is a poet, songwriter, musician & freelance arts practitioner from Doncaster. He is a member of a number of community groups whose aims are to increase arts engagement in the Doncaster region and he delivers song writing and poetry writing workshops. He was the director of Doncaster Folk Festival for 5 years and a founder member of the Ted Hughes Project in Hughes’ childhood hometown of Mexborough. He is founder and MC of Well Spoken, a monthly poetry performance evening held at Doncaster Brewery, and a founder member of the South Yorkshire poetry collective Read 2 Write, a group mentored by Ian Parks. His first pamphlet, A Tale to Tell, was published by Glasshead Press in 2017, followed by When the Waters Rise, published by Calder Valley Poetry in 2019. His poems have appeared in Pennine Platform, Dream Catcher, Dreich, Setu Mag, The Don and Dearne Collected Poems Vol 1, Black Bough Poetry’s Christmas & Winter Anthology Vol 1, and Christmas & Winter Anthology Vol 2, the exhibition these poets, our kin / these poems, our stories in the Frenchgate Shopping Centre, Doncaster, The Northern Poetry Library’s collaborative online work Poem of the North, and the book Tom’s Territory by Terry Chipp. In 2017 Mick formed a songwriting partnership with the poet Ian Parks and received an Arts Council commission resulting in the album of songs and poems about their locality, Songs of Our Town. Mick has since released two further favourably reviewed solo albums, When My Ship Puts out to Sea and The Wheel Keeps on Turning. Find him at http://www.mickjenkinson.co.uk
The Interview
Q:1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in Iron Harvest?
There were a few key drivers for the order, but beyond that it evolved pretty organically, and was more to do with the indefinable feel of how it flowed as a reading experience.
Firstly, the opening and closing poems needed to be both strong, and at the same time to make some sort of statement. Although I’d no wish to create a themed collection, it’s undeniable that I write much that’s geographically rooted in some way, and more specifically, about my hometown. Opening with This River seemed quite natural as it’s a manifesto of sorts for my love of Doncaster and its landscapes, and readings have indicated that it connects with audiences very viscerally. At the other end of the book, Past Brodsworth is my most anthologised poem, it’s really been around the block and proved its worth! I see that as a sort of origin story for the town.
The second consideration was to give a flavour of the scope of the collection within the first few pages, so it was important that a variety of styles and subject matter were represented, but without it seeming disjointed.
Then, I specifically did not want the book to feel as if it was in themed sections, so other than a couple of instances where I thought a pair of poems belonged together, I was deliberate in interspersing poems that might be seen to have common subject matter.
There’s also a temptation to cluster the poems one regards as the strongest towards the front, and I did not want it to be like one of those vinyl LP’s where all the singles are on side one and no-one listens to side two! so balance throughout the collection was probably the strongest deciding factor for how it ended up.
Q:2. Why the title “Iron Harvest”?
All through the process of getting the material together for the collection, I’d used the working title This River, because I decided early on that would be the opening poem. But when it came to finalising the manuscript, there was a feeling that it was a bit too generic. I had a meeting with Ian Parks, who had really acted as de-facto editor and assisted me on every facet of the book’s production. Over a coffee and a scone at Doncaster Library we tossed around various options for a title that would be more impactful, and Iron Harvest just sort of emerged. As Ian states in his foreword, there’s a metaphor there for the poetic process of bringing to the surface what’s hidden. The icing on the cake was that the publishers, Cyberwit, came up with that beautiful cover image, which manages the difficult trick of being both enigmatic while also capturing the essence of what I was aiming at.
Q:3. How important is poetic form in this collection?
One essential element of convincing poetry, to me, is the matching of form to content, so in that respect I’d say it’s essential. I treat the formal forms of poetry as structures within which to arrange my thoughts, and I like that discipline of the framework being in place as a template or pattern. That said, a poem will usually begin more organically with an assembly of words, and at some point, it will either suggest a formal structure or it won’t. I have very rarely set out to write, for example, a sonnet or villanelle outside a workshop environment, but it gives me a sense of satisfaction when one materialises.
Q:4. How important is nature in your writing?
I suppose a cursory flick through Iron Harvest would answer that nature is central to my subject matter, just as it is fundamental to my view of the world. One of the reasons I write at all is to explore and discover what spirituality means to me, and the natural world offers most to me to make sense of that. I’ve always been an urban dweller, but easy and regular access to countryside is essential to the way I live and it’s from those environments that my poetry seems to arise most frequently. That’s not deliberate, just the most forceful root of inspiration.
Q:5. One poetic form occurs more often in this collection. What attracts you to the villanelle?
I’m not a self-analytical poet, so it’s not easy for me to give a pat answer. A couple of the first poems that made an impression on me when I was young, Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night and Auden’s If I Could Tell You, were villanelles, and sometimes those early influences can be the most potent ones. I think there is an elegance both in the way a villanelle looks on the page and the circular nature of its repeating structure. We often start with a significant phrase that becomes the key to a poem, and the villanelle puts that phrase centre stage. The structure dictates that you have a limited and finite number of stanzas and lines to make sense of what you want to say, and an obligation to resolve it in some fashion. I find that discipline very rewarding.
Q:6. How has Edward Thomas influenced your poetry?
There are several aspects of Thomas’s poetry that I take as touchstones for how I would like to be able to write. In no particular order, his insistence on brevity and economy, the crispness of his language, his use of nature both in literal descriptions and as a metaphoric tool, and his love of strict poetic form (allied to the fact that he often ‘invents’ forms) and how perfectly they reflect his subject matter.
Q:7. Once they have read your book what do you wish the reader to leave with?
All the things we hope to get from good art, I suppose. I want to present a view of the world that is personal and universal, and hope people can relate and respond to it emotionally. I want people to me moved, interested, challenged, entertained. Whatever they leave with, I would wish that people consider it to have been a worthwhile experience.
New collection of poetry for 2025 Iron Harvest available from amzn.eu/d/2J5Xkhm
it’s all come down to this: a retrospective (selected poems & writings [1999-2024])
Paul Robert Mullen
Q:1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in your book?
Because this is collecting poems from a vast expanse of time (25 years), I felt that the only way to organise them was chronologically. It was a massive undertaking initially to find, organise, reread and rediscover everything. Actually, it’s made me very conscious about how I do this moving forward with new work. I reckon I’ve managed to find 95% of what I wanted to find. Unfortunately some work has been lost. That’s just the way it is – I can’t let it get me down. I’ve had poems and stories published since the age of 16, and some of those magazines, e-zines, journals and anthologies are now defunct, and with others I’ve lost hard copies down the years. Things are so different these days with everything being digital – we forget how the world was operated by paper!
The order of these poems is by collection … from the very beginning with ‘Issues, Tissues & The Senseless Comic’ right through to brand new work that I felt needed to be included.
There are poems from all of my published collections:
curse this blue raincoat (2017)
testimony (2018)
35 (2018)
disintegration (2020)
Belisama (2021)
There is also an array of stuff from unpublished collections. It’s a career spanning document, I guess. I felt that presenting them chronologically would demonstrate my development as a writer, my moods and interests at those periods in time, the fluctuations with style, and some sort of journey defined by what I was doing with my work during a particular era, or chapter of my life.
Q:2. How do you think your poetry has changed over time?
I think I’ve learnt how to craft the line better. Narrative poetry, for me, is all about saying as much as possible with as little as possible. I think down the years I’ve learnt to edit better – the initial inspiration should be spilt on the page and then left for a while. Then it’s a case of revisiting what you’ve written and being pretty brutal with what is needed and what isn’t. Sometimes I can write a two page poem but realise I can actually say the same thing just as effectively with eight lines. I think I’ve gotten better at that, which has happened by process of pure practice and experience.
I also think my subject matter has changed over time. I’m an observational poet; I love to get out there in the thick of it and watch people. Observe what’s going on. Try to turn real life into cinematic snippets that work as poetry. That has meant that as I’ve got older and developed my skills as a poet I’ve started to move away from just introspection, and start to actually write about places and situations and people and everyday life.
I’ve read widely down the years too, and I think that informs your subconscious. It means you learn that not everything you write has to be directly linked to your emotions. I’m pretty certain that has made my work more diverse and, hopefully, more interesting.
Q:2.1. What do you mean by “cinematic snippets”?
Well, I think observational poetry is about capturing moments in time as well as feelings and emotions. I like to think of some of my work as movie scenes – just very short snippets of something that is really happening. This stems from an obsession with the present, and how people and situations are shaped by everything going on around us.
I love to sit in the shady corner of a pub or coffee house and observe what’s happening. The high flyer on business calls, the relationship break-up, the first date, the alcohol infused argument, the flirts doing the rounds, the loner in the shadows, the old widow waiting for death in the company of whiskey. Everyone has a story, and sometimes I like to borrow them – this is how real life becomes cinematic.
Q:2.1.1. Why do you have an “obsession with the present”?
I think most artists have an obsession with the present – the time that we are living in is all we’ve got. We can’t step back into the past, and we don’t know what’s to come in the future. What we are currently living inevitably impacts the art – or our art of the time, whether that be the political climate, fashion, music, technology, social trends … everything helps create the “cinema” of real life that I’ve spoken about previously. The present is reflected in everything we do and the way we think.
I’m really interested in “now” because, I guess, subconsciously I’m fascinated by change. I’m also keen to see how people actually live in the present. People are living very differently these days even to, say, ten years ago. You don’t see people reading books anymore. It’s unusual to see someone smoking. The pubs are empty in the daytime now. There is fear on the streets – terrorism, crime, poverty, uncertainty. The world has become a parody of itself, what with Trump and our own governmental debacle, living life through a phone screen, people making millions as “influencers”, etc. I don’t mean this to be a nihilistic commentary … more so that the world RIGHT NOW is super twisted and therefore super fascinating.
Q:2.1.1.1 How does this fascination with “change” include history?
History is irreplaceable, but it’s done. The good people amongst us try to learn from history and avoid making the same mistakes. There seems to be a mission these days to delete history, which I find troubling. Learning from history is paramount, not pretending it didn’t happen, or cancelling people because of things they did or said at a time that is no longer familiar to us. The world in which we live right now is proof that negative history does, unfortunately, repeat itself. I’m aware of history in all its forms, but I try not to dwell on it.
Change is inevitable. Change needs history otherwise there is no such thing … but I guess my fascination with change stems from possibility. Not all change is positive, but it provides something to write about. I object to some of the technological changes that have stolen from our social and moral compass, but it provides great content to write about. Where do you draw the line? Who knows. Just write about it instead!
Q:3. How important is nature in your poetry?
Nature is important to every artist in some way, shape or form. I think it’s on the conscience of most people actually if you think about nature in terms of the environment. Being out in nature can be very inspiring, and has often led to me writing poems. I’ve been very lucky too; I’ve seen all sorts of terrains and places throughout my travels. Spectacular mountains, lush beaches, rainforests that spark the senses, desert plains, magnificent rivers, cherry blossom in Japan, lush greenery and meadows, and sun-soaked paradise islands. I’ve been really lucky to travel so far and wide. Over 50 countries, in fact. They all conjure a reaction in some way, and provoke a creative response.
Nature is full of symbolism and metaphor too. The idea of purity, escape, spirituality, savagery … I could go on. Nature is beyond explanation and unlimited in terms of creative freedom. Whilst it’s probably not one of my primary motives for writing, it’s certainly an influential interest.
Q:4. The urban environment seems essential to your poetry, too?
Yes, for sure. I’m kind of obsessed with urban life. I love cities, and love to escape them too. It’s a bittersweet relationship. There’s something about a thriving city that really turns me on. The noise, the neon lights, the music, the excitement. I’ve been a barfly over the years too. It’s no secret that I love a drink. It’s where real life happens, and whilst there’s no substitute for the delights of a country pub, a rocking city bar or nightclub is a place that is full of fascination for me. Cities are pure filth and glory.
Cities are so different too … London, Liverpool, Belfast, Dublin, Berlin, Paris, Prague, New York, Beijing, Tokyo, Madrid, Jakarta, Manila. I mean, different planets really. They each have their own smells, sounds, faces, styles, architecture, vibe. The “urban” is very much an innate part of my thinking in both a positive and negative way.
Q:4.1. How important is the idea of the other, the alien to your writing?
I guess “the other” is a key theme in my writing. I’m not always writing from my own perspective – I love to write from the perspective of others, and not always savoury characters. My poems are littered with all the sorts of people that make an impression on an observational poet; down and outs, drunks, hopeless romantics, sociopaths, lovers and lunatics … that’s as well as the postman, the barmaid, the teacher, the mother and the dog. I think poetry works on a spectrum, if indeed your poems focus on people and characters. Aliens and outsiders are vital in validating your main characters and alter-egos. An Alien identifies where the compass belongs.
Q:5. What is the significance of the quote from Roxy Music’s “Dance Away” lyrics at the beginning of your book?
The lyrics from Roxy Music’s “Dance Away” are lyrics that really resonated with me as soon as I heard them. I think they are genius in many ways – not only a true testament to the songwriting of Bryan Ferry, but also a validation that words are extremely powerful when used with deep thought. Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell were pioneers of this type of lyric, which are poetic at the core. Ferry definitely captured it here.
The notion that “loneliness is a crowded room” is oxymoronic; but it sums up how many of us feel a lot of the time. We could be in a class at school, at a party, in a bar, in an airport … places packed full of people, and yet, regardless, we still feel lonely. Lots of people doesn’t automatically result in acceptance or companionship. Also, this idea that the room is full of “open hearts, turned to stone, all together, all alone” is a brilliant play on words, and a fantastic exploration of the isolationist concept that Ferry is describing.
I used it because I loved it, essentially. It’s truly poetic and emphatic.
Q:6. Especially in poems towards the end of your book there are a lot of lists? What do you hope to achieve by using this form?
I like lists. They feel like momentos in a way that define a time or a place or a person. Lists can provide additional details that support or reinforce the narrative within a poem, or even give an insight into an author’s personality or state of mind. That’s certainly the case for me, especially when I’m revealing the types of musical artists I’m listening to, or films I’m watching, or books I’m reading, or places I’ve been. Lists help build an authentic profile of a writer, which can evoke emotions or feelings. It’s not a device that I’d be tempted to overuse, but it’s definitely a poetic device that has its place within my work.
Q:7. After they have read your book what do you hope the reader will leave with?
All I hope for from the reader after reading my book is a sense of fulfilment. Some sort of connection, or relatability, or appreciation for the words. I want them to feel like they’ve got something worthy in their hands – something that makes them smile, and think, and maybe even inspires them to write themselves.
But, also, saying that, these words belong to the reader now. It’s for them to deconstruct and wonder about now. I’m just so grateful to anyone who has taken a chance on my work and bought one. If my words connect and resonate with one soul, it’s all been worth it in the end. After everything is said, it’s all come down to this …
#thestarbeckorion #7 and final issue of 2024 launches on Christmas Day. Its featured artworker is the amazing photographer and poet @BerglundJerome Jerome William Berglund.
What’s Happening In 2025
25th Feb Bob Beagrie festschrift
25th April Showcasing Alan Parry
25th June Anthology
25th July Anthology
25th August Maggie Mackay festshrift
25th October Anthology
25th December #SoNotAdvent, #ANotNewYear
#thestarbeckorion final issue of 2024 #7 is themed #NotAdvent. Closing date 7th December. Featuring your poems/short stories/artworks about loss and missing. The opposite of advent. Email me your contributions. Here are the contribution details:
lives in Maryport, on the West Cumbrian coast, and works as a freelance editor. Her poetry has been widely anthologised and published in magazines such as Mslexia, Magma, London Grip and Shooter.In 2021 she came second in the Borderlines Poetry Competition and was longlisted for the Erbacce Press Poetry Competition. She has twice been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and she appears in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021 anthology (Black Spring Press). In 2021, she collaborated with Kerry Darbishire on their poetry pamphlet Glory Days (Hen Run).www.kellydavis.co.uk
The Interview
Q:1. When and why did you start writing poetry?
I always loved poems and rhymes as a child and I was lucky enough to have a father who read me Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur when I was very young. I know I started writing my own poetry in 1972, aged thirteen, because I still have the book in which I painstakingly wrote my first few poems in calligraphic script. Like many teenagers, I mainly used poetry as an outlet for difficult emotions. Expressing grief and anger in words, and particularly in poems, made me feel better – perhaps because it helped me understand my feelings and gain some distance from them.
Q:1.1. What was it about Malory’s poem that stayed with you?
I think the tragic love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. I was too young to understand it at the time but I somehow sensed the enormity of the betrayal.
Q:2. So you would say this action of your father introduced you to poetry
I think it was less about poetry at that stage and more about the beauty of Malory’s words and the power of the narrative. Many of my poems have a storytelling element so perhaps that early introduction to Malory’s epic somehow fed into my development as a poet. Q:3. How did you decide on the order of the poems in both of your books?
My first pamphlet, Glory Days (Hen Run, Grey Hen Press, 2021), was a ‘poetic conversation’ with Kerry Darbishire about the stages in a woman’s life, and our relationships with our charismatic mothers. It was relatively simple to arrange the poems, beginning with memories of our teenage years, followed by finding love, then the experience of motherhood, coming to terms with getting older, and thoughts about our own mothers aging. Finally, there were some poems about losing our mothers. Thankfully, my mum is still alive but Kerry wrote very movingly about the things her mother left behind – a house full of memories and the dried flowers she left in her diary.
Arranging the poems in The Lost Art of Ironing (Hedgehog Poetry Press) was much trickier. This newly published solo collection has several themes and deals with other women’s lives as well as my own. I always knew I wanted the book to open with ‘To My Hands’, which is really my life story in a single poem and I was originally going to follow it with other poems expanding on particular aspects of my life. However, I sent the draft manuscript to Brian Patten (a long-standing friend and one of my all-time favourite poets). He was kind enough to read it and he thought the poem about Emily Dickinson was one of the strongest and should appear near the front. Once I’d moved that one, I realised that it would be much better to start with other women’s lives and go back to the autobiographical ones later. This arrangement somehow opens the collection out, making it more resonant for a wider audience. In the later part of the book there are certain poems that had to follow each other – for instance, the ones about my Jewish family history. ‘Prove your identity’ hints at later events, mentioning the necklace owned by my great-grandmother which features in the next poem. It also refers to my grandfather leaving Lithuania ‘in time’. This statement is unpacked in the third poem in this little sequence, ‘Trying to Edit the Holocaust’. I wanted to end the book with my modern versions of five Shakespeare sonnets. I love the sonnet form – and the themes of time, mortality and digital technology run through the whole collection – so the book ends with a final rhyming couplet:
‘At last we know that love is what life’s for,
and life is short – so we love even more.’
Q:4. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?
I suppose the short answer is ‘very aware’. I studied English Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and gained a pretty good knowledge of ‘the canon’, starting with Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer and covering a range of Elizabethan, Restoration, Victorian and Georgian poets. I was there in the late seventies and the course was still very traditional then, ending with Yeats and Eliot. I had to go to another college to study the American poet Marianne Moore! My favourite women poets were Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and I loved the Metaphysical poets, particularly Donne, Marvell and Herbert. Outside university, I remember being electrified by seeing Ted Hughes read at a pub in Hampstead; and seeing the Liverpool poets (Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri) made me realise that poetry could break out of the rarefied realm of libraries and lecture halls – and speak to everyone. I love the idea of poets being in conversation with each other across the centuries, and ‘The Lost Art of Ironing’ includes poetic responses to Keats, Eliot, Anne Sexton and Shakespeare.
Q:4.1. What made Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Donne, Marvell and Herbert your favourites?
In my poem about Emily Dickinson, I explain why I love her poetry:
‘I’d ask her to tell me her secret,
how to distil 200 words into 20,
how to capture a truth
before it slipped away – ‘
It’s also her incredible precision and fearlessness, when writing about huge subjects. I think ‘I heard a fly buzz – when I died’ is one of the best poems ever written about the process of dying.
Sylvia Plath was also fearless and said things no woman poet had said before, smashing taboos and sometimes using shocking language and images, as in ‘Lady Lazarus’. But she could also be tender and lyrical, as in ‘Morning Song’.
With John Donne, I loved the way he used bizarre metaphors, like a pair of compasses or a fly, to talk about love. His brilliant intellect was always at the mercy of his emotions, which gave his poems a sense of tension and struggle. Andrew Marvell created a feast for the senses, in a poem like ‘The Garden’, and also used the power of argument brilliantly in ‘To His Coy Mistress’. George Herbert was the most overtly religious – but, again, his passion came through in poems like ‘Prayer’ and ‘The Collar’.
Q:4.1. What “electrified” you about Ted Hughes reading?
The reading was in a small upstairs room and I was sitting quite close to him, looking up at his craggy face and listening to his deep, powerful voice. He had a very strong presence. At one point he read a poem called ‘February 7th’, about delivering a dead lamb, and the visceral language just floored me. I was left shaking, feeling as if I’d been in front of a firing squad. It was a revelation – that poetry could have such an impact.
4.1.1. How is “the visceral” important in your own poetry?
I want to write poems that deal honestly with the messiness of life – the guts, as well as the head and the heart – so I’ve sometimes written about subjects like sex and menstruation, which used to be seen as inappropriate in more censorious times. I think poetry can make us more aware of our shared humanity. We all inhabit bodies, and experience the world through our physical senses. Poetry often has an impact on the reader through the shock of recognition.
Q:5. What is your daily writing routine?
I wish I had one! I still work from home as a freelance editor (https://www.kellydavis.co.uk/) and I help run the West Cumbria Refugee Support Network (https://wcrsn.org.uk/) so my poetry writing has to fit in when time allows. Occasionally I experience something that inspires a poem. If that happens I try to get a rough draft typed on my laptop straight away. Then I go back to edit it several times, at intervals. When I no longer feel the urge to make changes, I feel the poem is finished – and ready to share with others. I might road-test it at an open mic – and get feedback from poets I know and respect. I occasionally attend workshops and I have found the January Writing Hour (hosted by Kim Moore and Clare Shaw) a great source of inspiration.
Q:6. How does the natural world feature in your poetry?
I rarely write descriptive nature poems and I certainly wouldn’t call myself a nature poet. Most of my work focuses on human relationships but I’m also interested in the way human beings interact with the natural world. I grew up in London and my husband sometimes teases me about my ignorance of wild flowers, birds, and so on – hence the opening of my poem ‘Cutting Through the Fields’…
‘Today I surprised you / by recognising a yellowhammer’s call’.
In a poem from Glory Days, called ‘Walking in the Languedoc’, the autumnal landscape reflects my feelings as a post-menopausal woman. I liken the vines to ‘aged ballerinas in green tutus’, whose ‘grapes are long gone’. I’m not sure whether that’s personification or pathetic fallacy or both! But it’s my kind of nature poetry.
Q:7. How did you choose the titles for your books?
With ‘Glory Days’, I looked through the manuscript and noticed that my poem ‘Walking in the Languedoc’ ended with two particularly musical and evocative lines:
‘Their grapes are long gone
but the scent of their glory days remains.’
I loved the sound of ‘Glory Days’ and the phrase seemed to reflect our colourful, charismatic mothers, who are celebrated in several of the poems. I suggested to Kerry Darbishire that we should use it as a title for our pamphlet and she agreed. Neither of us realised that Bruce Springsteen had previously written a famous song called ‘Glory Days’! A male poet told me that title had already been ‘taken by the Boss’ but I don’t regret using it for our pamphlet.
For my solo collection, I knew ‘The Lost Art of Ironing’ was a key poem. It mentions women ‘creating order from heaps of chaos’ in the war years, and my mother-in-law using ironing to express her love for her children. As I worked on the book, I realised that my work as an editor featured in some of the poems and I felt that ironing could also be used as a metaphor for editing, in the sense of ‘smoothing’ something that is creased and crumpled. Then, by a stroke of luck, I found the perfect cover image – a painting by Edgar Degas called ‘Woman Ironing’. The title of the collection makes a lot of people smile, as many of us gave up ironing years ago, but it’s also quite poignant, as it makes one think of previous generations – and the losses as well as the gains.
Q:8. How important is poetic form in these collections?
I mainly write free verse, with stanza breaks that correspond to changes in the line of thought or mood or narrative, but I occasionally use a more traditional form, like a Petrarchan sonnet (‘That Summer’) in Glory Days or the five Shakespearean sonnets at the end of The Lost Art of Ironing. Readers may also spot a couple of prose poems – ‘Snapshot’, which describes a childhood memory, and ‘Meeting in Deep Time’, about editing my husband’s book on Lakeland geology. In the latter poem, the prose form seemed to suit the flowing lava and geological strata I was describing. My new collection also includes a specular (‘mirror’) poem, ‘White Gladioli’, where the second half of the poem reverses the order of the lines in the first half. This poem is about a memory of a tragic accident – and it’s a bit like a film unspooling and rewinding (a metaphor I used overtly in another poem, ‘9th September 1972’). In recent years, I’ve become more aware of the power of repetition, rhyme and a good line break. To sum up, the content of a poem (thought/emotion/narrative) always takes priority – but I think my best poems are the ones where form and content fit perfectly and reinforce each other.
Q:9. How do the writers you read when you were young influence your work today?
When I was young I read more fiction than poetry. I fell in love with the Narnia books and once spent quite a while in an old wardrobe with my best friend, trying to get to Lantern Waste! After that, books like ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Gormenghast’ sparked my imagination, interspersed with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s tales of pioneer life in America. I was struck by the ability of these authors to paint pictures with words, to take me into other worlds and experiences. I try to do that in some of my poems, whether it’s taking the reader into someone else’s life (like the woman who sat for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa) or back into one of my own memories (like watching Borg and Nastase play tennis at Wimbledon in 1976). I also loved Shakespeare from a young age – and I think his powerful imagery and use of iambic pentameter have found their way into some of my poetry.
Q:10. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?
I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of the poets I most admire – at readings and workshops. Kim Moore has been a big influence on my writing. I think she goes from strength to strength, in terms of shining a light on the darker aspects of male/female relationships and making every word count in her poems. Her last collection, All the Men I Never Married, has had a big impact – and rightly so. She’s also a very generous mentor. Several poems in The Lost Art of Ironing were first drafted in her workshops. Another, very different, poet I admire is Alison Brackenbury. Her delicate, beautifully structured poems draw on her rural upbringing and family history. I love the way she often uses rhyme sparingly and to great effect. There are really too many wonderful contemporary poets to list – but a couple of others that stand out for me are Imtiaz Dharker (who brilliantly fuses Asian and Celtic culture) and John McCullough, who can be playful, funny, whimsical, touching, shocking and everything in between. John often shares his amazing work on social media and it always stops me in my tracks.
Q:11. How important is a “sense of place” in your writing?
I grew up in London and came to live in Maryport, a small fishing town on the West Cumbrian coast, 35 years ago. I love living by the Solway Firth, looking across to southern Scotland, and I have written several poems about this place. West Cumbria is a ‘poor relation’ of the Lake District, with a lot of poverty and deprivation, but it has its own spare beauty. Glory Days includes a poem called ‘Liminal’, written during the pandemic, which has the following stanza:
‘A place of sand and marram grass,
mauve thistles and natterjack toads.
Flat and calm, with southern Scotland
visible across a silver strip of sea.
A liminal space, reflecting
the limbo we are in.’
Q:12. Why do you write?
I write because I feel the need to express myself creatively and communicate with my fellow human beings. It gives me great joy and satisfaction when a poem falls into place – ‘the best words in the best order’ as Coleridge put it. It’s wonderful when someone tells me that one of my poems has moved them in some way or resonated with their own experience.
Q:13. Why is family history in your poetry important for you?
I think we are all, to some extent, shaped by our families – for good or ill. I had a very happy upbringing, and I have a particularly close relationship with my mother, but all my family members are aware of our history as members of the Jewish diaspora. If my grandfather hadn’t left Lithuania when he did, he would have perished in the Holocaust, and none of us would exist. That is quite a salutary thought. My family also suffered a tragic loss on a family holiday in 1972, when my three-year-old sister drowned. It took me a long time to write about these very painful events but I think the poems dealing with them are among the most powerful ones I’ve written. When people come up to me after readings, those are the poems they often want to ask me about. Sometimes poems about grief and loss can be strangely healing.
Q:14. How did you collaborate with Kerry on “Glory Days’
It was a very easy, joyful collaboration. We already knew each other through workshops and poetry residentials in Cumbria – and we saw that Mark Davidson at Hedgehog Poetry was running a competition for ‘poetry conversation’ pamphlets. It turned out that we both had quite a few poems about our mothers and about the stages in a woman’s life – and I was delighted when Kerry invited me to collaborate with her. We started sending each other poems and they seemed to fit together very naturally. In the end, our pamphlet ‘Glory Days’ wasn’t selected for that competition but we both really liked it and wanted to find another home for it. Kerry showed the ms to Joy Howard at Grey Hen Press, who specialises in poetry by women over sixty. Fortunately, Joy liked it and agreed to publish it under her Hen Run imprint. She helped us arrive at the final order, gave us a few edits on individual poems, and published it in 2021. Kerry and I did several readings together (both in person and online) and I think audience members enjoyed the fact that we had different voices and styles but similar concerns as women poets, and the book really was ‘a poetic conversation’.
Q:15. What literary projects are you on with at the moment?
I have a pamphlet of poems about my father, which I’ve submitted to a few competitions. I also recently sent in an illustrated pamphlet about insects, animals and birds; and Kerry and I have been working on another collaborative pamphlet about food, cooking and kitchen implements. Meanwhile, I’m still working as a freelance editor. I mainly work on memoirs these days, but someone has just asked me to edit a poetry collection and I’m looking forward to doing that.
Q:16. Once they have read your book what do you hope the reader will leave with?
I hope some of the poems will stay with readers – because they find them particularly moving or insightful or they echo their own feelings or experiences in some way. There are some funny and uplifting poems, between the harder-hitting ones, which should make the collection enjoyable. There are also certain themes, such as the role of digital technology in our lives and the way the Internet has changed our relationship with time, memory and mortality, which I hope will lead people to think more about these subjects. More than anything, I would like readers to feel that they have been on a journey with me – and that the journey has been worthwhile.
Thanks again for spending time interviewing me about my poetry, Paul. Your website is a very valuable resource for anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry and I feel honoured to be included alongside many poets I admire a great deal.
The Wombwell Rainbow 