Released 30th June, 2025 // 360 pages // 978-1-917617-10-9 // RRP: £18.99 / $25.99 / €22.99
 
Martin Hayes’ A Few More Sunrises Yet Before It Ends gathers together decades of sharp, unsparing poetry that documents the underpaid, overworked lives of Britain’s contemporary working class. Hayes’ verse moves through courier control rooms, dead-end shifts, bureaucratic absurdities, and private struggles, tracing how capitalism’s grinding pressures shape not just labour but identity, relationships, and the very sense of self. With biting humour, documentary precision, and a refusal of sentimentality, the collection offers a sustained reckoning with work, class, precarity, and survival in the twenty-first century. This is a voice that matters, and these are poems that demand to be reckoned with.
 
PRAISE for A Few More Sunrises Yet Before It Ends:
I'm reading Hayes for the first time again in this Selection, and my excitement is not that this is work “for me”, but that this is work that is not “for them”. This poetry doesn't contort itself into unnatural shapes in order to appeal to an implied middle-class audience or their idea of what constitutes “good” prosody. Which is far from saying the work is not consciously crafted, or that it lacks lyric reach. If the poems in this long awaited Selected prove anything it is the numerous inventive and animated angles Hayes finds to approach his subject from.
 
And what is his subject? Work. And the body and brain of the worker, caught on the horns of late stage capitalism. I'm not talking about the symbols and shibboleths of working-class identity, of working-classness as a line of affect, but poems about the minutia of work; built from the abusive repetitions of work, of the anxiety and stress; its physical and temporal demands. These are poems about how we're used by the systems to which we are subject, but they also example how to use the off-cuts of energy and time we are left with: to write, to love, to witness to each other.
 
There's a lot of blether doing the rounds at the minute about “embodiment” in contemporary poetics, and quite a lot of the poetry produced under its banner is bloodless guff. No one's going to put on yoga pants and “om” their way through a Martin Hayes poem. His work remains a restless, relentless meditation on staying alive and alert by any means necessary. To spite the bastards and celebrate each other.
   — Fran Lock
 
What we get in this book is a real roar of anger, resignation, and fortitude from workers in everday jobs on the frontline of austerity Britain. It reminds me of Fred Voss or Geoff Hattersley; essential reading.
   — Andrew McMillan
 
What today passes for 'the working-class' is in need of no more 'laureates' than it ever was. Nevertheless, by falling so thoroughly for lies, the denigrated PRECARIATE it's allowed itself to become, has exactly that and a remarkable one. His name is Martin Hayes and his work is essential to the understanding of our twenty-first century selves.
   — Martin Malone
 
ABOUT Martin Hayes:
Martin Hayes was born in London and has lived in the Edgware Road/Church Street area of it all his life. He was schooled at Barrow Hill Primary School in St John’s Wood then went on to attend Quinton Kynaston Comprehensive in Swiss Cottage where nothing went quite as right as it should’ve and so was asked to leave at 15. He is married to a lady called Victoria who, miraculously, has remained married to him for over 35 years. Poetry is his only act of laying out his unrest.