Review of “poyums anaw” by Len Pennie

poyums annaw by Len Pennie (Canongate)

In her second collection of poems, Len Pennie is writing verse of empowerment, mostly (but of course not exclusively) for young women who have been victims of domestic and sexual abuse. These are poems written for the TikTok generation, her fan base on the short-form video app where she has over 717,000 followers, and each poem takes about as long to read as the average TikTok video lasts.

Pennie has two personas on her rewarding TikTok feed (“persona” is not meant to imply that they are artificial or insincere). The first is the cheerful advocate for the Scots language, offering the “Scots word of the day” to her followers, usually an amusing word like “catty” (to “sup greedily”), as in “Am cuttyin’ up ma stovies.” She delivers these with a charming smile and twinkle in her eye, and sometimes with a jolly snort when she laughs. Her other persona, however, is soberingly different. With grim seriousness, she discusses her own domestic abuse ordeal, nightmarish struggle through the Scottish courts, systemic injustices to women, the vicious sexism of some of her commentators, and her struggles with depression and anxiety. Sometimes the two personas have to come together for her to keep up her daily posting streak, and it’s sadly painful to watch her barely holding it together.

As with so many poets before her, the texts she writes are in a delicate and sometimes problematic dialectic with who she is. She craves privacy and autonomy, but she puts herself forward every day in the world’s most popular public forums to engage directly with her viewers. Looking all 717,000 of us in the eye, she gives us Scots pronunciation guidance with her intimate catchphrase, “One more time, just you and me, doesn’t even matter if you didn’t get it right the first time.” She writes passionately about being objectified and the subject of what some would call the “male gaze.” She aspires to be taken seriously as an impactful poet, and one of her challenges is that she happens to be one of the most beautiful young women in Scotland. While she seems most at home speaking from her bedroom in her sweats or jammies, she also enjoys glamming it up sometimes.

There are several poems about the ambivalence of unwinnable beauty standards, such as “Face”:

But you’re judged for your efforts, and judged if you lack
The ability to try to claw a bit back
Of yourself, your aesthetic, the way you appear,
If you don’t let yourself be controlled by the fear,
Then you’re arrogant, up yourself, self-obsessed, vain;
You’re vapid and wholly devoid of a brain
Because lipstick negates every word the lips form,
And eyeshadow somehow can truly transform
An intelligent woman to someone without
Credibility, whose ideas should be cast out.

I’m not calling her a hypocrite. I’m calling her someone who is honest about the full spectrum of who she is. She writes poetry as a woman of exactly her time, place, and situation: she’s a TikTok poet, fluent in English and Scots, recovering from domestic abuse, using structured art to deal with a maelstrom of emotions, and carving out her own place in a new media landscape. She’s doing so with conviction and a purpose outside of herself. We can ask little more of a poet.

Or can we? For example, I’m hardly the target audience here. I’m an old man with a PhD in English reading the book straight through. Is my experience of the text invalid? Would I be categorically wrong to read the book as a work of British literature? Another male critic, Graeme Richardson of London’s The Times, ignited a storm of controversy when he proclaimed Pennie “Scotland’s worst poet since William McGonagall.” He read her poems as stand-alone texts, not as vehicles of symbolic social action. Without providing much evidence, he proclaimed, “Len Pennie’s poetry is very bad. And when I say ‘bad’ I don’t mean mediocre or dull. I mean execrable.” He added a weak accusation of plagiarism like a sour cherry on top.

Receiving such a review in the Times, of all places, sent Pennie into a deep depression (recalling, perhaps, John Keats, another sensitive poet whose early death was likely accelerated by a harsh review of “Endymion” in the Quarterly Review). Pennie’s many online fans sprang to her defense (as they might swarm me after this review), accusing Richardson of bullying. Her publisher, Canongate, made a legal complaint against the Times. Cynically, one could say this is all great publicity for the book, and for poetry in general these days — it’s got to have some controversy to get on the best-seller list. Less cynically, and more importantly, it brings up questions of exactly how to read a certain kind of poetry written for a new and specific generation of readers who will not, and usually cannot, read Sylvia Plath.

The publishers’ catalogs overflow with books of simple poetry written for children and complex poetry for adults. The young adult market, however, is monopolized by fantasy novels. Where is the poetry for them? Does it have to be a laughable idea that teens and twenty-somethings would put down their phones for an hour to voluntarily read an unassigned book of poetry? What would that poetry have to look like, and what would it have to say? What are these readers seeing that poetry critic Richardson did not?

I’m flying by the seat of my saggy corduroy pants here, having never been a young woman, but I’d suppose that Pennie’s readers are keying in on her poetry’s dramatic (even melodramatic at times) intensity, topics unique to women’s experience, its center of gravity in unresolved emotions, and the humor and pathos mixed with visceral generational anger. In terms of form, the poems are short (never more than a page and a half), rhythmic, and draw on a register of language just high enough to be poetry, but not so high that you’ll need to check your English notes to remind yourself how metaphor and metonymy work.

“One of the best compliments I receive is from people who hate poetry, telling me they don’t hate mine,” Pennie writes in her acknowledgements. “It took me a while to get poetry, and it took even longer for poetry to get me.” Or, more directly, “My poyums were written to be punctuated with laughter and tears, and to be screamed, sung, and sobbed. So don’t be afraid to read them aloud; I’ll be reading with you.” (Poems is pronounced “poyums” in her Scots accent.) It’s doubtful that Richardson screamed, sung, and sobbed the poems before reviewing them. I didn’t, either. “Your Poetry is Shit” takes a preemptive strike against such critics and sets her manifesto:

If like me at school you left class thinking: Jesus Christ, I am thick,
Because poetry was something that for you was too elusive,
Reserved for people cleverer, more wanky, and exclusive,
Relegated to the academic, solely fit for study,
But poetry’s a human thing, it’s forged of tears and bloody
Handprints left on caves before the written word had been developed. . . .
Bad poyums don’t exist because the stuff that can upset you
Is fulfilling its poetic job as its designed to get you
Feeling; if you’re disappointed sad or just enraged,
The piece has just succeeded in ensuring you’re engaged.

Just because Pennie’s poems are reaching their targeted audience doesn’t mean that they are inauthentic and coldly calculated to do so. The domestic trauma she writes about with such raw emotion was serious and very real. She feels compelled to address such suspicions in the very first poem, “You’re Capitalising on Your Trauma”:

Come one, come all, to the scene of the crime,
Where the victim made every last police report rhyme.
She’s bottled her tears for the masses to swallow;
She carves out their serving from flesh rendered hollow;
An appropriate dose, the correct concentration,
Right way of expressing the wrong ideation.

But take a closer look at what’s going on and what’s being written here. What’s left out of the poem is what’s in it for her — if it’s painful or unethical to share personal trauma for the entertainment of others, then why keep doing it? Is it therapeutic, and if so, in what sense? Some of the poems reach out powerfully to readers who may need help or encouragement, as in “The Feminine Urge”:

The feminine urge to urge you to keep going;
You girls who are burning, and bleeding, and growing;
Defy every rule they impose on your soul;
Become headstrong, and bossy, and outwith control.

But other poems are simply more like primal screams. One is titled “I Fucking Hate You” (I’ll let you surmise the gist of that one). The poems taken together read like as steps along a road to recovery in the present tense, not the conclusions of someone who has reached the end and is looking back.

It’s time for a pause to recognize the minority of Scots poems in the collection, which are generally less personal. They’re delightful. “Bilingualism” plays to her strengths. It’s an introduction for English-speaking readers, with every other line in English and Scots, done with delicacy and humor. The rhymes provide a guide for the Scots pronunciation as she does in her “Scots word of the day” videos:

Inextricably linked, neither one takes the lead,
A wee pauchle ae words stappit fu in ma heid;
Each living in fear that the other upstages,
They lowp fae ma heid fur tae bide oan the pages.
Switching from too explicit to overly vague;
A hae twa leids tae follae ma brain’s wee stravaig;
One language must hide lest the other besiege it;
A gie yous ma word, that A’m urnae an eejit.

Any poet writing in Scots does so in the shadow of Robert Burns, and her salute is a long-overdue side-eye to the revolting concoction that is haggis:

A dinnae ken how Rabbie Burns decided oan that dish,
An how we cannae jist hae mince, or stovies, pie or fish;
A taen a keek at thon wee piece he scrievit ae the meal,
An A maun say A hink he seems an awfy silly chiel.

The Scots poems provide a welcome aural respite, because the single weakest part of the collection is that all but a handful of the poems are in anapestic tetrameter. It makes the book a slog to read in long stretches (a mistake I made), and your attention inevitably wanders. I get it — writers need to write it the way they hear it — but when it comes time to publish, they need to take some mercy on their readers. No musician would put out a box set of albums all in the same tempo, in the same key, with the same drum beat. And no poet would translate the complete works of Virgil into couplets of rhymed iambic pentameter (um, whoops, John Dryden did that in 1698).

Anapestic tetrameter — think “The Night Before Christmas” — has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s catchy, easy to memorize, and makes for dramatic live readings (no surprise it’s a favorite at poetry slams). It’s rat-a-tat rhythm is markedly different from the iambic and trochaic beats that favor the relentless 2 & 4 beats of rap. On the other hand, it’s a form that’s associated with children’s verse, particularly the genius of Dr. Seuss (“But our fish said, ‘no! no! Make that cat go away!/Tell that cat in the hat you do NOT want to play”). It’s therefore sometimes an awkward fit for poems of serious adult themes, as in “You’re So Strong”:

I’m bleeding inside and I’m so sick of trying
To live up to your standards of grieving perfection;
I don’t need your coddling, pity, protection;
I need you to stand up beside me, support,
Help fix lawmakers, the polis, the judges, the court.
If you join the crusade that I’ve fought all along,
Maybe one day, for once, I won’t have to be strong.

The English teachers Pennie distrusts would say that form follows function. In this case, perhaps function is constrained by the form. Anapestic tetrameter (four sets of two unaccented beats and one accented beat, as in “maybe ONE day for ONCE I won’t HAVE to be STRONG), with the occasional extra beat added or subtracted at the beginning or end, seems to pull the ideas expressed into sets of threes and fours. It’s an excellent form for listing things (as in Seuss’ “It came without ribbons. It came without tags./It came without packages, boxes, or bags”). To use the arbitrary example of “You’re So Strong” above, there’s one group of threes in “coddling, pity, protection” and one set of fours in “lawmakers, the polis, the judges, the court.” Once you’re aware of it, you start noticing them often: “When I thought I was better, was hopeful and healed,” “That I’m sad again, sick again, not quite myself,” “Judgemental, stagnant, and cruel, unforgiving,” “He’ll brag, and boast, and laugh, and shout,” “To colour your language, with curses, profanity.”

To her credit, Pennie does about all a poet can do with the limitations posed by anapestic tetrameter. Concepts and sentences may begin or end in the middle of a line, although sometimes it’s jarring to have rhymes bridging two different sentences, as in “But poetry’s a human thing, it’s forged of tears and bloody/Handprints left on caves before the written word had been developed./It is reaching out when life is dark to feel yourself enveloped.” She’s creative with her rhymes (sometimes painfully so, to my ear, rhyming things like “ingest? Or” with “fester”). The rhymes are almost all perfect, which isn’t necessarily a compliment, because they can become predictable and limit the vocabulary. For example, Pennie has an over-fondness for the word “brain” because it’s easier to rhyme with than “mind,” “imagination,” “consciousness,” or any number of other words that may be closer to what she really has in, um, mind. “Implanting self-consciousness straight in her brain” sounds more like surgery than it does discovery.

Recurring themes in poyums annaw are personal liberation and the self-validation necessary to become a poet. Perhaps in future volumes, more liberated poetic forms will catch up with her ideas.

The good news is that the book is selling well, it’s promoting the Scots language, and hopefully it’s genuinely fulfilling its important mission for a new generation of women in our supposedly post-literate age. Perhaps the quintessential poem in the collection is the stirring “You Are Here.” It’s poetry that sets its goals, finds the right language to reach them, hits hard, and recovers an ancient purpose for verse that has fallen by the wayside in recent times: consolation.

There isn’t a timescale for how you should heal;
Your bad days are valid; your heartache is real.
But so is the day that your smile will return;
That fire within you continues to burn.
You will overcome this, and continue to thrive,
You are here, you are loved, you are whole, you’re alive.

(Originally published on the Arts Fuse, Nov. 11, 2025)