I spent the summer of 2023 in a palace. This isn’t fantasy: I was lucky to be selected for a UNESCO Cities of Literature residency in Kraków, where I would work on ‘Replaying the Tape’ – a new, experimental work about chance and evolution – and I was staying in Villa Decius. Working with palaeontologist Dr Frankie Dunn (based at the University of Oxford) and, in our first collaboration, my sister, the composer-percussionist Dr Jane Boxall, our project considered Stephen J Gould’s thought: ‘Replay the tape a million times… and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.’ I was writing poems about marvellous creatures mostly from the Ediacaran (pre-Cambrian) period, and about the serendipity of the preservation and discovery of their trace-fossils, basing my poems on Frankie’s research (and other research she pointed me towards). I needed time to read widely, to work out the line between material and the poem, and to leave plenty of space for Jane’s music: she would compose both an electronic tape track and a score for live performance on marimba, glockenspiel, wineglasses, and other, less expected instruments (including rocks).

I have technicolour memories of that Kraków summer. It was a temptingly glorious one, and I had to make a deal with myself: I’d spend the stunning mornings on the terrace, reading and writing, and then I’d allow myself the broiling, breezeless afternoons (when it was too hot to think anyway) out exploring. I bought a second-hand bike early on, and in the bike-shop, by chance, made a lovely friend – a microbiology PhD student who would become my cheerful companion and unofficial Kraków guide over those sunny weeks.

Looking back over that summer, my brightest memories are of favourite bookshops (Massolit: a haven of cool and shady corners), cafes (Chimera: a gorgeous leaf-and-glass canteen in the Old Town, always with a table hidden away somewhere upstairs), cinema festivals and jazz festivals and folk festivals, museums and riverside cycles and too many pierogi and cheesecakes to mention… But I also, it turns out, wrote a lot. Alongside finalising ‘Replaying the Tape’ (which had its first performance in New York in November 2023), I wrote a verse novel for children: Elsa and the Shadow Theatre. The best thing is I didn’t even realise how much work I was doing. Time expanded, somehow.

There’s a poem in ‘Replaying the Tape’ called ‘The Molecular Clock’, which I strongly recall writing on that sunny morning terrace. It’s a technique, or metaphor, some palaeontologists use to describe the moment in an evolutionary process where two species diverged from each other, and I couldn’t resist using the term as a way to describe the distances between us as individuals: the growing spaces in which we live.

Listen to the track

We’re slipping further every minute.

Not just from the moment

you stood up in our habitual café,

abandoning your half-drunk coffee

(and molecules of its aroma

dispersed awkwardly in the air).

Deeper than that: more like the way we swap our

cells each seven years. But more so, more so.

This is hard to understand; I’m often wrong, I know.

What I mean to say: think of what’s between

us yawning, unabridged – widening to the point

that they might, in future, be able to pin down

exactly where and how and why it was we split.

How sad that is. How sad! And can’t be fixed.

Except, perhaps, this way: come back, and stick –

turn back, turn back the clock, the tick–tock–tick.

But – performing this piece in Kraków in the Miłosz Festival in 2025, my microbiologist friend in the front row; other friends and strangers in the audience on a hot, still evening – it’s not dislocation I hear in those widening gaps, but its opposite: it’s connection; the joyful bridging of gaps.

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Penny Boxall 

Penny Boxall is a poet and children’s writer who has worked in various UK museums. She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award with her debut collection, Ship of the Line. Her fourth poetry book, The Curiosities, about the materiality of memory, is out in June 2024. She is writer-in-residence at Wytham Woods, University of Oxford, and was Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford. She has held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships at the Universities of York and Cambridge, and is an RLF Bridge Fellow. She collaborated with Maarja Pärtna (Tartu) and Liis Ring (Gothenburg) on ‘Once was Mire. Siin Oli Soo‘, an installation and soundscape for Tartu Capital of Culture 2024. She’s writing poems for hiking cabins along the Nordlandsruta, Norway, for Bodø Capital of Culture. She’s held further residencies at Kraków UNESCO City of Literature, Hawthornden Castle, Château de Lavigny, Cove Park and Gladstone’s Library. Her debut novel for children is forthcoming in 2025.