I first started writing what might loosely be called poetry after my mother died following a brief struggle with ovarian cancer when I was twenty-six and she was sixty-three. Poetry became a way for me of trying to come to terms with loss. I saw it as crystallising experience, imposing pattern and form on flux and change, and enabling me to feel – for the briefest moment – as if I could stand outside time.
Nature has always been central to my life, and my poetry – and that I owe to my father. He was a keen naturalist and particularly interested in butterflies. When I was a child we used to go walking together and while he looked for butterflies I would be trying to identify wild flowers. We didn’t feel the need to talk much: he was never particularly good at that anyway; it was just our way of being together.
My poems are hard won. Unlike many other poets I know, I write very slowly and there have been long gaps during which I have written little, often no more than the strangled beginnings of a poem. My first collection, Birth of the Owl Butterflies, published in 1997, was the product of around ten years’ work, and it has taken me the eighteen years that have passed since then to gather sufficient “good” material for a new submission. Not that there aren’t folders and folders of abandoned drafts and jottings. There are. And sometimes I delve back into this old work in an attempt to reinvigorate an earlier impulse. Sometimes the attempt is successful; at others it can feel as if I’m using up the last bit of pastry dough to make a shapeless blob …
While I was still living in London, I was lucky enough to attend workshops with some really inspiring teachers – Michael Donaghy and Julia Casterton at the City Lit and later Christopher Reid, Maurice Riordan and Matthew Sweeney at Morley College – and to make some good poetry friends who have gone on to be widely published, among them Nadine Brummer, Angela Kirby and Beatrice Garland.
Moving to Bath with my then five-year-old son in 2002, I imagined for no good reason that there were no poets in Bath, and maybe only a handful in Bristol. I continued to chip away at the poetry quietly – and slowly – in my little ivory tower, while working as a freelance French translator for Thames & Hudson. Then one day a new friend invited me to Dawn Gorman’s “Words and Ears” at Bradford-on-Avon – a combination of invited guest reader and open mike session.
Since that time I have become increasingly involved in a poetry scene I wasn’t even aware existed. Alongside “Words and Ears” and fairly frequent poetry readings at Toppings bookshop, I attend a monthly workshop run by Rosie Jackson and a poetry reading group, and have signed up for a number of Sue Boyle’s writing days organised under the umbrella of the Bath Poetry Café. Meanwhile the writing has picked up a bit of speed…
The poems I am writing continue to attempt a kind of balancing act between life and death, light and dark – both real and metaphorical – and try to make some kind of sense out of the beauty and joy of life – nature and relationships – in the face of constant flux and loss.
My father died a number of years ago, but when I’m out in the country now, I often feel as if I’m still communicating with him. I feel I want to show him the things I see, or record them for him because he’s not there to see them. We were both obsessed with identifying and naming natural things. It felt like a way of holding on to beauty – and the names and the knowledge feel now like a way of holding on to my father’s memory. As do the poems. Not long before he died, my father asked me rather shyly if “all those poems about butterflies” were really about him. The answer, of course, was yes.
