POEM OF THE WEEK

“Everything has its own way to break,” writes Holly Hopkins in “The Death of a Fridge”. In context, it’s a line about faulty inanimate objects. But it has the ring of an emotional truth, a piece of wisdom learnt through hard experience. It raises the question: what other kinds of breaking might there be?

There’s a hint of something sad beneath the smooth, sparky surface of this poem – a feeling reinforced by the helpless final image, in which the doomed appliance is compared to a human tragedy – but it remains just that: a hint. It’s not in the poem, and its absence pulls the poem in around it, just like the internal vacuum that makes the “whole white weight” of the titular fridge buckle and collapse in on itself, “drawn from the inside”.

This is a poem about playing with fire. The party trick of the first stanza, a harmless-ish way of setting oneself aflame with lighter fluid (which burns at a low heat), gives way to an equally strange-yet-grounded image of cold fire: a burning newspaper shoved into a fridge.

“Many of my poems are fables or little self-contained universes,” says the Manchesterbased poet. Though “they often don’t contain much that could be described as biographical”, the extraordinarily unlikely “death” in this one was in fact inspired by a real imploding fridge Hopkins once saw at a party. Stranger things have happened.

It appears in New Poetries VIII, an eclectic anthology out next week of work by 24 poets who are each working towards publishing their first full collection. Hopkins tells me that ideas of “fire and burning” crackle throughout her forthcoming first book, which often touches on climate change, and explores “clashing images” – freezing flame, for instance. Tristram Fane Saunders

The box sealed. The rubber trim sucked tight. We couldn’t force it any more than we could pull apart a dinner plate. Not crack a dish but hold the rims and pull it in two, everything has its own way to break.

The air was eaten: a dimple in the cool enamel, a crease, then, drawn from the inside, the whole white weight crumpled

with thunks of deep struck metal, as a girl, trapped by an earthquake, might smash keys on a pipe when she still thinks of rescue.