Released 1 December 2025 // Poetry Pamphlet // 56 pages
Content warning: image of deceased gannet caught in a net inside book.
‘From its arresting opening line, “Add a splash of homicide to water”, this collaboration by Stephen Paul Wren and Lesley Curwen is a series of striking reflections on plastic, and how it has shifted from wonder substance to menace. The poems are gripping, unapologetically direct in showing us our dependence on the material, and the damage to the oceans and the wider world this has wrought. The language throughout is alien and scary, naggingly insistent on confronting us with what is happening. Will we listen to these meditations, warnings, laments? I hope so.’
— Rishi Dastidar: poet, consulting editor at The Rialto and chair of Wasafiri
‘It’s far from straightforward to compile a collection of compelling poems centred on the oceanic pollution of microplastics, dealing with the implications for marine life and the human food chain. These poems strive to do just that: they are insistent, serious, uncompromising; bold, too, in embracing modernist tendencies and deploying technical scientific terms one normally wouldn’t find in poetry. This is about as far as you can get from light reading; but the chimaera-driven microscopic perspectives and the unsentimental spareness of the language make it tenaciously memorable. Permanence manages to contribute arrestingly to the evolving aesthetics of Ecopoetry whilst also serving to educate and inform its readers on a crucial issue.’
— Mario Petrucci: award-winning poet, physicist, ecologist; early founder of Ecopoetry in UK
‘What emerges from these poems, from their ingenious merging of technical and descriptive language, is a strange hybrid lyric that places our obsessive use of plastic within a larger temporal, or anthropological, sweep that is as poignant as it is hard-hitting.
Throughout these poems there is a lightness of touch, a deft imagining of future dread scenarios, where there might be placed a small bead of hope somewhere in the overwhelming detritus.
With their mix of ordinary and outlandish imagery these poems offer insights into our endemic use of a substance whose everydayness and traditional reputation, as harmless, colourful, durable, is exposed as something far more sinister and alarming.
Below the acceptable, conventional use of plastic these poems reveal a deeper, more real – often surreal – exploration of the inherent dangers and damage it causes.
It’s fascinating to see poems that reveal what lies beneath the acceptable surface of what we use so unthinkingly, on a daily basis, the damage we often so unconsciously cause.’
— Greta Stoddart: award-winning poet, editor, and teacher for the Poetry School
Permanence - Lesley Curwen & Stephen Paul Wren
Lesley Curwen is a poet, sailor and swimmer who lives in sight of Plymouth Sound. She is an experienced broadcaster, a former BBC presenter and correspondent who travelled widely reporting on economics and global business. She has presented Money Box and Today Business on BBC Radio 4 and won many journalism awards for her documentaries and investigations. In 2021, she won the Medical Journalists’ Association award for a programme about rogue stem cell clinics.
These days she often writes about damage done to the ocean environment, and tries to use a poetry brain to interpret the scientific evidence of harm.
She has been nominated for Forward and Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. 'Rescue Lines' is published by Hedgehog Poetry Press and an eco-chapbook, 'Sticky with Miles' is published by Hybrid Dreich. Other poems found homes with Nine Arches, Smith Doorstop, 14 magazine, Bad Lilies, Nine Pens, Broken Sleep, Atrium, Iambapoet.com, Spelt, Broken Spine, Black Bough, The Alchemy Spoon, East Ridge Review and the Heimat Review.
She started collecting bakelite objects and other early plastics in the ‘90s, for their beauty and function, but has sold most of them, including 55 vintage wirelesses.
www.lesleycurwenpoet.com
Stephen Paul Wren received his PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Cambridge. His teaching and research career in chemistry and drug discovery has encompassed the University of Oxford, and five other universities, and many companies to date.
Stephen launched and developed the Molecules Unlimited poetry community. This innovative group explores the intersect of poetry and the chemical sciences and continues to grow on Facebook. He can also be found on Instagram/Threads @luke12poetry.
Stephen has written many books of poetry; Elementar (a collaboration with visual artist Laura Kerr) was published by Paper View Books in 2024; Formulations (co-written with Dr Miranda Lynn Barnes) was published by Small Press in 2022; and A Celestial Crown of Sonnets (co-written with Dr Sam Illingworth) was published by Penteract Press in 2021. His poem sequence A Runner's Lament was published by Ice Floe Press in March 2025. Blood Women was published by Parlyaree Press in November 2025. Turas Press will publish his book The Chemistry of Emotion (co-written with Fiona Perry) in 2026. Also, Stephen’s poems have been published in places like 14 magazine, Marble Broadsheet, Consilience, Green Ink Poetry, Tears in the Fence, Fragmented Voices, Obsessed with Pipework, and Dreich. The Tamarind literary journal published his essay written around the intersect of poetry and the chemical sciences.
Stephen has previously chaired an online SciPo meeting for the University of Oxford and TORCH on the theme of the Science of the Seas. He has spoken at two Slade Institute of Art events. The themes for these meetings were the Chemistry of Memory and the Chemistry of Colour.
www.stephenpaulwren.wixsite.com/luke12poetry