Natalie Ann Holborow

There are some days when writing feels like trying to spark a candle with damp matches. It’s a Saturday morning and I’m up early, patio doors thrown open, blowing on a cup of milky tea. I reach for inspiration, but grab nothing but empty air. I sigh. Then I sit at the table, notebook open, pen tapping a soft drumbeat against the paper, and I wonder if today will be one of those days where the words don’t come.

I catch a glimpse of it as I recline against the chair, sizing up the page, in the form of a sentence that doubles back on itself, a thought I hadn’t meant to think. The poem turns, but not in the way I planned.

And I have learned that this is a good thing.

The moment a poem changes its mind

I first heard about the idea of the volta – the “turn” – in a sun-bleached university classroom when I was twenty and thought poems were made by a series of strict rules and not much room for playing. I learned that a turn is any significant shift in direction within a poem. Our lecturer spoke about sonnets, talking about how the Italians gave them an octave and a sestet; a problem and then a solution; a twist into something that made me sigh in a good way. I tried to write my own, but for a long time I wasn’t interested in forms (I still cannot get on with the villanelle). I just wanted to be let loose on the page and write about boys who’d pissed me off recently without any form-related restrictions.

It took me longer than I care to admit to realise that sometimes form can guide us to the core of the message we want to say, and that the turn is the poem’s real heartbeat. It mimicked the way a day could tilt from ordinary to unbearable with the buzz of an unexpected message, or the way a love could slip from safe to uncertain without warning. Sometimes, it was the way your worst days, swaddled in your duvet with your wonky curtains obscuring the light, could sometimes be interrupted by a friend’s voice gently calling through your door.

It’s the moment a poem starts to teach you something, rather than the other way around. And it doesn’t have to be limited to strict form either (unless you want it to).

Why poems should surprise us

Most mornings, when I write before work, I think I know what I’m doing. I’m still in that hazy, dreamlike state where my inner critic is half-asleep and is far too tired to make a dig at me. I’m more open to letting words take shape on the page and tackling the painful editing process later. I have a vague idea. Something about memory, maybe, or a regret I won’t normally talk about. And so I write a few lines, which seem, at this hour, to behave. They line up obediently.

But they don’t make me feel anything. In fact, most of the poems in my ‘TRASH’ folder (the capitals are important), are guilty of this. They don’t surprise me, so they won’t surprise anyone. They’re poems that played it safe, but said nothing. The magic comes when you fully let your guard down and stop writing in the way you think will please people. The turn happens naturally, not from force.

The biggest lesson that taught me this was working in collaboration with another poet and friend, Mari Ellis Dunning, whom I’d let into my first drafts and transform them. I’d do the same with her poems, too. We worked each other’s poems hard. We questioned. We twisted them in other directions.

And every time, the poems ended up better than they were at the start. When you question your first instincts, and when you allow someone else to pull back the curtains, you start to realise that every poem has multiple possibilities hidden inside it.

The turn happens when you’re brave enough to ask: What else could this be? What else can it say? When you let a poem turn, when you allow it to betray your first intentions, you open a door you had not seen was there. You’re admitting there are parts of yourself, and your world, you haven’t fully explored yet. And neither has the reader.

That’s where the connection is made.

How to master the art of the turn in poetry

I’m not saying I’m a master at this. I’m not. I’m a lifelong learner. But there are certainly things I’ve learned that I’d love to share that I think might be useful if ever you’re finding yourself staring at a poem, prodding it with a metaphorical stick, and begging it to say something more.

1. Write past (or remove) the easy ending

Sometimes, when I think a poem is done, I try writing past it. Just five lines. There are times when I find that the real ending is hidden just beyond where I would have stopped. And sometimes it’s the opposite: the poem actually needed to end earlier, and that I’ve diluted it by overexplaining.

In Imtiaz Dharker’s poem, The Right Word. In it she explores issues of language and identity; how we see and label other people, and how those people may see and label themselves. She begins by trying to define a figure outside her door. Is he a threat? A martyr? The labels keep shifting. But the poem turns unexpectedly, softening into:

Just outside the door,

lost in shadows,

is a child who looks like mine.

You can really feel the shift in this poem. The impact takes your breath away. It’s an important subject and she delivers stunningly.

2. Shift perspective in the poem

I often try and write about the same situation through someone else’s eyes. It’s why I love writing about overlooked characters in mythology, and why I focused on the perspectives of patients, visitors and hospital workers in Little Universe. No two people see the same thing in the same way. Sometimes a whole poem turns when a new voice or angle steps in unexpectedly.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Mrs Midas does this beautifully:

Separate beds. in fact, I put a chair against my door,

near petrified. He was below, turning the spare room

into the tomb of Tutankhamun. You see, we were passionate then,

in those halcyon days; unwrapping each other, rapidly,

like presents, fast food. But now I feared his honeyed embrace,

the kiss that would turn my lips to a work of art.

The turn is weaved skilfully into this stanza, shifting between love and fear. Changing perspective isn’t about tricking the reader. It’s about revealing new layers of truth that weren’t obvious at first glance. Next time you are stuck in a poem, pause and ask yourself:

• “What if another voice spoke here?”
• “What if the tree spoke instead of the person sitting under it?”
• “What if the event was told from the perspective of the person who left, rather than the one who stayed?”

Often, just switching the camera lens, even briefly, reveals a part of the poem you hadn’t thought to touch yet. Poems live not just in what happened, but in the infinite ways it can be seen.

3. Introduce an unexpected detail 

Sometimes a poem becomes predictable because every part of it belongs too neatly together. One way to create an organic turn is to drop in a detail that shouldn’t fit; something odd, out of place, or jarringly real. Rhys Owain Williams (another fellow poet and friend) does a beautiful job of this in Vetch Field Energy:

And as the smell 

of warm piss and fried onions

drifted above the floodlights,

getting lost on its way to the bay,

we poured out onto the streets

like black and white tears.

The football shirts becoming “black and white tears” is a fitting but unexpected image that carries the sadness of the Vetch field closing for the final time. Juxtaposed with the familiar scent of “warm piss” and “frying onions”, he introduces a tenderness that aches in that final line.

When revising a draft, deliberately add one surprising detail from a different emotional register. If the poem is lyrical and dreamy, drop in something sharp and mundane (the smell of burnt toast, the feel of dirty linoleum). If the poem is dark, insert one tiny absurd or beautiful thing (a child’s hairclip, a cracked seashell).

Then notice: does the poem resist the detail, or does it start to bend toward something more alive?

Now, go and surprise yourself

The turn isn’t just a trick of craft. It’s a moment of opening. It reminds us that our first instincts aren’t always our truest ones, and that the best writing often begins where we let ourselves be surprised. 

Whether it’s writing past the obvious ending, shifting the perspective to see the world through someone else’s eyes, introducing a jarring detail, or allowing a contradiction to live inside your lines, the most powerful thing you can do for your poem is stay curious and open.

The poem knows more than you do. Trust it to turn. And then trust yourself to follow.