Remarkable Coincidences

Len Pennie became famous during the Covid pandemic, posting on social media about Scots words and reading her own ‘poyums’. She now has more than 700,000 followers on TikTok and in excess of 500,000 on Instagram.

You might have seen those words before. They’re not mine: they are the opening sentences to Graeme Richardson’s recent Sunday Times review of Pennie’s second collection (in two years), Poyums Annaw, published by Canongate in September. I probably could have passed them off as my own, though: they’re not remarkable, but constitute a simple establishing shot. What is remarkable, however – or, rather, the first and yet least remarkable thing about this story – is the extent to which Richardson buries the hatchet into the work. Hardly any reviewers seem to do that anymore, under any circumstances. Pennie’s poetry is, he writes, ‘execrable’, and he backs this up with a smattering of quotations.

I do not own Poyums Annaw (though a sample can be read for free online), know little about its contents, and this is not a review, so I’ll just give a flavour of her style, in a passage quoted by Richardson:

We’re still here burying our heads in the sand
While they bury their kids [sic] severed heads with a hand
Holding white flags still stained with their tears blood and sweat […].

Okay, this feels a bit like a death march blasted from a kazoo – but some people really like Pennie’s poems, it seems, and good for them, and good for her. The Sunday Times chose a line from the review for its title: ‘Scotland’s worst poet since William McGonagall’, above a serious-looking mugshot of the author. Meanies.

PN Review doesn’t seem like the place to discuss Pennie’s sort of rhyming at length, and in any case I’d rather drink a pint of lead. I feel that way about a lot of books, so do you, and that is fine, as is saying so. However, the inherent quality of her work is not my subject, or at least no more than is necessary to make the points I wish to make. Richardson’s review also identified some (not all) of the similarities between one of Pennie’s poems and the poem ‘Laika’ by the relatively unknown and talented poet Sarah Doyle, which was a runner-up in the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize in 2019 and was shared widely online at the time. Laika, of course, was the dog sent by the Soviet Union on a one-way trip into orbit in 1957, where she died as planned, there being no way to bring her back. Doyle’s poem is outstanding (more on that below), and it is on her website, sarahdoyle.co.uk. But I’ll make things easy for you:

Laika
by Sarah Doyle
Moscow street-mutt, unloved
stray. Eleven pounds of bone,
of pelt, of tail. Who can weigh
the heart of dog? What dials
or instruments may measure
loyalty; the desire, hard-wired,
to obey? Dogs have no gods,
know only to worship the hand
that feeds. There is no canine
word for pray. Brave little
cosmonaut, faithful to a fault;
caught and collared, Earth no
more than a distant ball with
which you cannot play. How
the words that sent you on
your way crackle through
the ragged dishes of your ears,
a comet’s tail of breaking
syllables that even now leave
their trail: Laika, in. Laika, lay.
Good girl, Laika. Wait. Stay.

The last third of Richardson’s review of Pennie lays aside the hatchet, and looks straight into the lens. He has something serious to point out:

A poem that stands out in Poyums Annaw is ‘Good Girl’, about […] Laika. For once, ‘I’ isn’t Pennie: ‘the world’s just a ball that I haven’t yet caught’. Touchingly, it ends with ‘the last words I heard my new science friends say: / good girl, Laika; sit, Laika; now, Laika, stay’.

He then quotes from Doyle’s poem, and notes what he calls ‘a remarkable coincidence’. He might’ve written ‘remarkable cluster of striking coincidences in two short poems with the same conceit and subject’. In any case, readers can make their own minds up, and that is all Richardson encourages us to do.

One might have expected a speedy apology and act of atonement from Canongate and Pennie – perhaps a contrite admission or profession of innocent naïveté from the author, an errata slip with an acknowledgement in the then-still-unpublished book, or whatever else publishers would normally do in this invidious but surely not irrecoverable  situation. The consequences for the author might not have been great, but well over a million followers on social media and fame for things other than poetry is probably some compensation, and worse examples of apparent borrowing have not previously destroyed many famous people’s careers within and without poetry. Instead, Canongate lodged a legal complaint against the Sunday Times, and publicly denied any similarities between the poems, stating that they are ‘completely different in […] content’. That’s right: having found a bit of egg on its face, Canongate decided to headbutt an omelette rather than get out a hanky. As Naush Sabah, the editor of the magazine Poetry Birmingham, wrote on X:

I will never commission a review of a Canongate poet. Big newspapers can deal with legal threats, little mags don’t have the money, energy, or woman power for that. Why would we bother giving the privilege of print space & critical attention to a publisher that responds with legal threats when upset by the opinions of a reviewer?

Quite.

To date (I write this on 26 September 2025, five days after the review appeared), Pennie has made no public comment, perhaps at the encouragement of her publisher. Others have rushed to her defence, though, and often in the most perplexingly vituperative terms. The Lord moves in mysterious ways, and so do the be-kind people of Internetland. Within a day or two, commentators on social media, where people go to have rational debates in a civilised manner, were citing Richardson’s review as evidence that he has sex with children and dogs, contemplating telling his employer he’s a bigot, hoping he might shit himself to death, accusing him of having a tiny penis, suspecting Pennie had previously rebuked him for sexualising her, calling him a misogynist and a domestic abuse apologist, and sometimes even commenting on the review. A few witnesses for the defence have relatively high profiles, such as Emma Mitchell, who focused squarely on Richardson’s mockery, accusing him of having ‘caused harm’ and suggesting he needs ‘a good deal of therapy’. That is one of least insensible attacks he has faced. Lemn Sissay, whose endorsements appear on the front covers of both of Pennie’s collections (‘A poet who redefines what poetry is and who it is for’), went a little further: he referred to the review as a ‘farticle’, diagnosed Richardson as ‘cowardly’ for some reason, then suggested he was ‘dragging her by the hair’ and implied a ‘telling and nasty ambiguity’ in the review’s (straightforward) disavowal of domestic abusers. Sarah Wendell, from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (look it up), accused him of ‘misogynist petty jealousy’ and claimed that what he had written ‘doesn’t seem like a review to me’, but she then ignored the part of it that isn’t.

A pattern had emerged very quickly. I was among the several people who replied to Sissay, the dissenter with the highest profile and someone I thought might be reasonable, to say I understood some of his feelings about the first two thirds of the review, but would like to know whether he had any comment to make about its final third – the revelation of a ‘remarkable coincidence’ – and the implications of that remarkable coincidence for less well known poets such as Sarah Doyle. I wouldn’t like to accuse him of cowardice, but he made no reply. Perhaps he didn’t notice my question, though only a few other people commented so it wasn’t lost like the proverbial needle in the haystack. It seemed to me that several people had mobilised, or perhaps in some cases had been mobilised by someone or something, to attack Richardson’s admittedly mocking assessment of the book, but that they had looked the other way, like shoppers passing the homeless, when it came to the bit with grave implications. Richardson was the straw man who had to be burned, without reference to any implication of impropriety on Pennie’s part, so that that implication might be overlooked more readily by others. Perhaps.

Doyle does not yet have a full-length collection, much less the backing of a sizeable publisher, monetised social media channels, and regular dates with the national broadcaster. Her reach is small, but her voice is strong, and her ‘Laika’ is a controlled and moving little machine of words, full of striking images and phrases. Let’s focus on one that caught Richardson’s eye for its similarity to a line in Pennie’s poem:

Earth no
more than a distant ball with
which you cannot play

What an unusual perspective! It doesn’t quite work, if we decide to be too literal about it: Laika would have been at an altitude of no more than about a thousand miles at the farthest extent of her elliptical orbit, at which distance Earth would’ve looked a bit like a blue-green basketball a nanosecond before it hits you in the face. But let’s not worry about that: the image reminds us that Laika is still an innocent doggie, without encouraging us to hum ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window.’ One imagines a poet of this deftness weighing up the pros and cons of the image that had come to her in the ineffable way images do, and opting to keep it. It works, or works enough, considering its original and uncanny payoff.

Nose to tail, Doyle’s poem is a near-perfect example of economical writing in which sentiment is not stifled by sentimentality. It moves us, in part, because our minds must move to meet it halfway. It also leaves us to imagine the natural, irrevocable conclusion to the dog’s unwitting spaceflight. Doyle’s Laika is still floating into space, apparently fully conscious, when her poem ends, implicitly early in the mission: the dog’s fate is known to us, but not to the poem. That certainly is different to what Pennie does: her Laika – who tells us her own story – looks at Earth with playful relish: it is ‘a ball that I haven’t yet caught’, which is not quite the same, i.e. is artless and imperceptive, compared to ‘a ball with which [a dog] cannot play’. The image may not have been stolen consciously – decide for yourself – but if it has, it appears to have been misunderstood, not purposefully adapted. Pennie’s Laika then keeps on keeping on, in the same happy vein, to the sweet end of her conscious life: ‘I’m not lonely, not sad and not scared’, Laika tells us, before lapsing ‘into sweet dreams’ from which she won’t wake. Please try to imagine a dog(gie) reacting like this in zero gravity as Sputnik 2’s thermal control system overheats.

What are the other similarities between the two poems? Richardson highlights the imagined words of the handlers. These both come in the same place in their respective poems, and both poems’ last lines begin and end with the same words, Pennie’s phrasing simply being padded out to fill her jocularly tum-ti-tumming metre. There are other commonalities: slight in themselves, but multiple, incrementally hinting at unacknowledged tribute, and simultaneously appearing haplessly and unintentionally to desecrate. Doyle, with the economy and ear for connotation only available to a talented writer, tells us Laika is small by focusing on her payload, ‘eleven pounds of bone, / of pelt, of tail’; Pennie opts for ‘small pup’, which is a tautology one might expect a poet to notice. Both poems focus on a dog’s loyalty, respect for human commands, and abandonment, and gain emotional power from dramatic irony, which seemed unique to me, in this specific context, when I read Doyle’s poem in 2019; but only Pennie’s poem clumsily and comically undermines that conceit by turning Laika into Spot the Dog in a commercial for Dignitas.

‘Good Girl’ is an enjoyable poem, I’ll give it that – unless you’re Sarah Doyle, I suspect. ‘My poyums were written to be punctuated with laughter and tears’, writes Pennie in her book’s introduction (freely available online), and in the case of this poem I am confident it has done both. I am not her audience, wish her well, and only point out the above failings and ‘remarkable coincidences’ because the connotations of the establishment response seem to matter quite a lot. If this sort of ‘remarkable coincidence’ can land like a turd on Sarah Doyle’s mat, and there are to be no consequences, then it can land on the mat of any poet who comes to the notice of a TikTok poet with well over a million followers across social media platforms, a snazzy book deal with a press that somehow can’t see the problem, and a tour to promote.

Am I being mean? Maybe a bit in places, but I think it is meaner to overlook how Doyle might feel, as the cavalry, the publisher, and apparently the poet under scrutiny have done. I also think literary criticism has a function, and that a book of poems published by Canongate is fair game. If a publisher wants punters to spend c.£15 on a book, critics have a right to tell readers it isn’t worth the entrance fee. Other critics are welcome to disagree with me, or with you, without being called nonces, or domestic abusers, or having their livelihoods threatened. Would I have agreed to review Pennie’s book? No: I wouldn’t have seen the point, life being rather too short no matter how long it is. But that means I could not possibly have noticed those coincidences. I’m therefore very glad for the final third of Graeme Richardson’s piece, even if I think the opening two thirds of it is a bit pointless, and I think you should be grateful too.

Will I now also be accused of bestiality and paedophilia by nice righteous internet-addicted loons, or of misogyny and excusing domestic abuse by big-named defenders of big names and big publishers? I’ll certainly be accused of snobbery and jealousy, but that’s okay: I wrote a book about Wendy Cope, perhaps the most popular British poet of the past half century, so the evidence can stand for itself. Will someone threaten to tell my employer I am whatever they want to say I am? Have at it. I’ve faced all that sort of stuff before, it didn’t bother me much then, and it wouldn’t bother me at all now. I didn’t write this because I enjoy people coming at me with metaphorical daggers, and it’s hardly likely to win me many friends in high places.

I’ll sign off with two lines from Pennie, about her dad:

He won’t centre himself, or his ego, his pride;
He won’t tell me to keep my complaints trapped inside.

Real or imagined, he sounds like a good person with a backbone, and the poem implies the author cares about such things.