Does form and structure matter to you?
That is not something that I initially consider when I start a poem. It’s very much the idea and the theme that comes to me first. An idea might live with me for a number of years. It sits dormant until I can work out what to do with it.
“Flower Pressing for Beginners” is very much an example of that. The image of my sisters crushing flowers at the brick wall with Debbie was with me for decades.
I find once you have the idea and the theme, structure and form sort of take care of themselves. Looking at “Flower Pressing for Beginners”, it looks like a very structured poem indeed especially with that middle stanza which trying to mimic something from a self-help manual. But it wasn’t the structure which formed the basis of the poem it was the images, the ideas and the themes.
Jason Lovell receiving The Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2025 from CAP’s ceo, Conor Shields,
The Seamus Heaney HomePlace on Sun 31 Aug 2025
What about themes?
My poems do tend to be very different from each other, covering a wide range of ideas and themes. What I hope is that they’re beautiful, and they’re imaginative.
So no recurring themes or ideas?
I don’t think so. I have lots and lots of ideas for poems, but every now and again, one sticks with me. And it sticks to the point where I can’t forget it. I can’t get rid of the image, whatever that image might be. And then all of a sudden, I’ll do something with it.
I recently wrote a poem about a story that a colleague told me, where the British army raided her house during The Troubles. And the thing that stuck with her from when she was a very young child was that one of the soldiers stole her three foot Chewbacca (Star Wars) toy. And that stayed with me for a long time, and I couldn’t work out quite why, until a couple of months ago when I decided to write an anti-war poem, for Gaza.
I wanted to write about the terrible situation in Gaza using the image of the child and the house being raided by soldiers. And I wanted to use the language around Star Wars. In fact, Blue Star Wars, where is a sense of the colour blue being sued throughout the Star Wars films, and this is hinting at the Israeli flag.
Would it be more a more instinctive approach to your work?
It’s very difficult for me to know. I don’t want to sound too precious about these things, but I feel you are just a vessel. The ideas come to you, and you have a duty to follow through to the best of your ability until the poem is complete or until you think it is complete. I think you have a duty to do so.
Jason Lovell, Winner of The Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2025 with the other Long List poets,
The Seamus Heaney HomePlace on Sun 31 Aug 2025
Are you a whittler or do your poems arrive fully formed?
I’m very much a whittler. I think “Flower Pressing for Beginners” had about 12 drafts, but I sometimes write as many as 30 to 35 drafts of a poem before I consider it anywhere near finished. I spend a lot of time drafting and redrafting, printing, amending, printing again, and amending, and so on.
I also belong to a writer’s circle called “This Writing Thing”, which is based in Derry and run by Sue Divin. And that’s been very helpful because it teaches you to have a sense of ownership over your work. You sometimes have to defend it and you can’t get hung up on any particular criticism, you have to be quite humble, you have to be able to think about what people are suggesting about your work, take whatever is useful on board and go on from there.
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