Poem of the week: Down on the canal on Christmas Day by Chris McCabe

"Down on the canal on Christmas Day Down on the canal on Christmas Day a man walks towards me out of water-light, upright, Cratchit-wrapped, a smile to say: I know you. Hello Chris. Ghost in a time-ripped landscape where a low solstice sun spills whisked through a metallic staircase. With joy, the man's smile haunts me for miles a long blasted path, where a dead rat's belly festoons its purple crinoline Christmas hat."

"In canal-light, in time-light, in Cratchit-light, in ripped-light, in rat-light, in Solstice-light, in metallic-light, in frost-light, in grief-light, in Christmas-light from the smile of a stranger I remake my father. This week's poem is from Hedonism, Chris McCabe's latest, sixth poetry collection. It confirms a prodigious talent for the assimilation of ideas, and for letting them loose in forms that are variously experimental, and use the full muscle and gristle of lived language."

"If a reader thinks about identifying the figure as Christ, there's a quick corrective: Cratchit, Scrooge's clerk and foil in A Christmas Carol, is the word. It's a scratchy name, like the cheap scarf the shivering figure in the story needed to wear indoors. This dream-Cratchit recognises the poet-speaker with a friendly surprise and names him instantly: I know you. Hello"

A canal-side Christmas encounter presents a man emerging out of water-light, Cratchit-wrapped, whose joyful smile triggers remembrance that remakes a father. Layered light imagery—solstice, metallic, frost—interacts with grotesque details such as a dead rat wearing a purple crinoline hat to fuse joy and decay. Repeated hyphenated 'light' phrases map time, memory, and grief across the scene. Cratchit functions as a corrective to Christ, linking Dickensian poverty, recognition, and intimacy. Hedonism is framed as a philosophy of pleasure that yields surprising, emotionally realist stories. Experimental forms and lived language amplify associative, connective tributaries of loss and consolation.

Read at www.theguardian.com