal (Black Cat Poetry Press)
This pamphlet is a stunning, beautiful expression of love, loss, the haunting of grief and memory, told to us by Argyris in a strongly themed, skilfully written, well-structured gathering of most interesting shapes, fractures and fragments. These poems are emotive, heartbreaking and at times devastating. Each poem is filled with pain and claims a piece of your heart.
Each of the poet’s experiences is bound to the natural world. Nature is integral, is the lens through which the poet attempts to name or process the overwhelming, inescapable massiveness of grief. These poems are neat, often gorgeously distilled acts of devotion. Argyris’ ghosts are forever bound with the birds, the trees, stars, stones and water. How do we bear these sadnesses that enter our hearts and never leave? Perhaps there is no answer to this question. At least there is poetry like this – these poems will remain, gentle as breath around you for a long time. Jane Burn, author of The Apothocary of Flight (Nine Arches Press)
Sophia Argyris' poems are spacious, loving and melancholy. These are writings of near-loss and actual loss, of nature and need; poised in the balance between air and earth. Jo Bell, author of Kith (Nine Arches Press) & Boater: Life On England’s Waterways (HarperCollins)
Years With Blue Mother and Skye
Published in The Interpreter’s House. Read these poems here
Twenty True Things: An Incantation
Published in The Marrow International Poetry Read this poem here
ἀγάπη, Or How Caves Love You
You can read this poem in the Verve Poetry Press Anthology ‘ A Gift Once Give Must Not Be Spurned’. The title of the anthology is a line from my poem. Buy the anthology here