A couple of weeks ago I put all the poems I’d been working towards for the new collection together – the good, the bad and the ugly. I scythed a few out, teased a couple of others in, and decided that, as a first draft, it was just about done. Then my dad died and I ended up writing a few poems about him, about loss, about the strangeness of death. They tie in well with the rest of the collection and feel like a good fit.

There is no one size fits all approach when you’re putting a collection together. Even to the same poet the process may change between collections. When I Think of My Body as a Horse took years to write. The poems in that collection were mainly natural, organic poems that were written in powerful emotional splurges, and then…