Six collections for the long nights

New poetry from Salt for the darkest stretch of the year – from the dialysis ward to the hot-spring pool, and a gift for every reader on your list.

There is a particular kind of reader who reaches December and feels faintly ambushed. The tables are stacked with celebrity memoirs and bumper puzzle books; the poetry, if there is any, is a single shelf somewhere far from the till. And yet poetry is quietly one of the best things to give at Christmas. A slim book wraps beautifully, posts flat, and says something specific – I thought of you – that a fourth scented candle does not.

Salt has published six poetry titles in 2026, and they fall, rather neatly, into two halves, like the season itself. Three are for the long nights: the dark that arrives at four o’clock, the hours when only the bedside lamp is on. Three are for the warm room: steam on the windows, and the people you are glad to be with. The last of the six, Matthew Haigh’s God Mode, is published on Monday 16 November, in good time for the stockings.

For the long nights

Sidewinder is the darkest of the six, and perhaps the most gripping. Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, the Forward Prize-shortlisted poet, has written a poetic memoir that follows a relationship from fascination into coercion, set against the grit and soundtrack of 1990s Britain: small-town pubs, nineties rock, an older man who rules by charisma and myth. Julia Webb finds ‘an undercurrent of violence’ running through it. It is formally exact and emotionally unflinching, and it asks how we make sense of experience when the story we were told was never ours. This is the gift for the reader who wants to be unsettled and will thank you for it. It is not a book for every stocking, which is rather the point.

God Mode is Matthew Haigh’s second collection and a single, electrifying sequence on chronic kidney disease, dialysis, transplant and the body re-entering the world. It carries the cut-up wit and pop-cultural intensity of his Polari-longlisted debut, Death Magazine, into something graver and more interior: hospital wards, faux-medical letters, the haunted spaces of online life. Salt’s own description calls it a queer survival narrative, a body horror and a prayer book for the age of the algorithm. Sam Riviere, for his part, finds it ‘astonishingly joyful’, which is exactly the surprise at the heart of the book. Give it to the friend who likes their poetry strange, funny and brave.

Collected Poems by Tobias Hill is for the reader who already owns a shelf of poetry, and for the one who read him in the nineties and lost track. For the first time it gathers all his poems from four full-length collections – from the Eric Gregory Award-winning Year of the Dog (1995) to Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow (2006) – with an introduction by Maura Dooley. London is its imaginative centre, the city after dark, sensuous and decadent and austere by turns. Hill died in 2023, and Jeremy Wikeley, reviewing the book in the Daily Telegraph, writes that its later poems make clear ‘how much we lost when his voice went silent’. At 288 pages, it is the keepsake of the six.

For the warm room

If the first three are for the dark, Skinship is for the steam. Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana’s second collection is the sequel to her Salt bestseller Sing me down from the dark (2022), with the same feisty protagonist, the same dark humour and a few moments that will make you cry. The title comes from the Japanese loan word fusing ‘skin’ and ‘kinship’, which can describe bathing together in a hot spring – and the cover, a pool of women up to their shoulders in turquoise water, could hardly be better suited to midwinter. Motherhood, friendship between women and the trials of difficult partners are handled through Japanese forms – zuihitsu, haiku, tanka – alongside a witty, surreal sequence after Yoko Ono. Sue Burge says it ‘more than fulfils the promise of her first’. Give it to anyone who loves a book that is warm in the hand and wicked on the page.

Not Even October is Tim Relf’s debut, and the one to give the person who tells you they don’t read poetry. His poems find humour and heartache in classrooms, petrol stations, cafés and vets, in suburban gardens, pubs and seaside towns, and swing from one to the other in a breath. Richard E. Grant calls it ‘incisive and moving’ on the cover; Ian McMillan says the poems produce a feeling of Yes, I have been here too. Relf is a journalist who writes about books for the Guardian and The Bookseller, and it shows: he writes directly to the reader, and his words linger.

Making the Wedding Dress is the seventh book of poems from Jackie Wills, whose first collection was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1995 and who won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023. It begins with a quotation from a sewing handbook and asks what can be mended, and what it means to make a daughter’s wedding dress. From there it fans out – to bullying and money, to rats and sinkholes, to the communal life of starlings, to ageing and the fragility of care. Salt’s one-line summary is hard to better: ‘Starts with the mundane. Then exaggerates. Then astonishes.’ It is the gift for mothers and daughters, and for anyone who has ever sewn, mended or been quietly unmade by a family occasion.

Giving poetry

A poetry book asks very little of the giver. There is no size to get wrong and no battery to replace; you need only choose the one that sounds like the person receiving it. Write on the flyleaf, and let them read it at the pace of the season – a poem a night is a perfectly good way to see out the year.

All six are available from saltpublishing.com and through bookshops, with the exception of God Mode, which is published on 16 November.

The six at a glance

Title	Author	Published	Price
Collected Poems	Tobias Hill	30 March 2026	£12.99
Making the Wedding Dress	Jackie Wills	14 June 2026	£10.99
Skinship	Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana	21 September 2026	£10.99
Sidewinder	Elisabeth Sennitt Clough	9 November 2026	£10.99
Not Even October	Tim Relf	9 November 2026	£10.99
God Mode	Matthew Haigh	16 November 2026	£10.99