Today I welcome fellow Swansea University alumnus, Ellie Rees, to reflect upon a poem from her fabulous new collection Ticking (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2022).

The poems contained in Ticking were written in response to separate stimuli; what linked them in my imagination as I wrote was my desire to capture the spirit of a place, an attempt at a deep mapping through the medium of verse.

The poems in Ticking deep map a beautiful but apparently empty strip of the South Wales coastline that looks across the Bristol Channel to Exmoor. The collection could be classed as Nature Writing, though the term, deep mapping is a more accurate description of the eclectic subject matter: there are ghosts, suicides and ruins as well as dung spiders, stone masons and insect apprehension. Many of the poems focus on the history and geography, archaeology and wild life of a two-mile stretch of…