In what has been a difficult year for us all, how refreshing to read a collection as life-affirming and positive as Vic Pickup’s debut pamphlet, ‘Lost & Found’ (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020).  Though her poems acknowledge life’s difficulties, they draw attention to the things we might take for granted,  inviting the reader to see them afresh and to value them.

‘What it meant for the women’ is typical of the collection. Whilst many poems about Lockdown by other poets have focussed on the negatives of this imposed isolation, Pickup values the opportunity to slow down, to take a break a break from oppressive routines and to re-evaluate. The poem ends with the women she describes ‘stood outside in the world’ and listening ‘for what seemed/like the first time’, noticing and able to take delight in the world around them.

This is very much what Pickup herself does in…