Are there any recurring themes you look at through your writing?
I wouldn’t say I ever really ‘try’ to write about anything in particular, but the themes come as I am writing. And there are recurring themes. Intimacy and the boundary between the self and others is one. The parent-child relationship is big, but it is never just personal – I am always trying to find some place between the personal and the mythic, or maybe to dissolve the personal into the mythic or something. Language itself is a theme; language and how that is navigated through place, how you find your way around (or don’t) via language. It’s always the case that I want to develop an idea that I can hand over to the reader, and allow them to completely take over.
I used to write through visual art a lot but that’s not really part of morsels. I hopefully have another publication coming out in the not too distant and both were born out of a period of travel. While they’re not about travel, per say, they manifest through images of travelling I suppose.
What about the theme of Climate Change?
That is an interesting one because I didn’t set out to write a book about climate change and I didn’t set out to interrogate or expose anything in particular about the environment. But that is a theme that has definitely been picked up on, and I see that it is very much there as a concern, or a driving question, in the work. They’re inevitably part of the context out of which I’m writing. When themes like this turn up, I do step back and decide what I want to hone. I try to become my own reader and work at it until I am satisfied with the words. But generally I am trying to be as instinctive as possible.
Do your poems come fully formed or are you a whittler?
My poems certainly don’t come fully formed. In fact in the initial stages they don’t even come as poems. If I have a process (and that varies) I write a lot of notes and a lot of my work emerges from those notes.
I keep a lot of very disorganised and inconsistent journals. My notes used to be on my phone, and occasionally still are. I end up combing through these notes multiple times until I’ve forgotten something of the moment in which they were written and then I can find things which mean something to me as a reader, and then seek out images which speak to each other, and correspondences that mean something I didn’t necessarily mean to say. I try to identify a ‘narrative’ (for want of a better word) and then I have to figure out formally how these things need to play against each other.
I never want my work to be inaccessible so I tend to say that I am using simple means to complex ends.
You have one collection, morsels?
Yes, morsels with Macha Press came out in 2025 and it’s my first collection. It’s written in three parts, two of them are quite long sequences. I have published a lot in journals in the past, but actually very little of this book had been published before it came out as a book. I was taking a big break from submitting poems to publications when Macha Press reached out to me. Prompted, I found the makings of that book was sort of waiting in the margins of my notebooks.
Where to now?
I am the poet in residence at the Belfast Book Festival, which is exciting, and there will be an event on 11th June as part of that, and a poetry film screening. I’m working on a second publication. It was supposed to come out as a pamphlet before morsels, but for a number of reasons that didn’t happen. So hopefully soon. I’m hoping to spend the Summer finding the seeds of some new work too, with the help of an ACNI SIAP grant. (I have been doing a PGCE this year, switching into teaching, and that has taken a lot of my energy. But I can see the finish line now.
If you would like to see more of Susanna Galbraith’s work
