The Price of Happiness

“The Price of Ηappiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens (‘Goodness, I’m weeping said Mum’) to full-blown violent coerciveness (‘the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown’) and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life (‘it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long’). You barely take a breath before you’re holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship. It is a tribute to Nikki Robson’s skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing – these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude – ‘my label of a husband’; ‘my mummy-smile’; ‘this Vitruvian boy’ – and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: ‘[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another’.” W. N. Herbert

“‘The divorced cannot/bury their dead.’ Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her ‘mummy-smile’, layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet's first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot.” Beth McDonough

The Price of Happiness is very visceral and very contemplative.

ISBN: 978-1-7394122-4-1
34 pages
R.R.R.P. £6.99

A sample poem from The Price of Happiness can be enjoyed below.

PRE-ORDER The Price of Happiness NOW using the paypal options below. [The Price of Happiness is out in February 2025; pre-orders are posted out in the week of publication.]

The Price of Happiness (with p&p options)

The Price of Happiness (with p&p for UK delivery) £8.99 GBP The Price of Happiness (with p&p for Rest of World delivery) £19.50 GBP

N.B. Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.

Signature dish 

We ended the conversation laughing – 
weren’t we meant for each other,  
making curry on both sides of the Irish Sea?

 
I’d ground the aromatics and rubbed the lamb,  
marinaded it overnight in wine and thyme.  
Now low and slow on the hob, it bubbled 

 
up intermittently, splatted spice on steel.  
Coriander clung to the sharp blade, 
dough bedded in the warming drawer.  

Three months later I opened the cupboards  
to join my kitchen with his. 
Rows of packets of Vesta.