You went to a class taught by Stephen Sexton?
At school you were really only given a snapshot of what contemporary poetry was like. I had read one Sinead Morrissey poem and one Paul Maddern poem for my GCSEs. I read Stephen Sexton’s collection before I took his class and that really shifted my perspective on what was possible. And his class was brilliant. It really shifted my thoughts on what contemporary poetry could be.
What happens then?
Very quickly after that I started to take my writing very seriously. One of my friends Olivia Heggarty, who is also a writer, she sent me a link to a poetry competition, Tower Poetry Competition. It is a poetry competition, run by Christ Church College, Oxford, for young people between 16 and 18. I submitted to that competition and I was commended for that poem. That was in April 2020, a few months after I had been at Queen’s for work experience.
I thought something in this is working, and then I discovered the Foyle Young Poets Award, a competition for young people aged between 11 and 18. Now, as far as I had seen, someone from Belfast had never won anything like this – I was probably wrong, but it definitely felt that way as an outsider, just breaking into the poetry world!
I ended up winning alongside fourteen other incredible writers, and it was with a poem which was written in a Belfast dialect, one I felt so familiar in and comfortable using, and I was also writing about things I’d seen, things I’d witnessed and felt growing up. That was another thing which inspired me to keep writing. I wanted to be able to document where I had grown up and where I live with the honesty and integrity that’s owed.
At this point you commit to writing and, in particular, poetry?
It was a hard decision, because my head was still saying, “Do the English Literature degree and go into academia,” and after my GCSEs it was suggested that I look to going through the Oxbridge system.
While I was working on that application I realised that I wanted to concentrate on my own writing. In my Oxford interview, they asked questions about Joyce, Frost, Heaney, and all I wanted to do was talk about the writing I was doing.
I didn’t get into Oxford, and you could see that as a dream which had died, but I got my place at Queen’s, and I knew what I wanted to do and so I started my degree, English with Creative Writing, in September 2021. I finished that degree in June 2024, and I am now doing my Master’s in Poetry.
Another morning
we wake & you don’t have cancer:
no strange solidities, no stones in your
kidneys, no egregious malignancies
in your blood. My ear is the stethoscope
which says your lungs are clotless, no red
bombs braided as death bracelets,
& the walls of your heart are chained
but so unchained. We wake & there’s bacon
frying at that one shade of livelihood,
the fat on it close to bursting out
in song. Your breath sharpens my shoulder-
blades so one, two magpies can sleep
on them, their beaks sweet to my marrow-
chocked pillows. I catch a robin
warm to our window with a breast so red
I thought of the night that followed us here.
Zara Meadows
This poem is available at the following link – www.bathmagg.com/zarameadows/
