Published by Poetry Space, 2026
ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 1909404624
ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-1909404625

Description

Myra Schneider’s 17th collection, The Disappearing, explores the fragility of our world and the pleasures that make it precious. Moving from suburban gardens to the Amazon, from childhood memories to the worlds opened up by paintings, these vivid poems bring anxieties about climate change into conversation with the intimate experiences of ageing, family and friendship.

Colour, warmth and flashes of humour run through the collection, while art and imagination offer freedom beyond everyday limitations. Attentive to what we risk losing, Myra celebrates the resilience of nature, the kindness of others and our enduring capacity for wonder.

Reviews

I have just received your new book this morning. It looks beautiful with such inviting colours.  I have been able to dip into it and read a few of your wonderful poems; they are fabulous and cover the year we have been through up to now. I will enjoy reading them more deeply and wish you all the best in promoting the book. I look forward to reading it more thoroughly as it only arrived approximately twenty minutes ago, but it drew me in immediately. ~ Carolyn O’Connell

Excerpt

THE DISAPPEARING

How beguiling the lawn is this summer morning:
it’s turned into a buttercup meadow and as I watch
an orange-tip butterfly fluttering across it,

the field across the road from my childhood house
slips into my mind – it seems like a dream now.
The flowers that grew there are in bloom here:

daisies, clovers, vetch and speedwell with inimitable
blue petals. In those distant days we believed
we were heroes who stamped out fires in stubbled fields.

I open the back door and go outside, eager to take
a look at the fig sapling I planted four years ago –
it’s put on a spurt of growth as if at last it intends

to become a tree. Then I savour the bank of freckled
white parsley at the foot of the garden and the cup-
sized blooms on the elderberry bush which almost hides

the rusty metal climbing frame. My child, now
a middle-aged man, used to sit at its top and empty
watering cans out onto flames leaping from forest fires

or foes attacking his fortress. Suddenly it strikes me
the grass is so overgrown neither mower nor scythe
could possibly cut it and bramble canes have sprung up –

they are suffocating the peony bushes. Worse,
rubbery green umbrella fronds have planted themselves
among the fruit trees, huge clumps of fern have taken over

the lawn and I’m surrounded by colossal trees.
It’s intensely hot. I struggle to break my way through
the undergrowth to the house but it’s disappeared.

THINK PINK

Delighted with the new shoes which fit my feet
so neatly, I tie their pink laces, hide the old
down-at-heel pair in a drawer and with a bounce
in my step, although I’m elderly and out of date,
stroll along our suburban street pretending
I’m walking down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand.
Suddenly it’s 1957, I’m the editor of Quality, a leading
fashion journal and I’ve just hit on the theme
for the spring edition. To celebrate, I start singing
and dancing Think Pink on the office floor.
Seconds later I discover I’m Audrey Hepburn
and though dowdily dressed in black and grey
I’m waltzing in a dark room with photographer
Fred Astaire who’s warbling: I love your funny face.
In the blink of an eye we’re arriving in Paris
where I’m to be the model in a classy show.
Behind me is the Eiffel Tower and I’m sauntering
down the Champs Elysées stopping often to pose
for Fred to take photos. After a dreadful fiasco
and several misunderstandings we end up in a park
pledging love forever to one another. Then we dance
across a bridge beside a stream, in which two
snow-white swans are swimming, into paradise.

Myra Schneider

Walking down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand: Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera: Patience.
The other references in the poem are to the film Funny Face (1957)