Published 2021. Paperback, 150pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617391 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Shortlisted for Wales Poetry Book of the Year 2021

The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette tells the tale of the author's great-grandmother's cousin, Richard Parker, a cabin-boy on a yacht being sailed from Southampton to Sydney in 1884 for Jack Want a prominent New South Wales barrister and politician. The Mignonette foundered in the South Atlantic far from land, and after nineteen days with no sight of any other vessel to rescue them, and with all four in a terrible state, the captain and mate decided to murder and eat poor Richard. Days later the remaining sailors were rescued and returned to Falmouth to face justice. The original trial at Exeter Assize was moved to The Old Bailey due to huge public interest and the need to clarify the Empire’s maritime legal framework regarding what had been common practice.
The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette takes place in the West Country, at sea and in Australia. It explores power relationships, individual motives, survivor guilt and self-justification, and justice and divine retribution. Poetry heightens the tension and drives the narrative telling the personal and human story of one of the most important legal judgements in English Law—that necessity is not a defence for murder —and is still taught at universities the world over.

“As a story, this is a tremendous find – rattling good yarn, courtroom drama, murder story, test case in moral philosophy, cross-section through the class structures of its time… But what makes it extraordinary is the tour de force of language that brings it to life, shapeshifting accurately through all the registers from lyric concentration to documentary, with sea shanty and an almost operatic to and fro of voices on the way” —Philip Gross

“ The Sorry Tale is powerful, and in sections harrowing and beautiful. I loved the marine music of the piece, which runs almost all the way through, and which reminded me of Melville or Malcolm Lowry, and also the psychological, novelistic shrewdness; the bathetic commercial undercutting of Mary Dudley’s concerns for Tom, Jack Want’s playboy carelessness, the moving bond between Sarah and Richard, the handling of the trials, the Conradian / Australian Aboriginal counter-imperial contextualising, and much else. I could hear the piece singing to me as I read it, as though it was scored for music. It is a fascinating and brilliant work.” —John Goodby

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