How did the new collection come about?
Because I am always writing. I wouldn’t say I am terribly prolific but most of the time I am writing poetry and, at some point in that process, you get a sense there might be a new collection emerging from your work. I don’t think I set out to write a new collection, I just set out to keep writing and eventually a group of poems come together, coalesce, to form what becomes a collection.
This particular collection consists of many poems which are very pared down and I think there are a number reasons for that. When I was writing what became the middle section of the book, I was grieving the loss of my friend Jo Egan who was killed, very tragically, by a drunk driver on Christmas Eve. I found myself overwhelmed by grief. I had also just lost another close friend, the poet Myra Vennard. I just couldn’t find an articulate way of talking about grief so all those smaller, very fragmentary poems, came out of my experience of grieving.
Were you conscious of a sense of paring back your writing at that time?
I think that when I was writing what became this collection, I was very interested in carving everything to the bare essentials. I was conscious of the idea that I wanted to convey the most direct elements, the most essential ideas, and that was all I wanted to have in those poems.
If you look at each section they are looking at coming to terms with the way the world is now and the difficult situation we are in, climate change, war; and then the personal – loss, grieving, ageing, and it is me asking myself what is it that I need to say about the situation as I see it.
It does sound like your writing at this time was part of coping with your grief?
I felt I had to work on pieces which would deal with the grieving process, even though grief left me feeling very inarticulate, so I found myself comparing grief to the phases of the moon. That the moon is always changing, is always in flux. A thirteenth moon, like grief, is a natural phenomenon, yet because we don’t think about it most of the time, it can seem quite alien when it appears. These poems make up the middle section of the book.
Would suggesting that this new collection seems like three separate collections make sense to you?
I think that even though it might appear that there are three independent sections in the collection, actually to me, the three sections speak to each other. They work as a collection because of that dynamic between the various themes.
The first section “Take” has poems which are more in my familiar style of writing and so to readers of my work, the poems might come across as recognisably me. If I do have a particular style, then that style would be apparent in the first section. In this section, there is a connection with nature and how nature sustains us, and the noticing of nature and how that can be comforting. But, primarily, this section is about taking hold of the day, of keeping going to get the most out of life; that you need to live life to the fullest because it can be taken from you in an instant.
