A Damned Mob of Scribbling Women

I have had the enormous pleasure of talking about the hidden histories of women’s writing many times this year, at bookshops, libraries and festivals. As I prepared, I thought again about how female writers of the past had to overcome social disapproval to write, publish or promote their work. Marketing your book was seen as unladylike and even scandalous – a little (delicate shudder) like selling yourself. None of this censure attached to male literary lions hawking their wares, but the arena of art was one in which the women were supposed to stand still and look winsome and inspiring. They were muse, never artist.

Lizzie Siddall, painted as Ophelia by John Everett Millais, is a woman I always turn to to illustrate this point. She wrote and she painted. Despite not having the benefit of the art school education the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were privileged enough to absorb and then rail against, she was good enough that John Ruskin — pre-eminent art critic of the Victorian age — offered to buy all her artworks so she could support her practice. But although she is famous, today we know her as this: a mute and beautiful muse, strewing her flowers and drowning winsomely. She caught a terrible cold modelling for it, too, when the lamps warming the bath she was posing in went out and she was too polite to interrupt the master at work to tell him that her teeth were chattering.

Women found ways round this. They published anonymously, like Jane Austen who published during her lifetime only as ‘A Lady’. (Virginia Woolf says, in A Room of One’s Own: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”) They published under male pseudonyms like the Brontës and George Eliot. They published under gender neutral initials – I understand J K Rowling was told boys wouldn’t read her if she published as Joanne. They could be ‘published by others’ – so much less unseemly – like Anne Bradstreet who claimed her brother-in-law swiped her book, sailed from Massachusetts back to London with it and printed it in 1650 without her knowledge. (Her thirteen uses of the word ‘fame’ in the first three poems suggest she was perhaps a more active participant in the process that it was acceptable for her to admit, mind.)

A suitably pious and Puritan Victorian imagining of Anne Bradstreet. Would this woman be so bold as to publish a book? Heaven forbid!

Every time I cringe talking about my books on social media, or feel I’m underqualified to speak on the subjects on which I do (which is many times – and I am literally a book publicist) I remind myself that I am the heir to these centuries of pursed-lipped whiskery disapproval. Every awkwardly dismissed compliment, every self-deprecating aside is a symptom of that hangover. It’s plaited into our society and our own fibres at so deep a level that most women have never asked for a payrise. Nobody likes a swanker, but it’s ok to own your achievements.

I have a collection of things men have said about women writers that I include in my talks. “Intense thought spoils a lady’s features”, opined eighteenth century critic William Rose. Don’t furrow your pretty brows girls! Norman Mailer wrote in Advertisements for Myself that “a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls”, prompting Cynthia Ozick to ask him in 1971: “I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?” Watch her glorious take down here. In 2011, V S Naipaul claimed no women writer was his equal and talked about ‘feminine tosh’ (definitely the title of my imaginary garage band’s first EP.) But in my recent research I found a new favourite. In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote to his publisher that America was now dominated by “a damned mob of scribbling women.” And that’s such a doozy, I think I want merch. Would wear that shirt in a heartbeat.

To read work by a damned mob of scribbling women, including many who were unpublished or unfeted during their lifetimes or quickly forgotten afterwards, pick up a copy of She is Fierce or She Will Soar. I have a talk I love giving on the hidden histories of women writers that includes mention of Murasaki Shikibu, Jane Austen, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Leapor, James Tiptree Jr, Lizzie Siddal, Anne Bradstreet and lots more, so do get in touch if you’re planning an event for which this would work.

Prehistoric Poems for Dinosaur Devotees

Oh sure, a CGI dinosaur eating someone on the toilet is great, but have you ever read a POEM about a dinosaur? There’s no limit to how scary a poet can make a monster, no rubbery claws or clumsy greenscreen behind the leathery wings. We can only meet these monsters in our imaginations and, liberated from the constraints of prose, poets can paint a particularly vivid picture.

In ‘Dinosaurs Walked Here’, Elli Woollard uses heavy language and rhyme to echo the smashing of huuuuge feet into the earth:

            ‘Dinosaurs walked here once.

            Here, right here, on the site of this street,

            they’d stamp along, and the slabs of their feet

            were as wide as a car, crushing, crashing

            a road through the reeds. Then, striding and splashing,

            they’d thud in the mud of the deep green pool

            and they’d clomp in the swamp under new-forged skies

            where now the cold grey concrete lies.’

When I talk to children about dinosaur poems (more about my school events here), I love to use Cheryl Pearson’s poem ‘Kronosaurus.’ Its skull was as long as two eight-year-olds, so it’s always fun to ask for volunteers to lie head-to-head to demonstrate just how enormous that terrifying jaw really was. The poem asks us to imagine

            Thirty feet of brute strength

and teeth, faster than a shark,

snap snap snapping at your heels

            in dark water.

(I’d definitely skip this particular swim. That’s me on the beach, reading poems with dry feet.)

I asked my seven-year-old – a palaeontologist in training – to choose some favourite dinosaur poems and explain why she loved them. Little explanation was needed as to why she loved Laura Mucha’s ‘Apatosaurus Rap’… wait for that thunderous B O o O o o O o o o O o o o o O o M! You can hear Laura and friends reading the poem here.

Her favourite dinosaur is Tyrannosaurus Rex, so she also post-it noted Paul Cookson’s ‘The King of All the Dinosaurs’ who ‘rants and raves and royally roars’ and ‘stomps and chomps on forest floors’ and ‘Gouges, gorges, gashes, gores…’ – this one is just so much fun to read aloud and, in my opinion, definitely calls for stomping for emphasis.

‘The Night Flight of the Pterodactyl’ by Chrissie Gittins also found favour. She liked the ‘glistening and gleaming’ Pterodactyl as it glides dangerously through the dark sky, moonbeams flashing on teeth and claws. Not a good night to be an unsuspecting sleeping frog in the shadow of those vast wings…

I was thrilled last term when my daughter came home from school bursting with excitement about Mary Anning, who is a hero to her now. Jan Dean’s gorgeous, evocative poem ‘Remembering Mary’ threads us back in time to her discoveries at Lyme Regis:

            The sea’s mysterious –

            iron grey and shunting shingle,

            growling with the roll

            of pebbles pounding in the tide.

            This same long roar that fills us

            as we beachcomb

            this same long rolling roar

            was sounding when Mary walked

            below Black Ven.

            It is the song that shapes the world

            this echoing roar of dinosaurs –

            the song of rocks and sea.

I really enjoyed hunting down dinosaur poems for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book and I also love the Emma Press anthology Dragons of the Prime. And I haven’t quite left terrible lizards behind as Gods and Monsters: Mythological Poems, includes plenty of dragons…

This article originally appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit blog.

Poems for Mothers' Day

One of the most intense and rewarding projects I have ever worked on was Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood. This was not only because of the emotive subject matter, but also because, immediately after Mother’s Day 2020 and shortly before I began editing the anthology, the nation locked down. We retreated into our houses and for many of us – although we didn’t know it at the time – the longest period of separation from our mums we would ever know was beginning.

It was far from an easy year to be a parent, enduring the sticky chaos of home-schooling or the isolation of the newborn days without a support network, but it was an agonising time to be a grown-up child, too, wracked with fears for our parents. (And, in lighter but occasionally genuinely fraught moments, trying to help them navigate Zoom.)

I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood, while locked down with my young children and unable to see my own mother. I have to admit that I cried a lot. (Also: shouting, wine, half-hearted attempts at Joe Wicks workouts, wearing the same tracksuit bottoms for weeks, despairing of going to the loo alone ever again, forgetting what a hairbrush was, more crying.) These poems took me from pregnancy to the empty nest and to every mad milestone between, and it felt a particularly poignant time on every level to be thinking about this wild, deep bond, and about how it evolves over the years.

 Now the paperback is about to be published, and — thank goodness — life feels back on an even keel. We can say in person how grateful we are for each other. I am a better mother by far for not being so crushed up against full-time motherhood. Being teacher, family and friend to my daughters (not to mention chef, housemaid, cheerleader, encyclopaedia, referee…) was an impossible task. But this collection is a beautiful thing that came out of a difficult time, and the poems still move me so much. Here are a handful of my favourites.

Great-grandmother, by Jean Valentine  

Great-grandmother,

be with us

as if in the one same day & night

we all gave birth

in the one same safe-house, warm,

and then we rest together,

sleep, and nurse,

dreamily talk to our babies, warm,

in a safe room             all of us

carried in the close black sky.

I love the peace within this poem, and the sense that as mothers we are part of a long line of women who walked this way before us, feeding, soothing and loving.

The Evening Star by Sappho  

Hesperus, you bring everything that

                                     the light-tinged dawn has scattered;

you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring

                                    the child back to its mother.

Sappho’s poems survive only in scraps and tatters but those fragments are enough to show us why she was so feted in the ancient world that Plato called her ‘the Tenth Muse’. I find these beautiful lines so deeply soothing, with their nursery rhyme cadences and the idea of rounding up the animals and bringing everyone safely home.

The Temple of the Wood Lavender by Lady Caroline Blanche Elizabeth Lindsay

A perfum’d sprig of lavender

You gave, dear child, to me;

It grew, you said, by the red rose bed,

And under the jessamine tree.

’Twas sweet, ay, sweet from many things;

But (sweeter than all) with scent

Of long past years and laughter and tears

It to me was redolent.

Our mothers are the repository of memories for the years we can no longer recall. We don’t remember learning to clap our chubby hands, or grabbing for the candle on our first birthday cake… but she does. It’s hard for a mother not to mourn her children’s infancy – though we might not miss the sleepless nights, we grieve for the squeezable thighs, the tiny froggy legs and the months when we were asked if we ‘merembered’ something. This short poem beautifully expresses a mother’s nostalgia for that strangely one-sided intimacy, built at first from months and years that only one of you remembers, though they colour everything after it with love.

Limbs by Mary Walker  

Afraid of the dark, they find their way

to my bed at night; one hot, one cold

and no rest for any of us.

Sleepless elbows and knees find my hip,

shin, and the tender bone under my eye,

my body remembering a knot of child

kneading my bladder, stealing my breath,

stamping footprints on my belly.

These growing limbs –

needing new shoes, longer pants, another haircut;

these limbs that cling to me like vines to the face of a house –

they are working themselves free.

Against the curtain of their still small breaths,

truth dawns – these limbs will outlast me.

Worse, first

they will stop walking themselves

to my bedside at night.

Personally, I’m a demon if I’m woken. Having weathered the extreme exhaustion of the baby years, I genuinely don’t feel nostalgic for the months I slept only for the odd hour, dropping like a stone out of consciousness until the next howl. Despite that, this lovely poem ambushed me completely when I discovered it – especially the beautifully paced power of this line: “they are working themselves free.”

Mother and Daughter Sonnets XVI by Augusta Webster 

She will not have it that my days wanes low,

Poor of the fire its drooping sun denies,

That on my brow the thin lines write good-byes

Which soon may be read plain for all the know,

Telling that I have done with youth’s brave show;

Alas! and done with youth in heart and eyes,

With wonder and far expectancies,

Save but to say ‘I knew such long ago.’

She will not have it. Loverlike to me,

She with her happy gaze finds all that’s best,

She sees this fair and that unfretted still,

And her own sunshine over all the rest:

So she half keeps me as she’d have me be,

And I forget to age, through her sweet will.

Victorian poet Augusta Webster expresses so gorgeously here that your mum is always your mum, no matter how many years pass, what they bring or how many miles are between you. I hope the last Mothers’ Day we’ll be apart is behind us.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.

Songs of Scuttling and Slime: in Praise of Creepy Crawlies

Silly though it is, I am not a fan of insects – despite their tasteful ‘mini-beast’ rebrand. I was once so rattled by a sizeable spider that my husband told me that because spiders were ‘territorial’ there couldn’t possibly be another lurking. (As well as being cowardly, I am gullible, and blithely repeated this to people for years before someone pointed out what utter nonsense it was.)

I have children now and I don’t want to bequeath them my fear. I managed not to shriek while capturing a mammoth spider under a pint glass. I took my youngest to meet various horrifying creatures including a giant millipede and managed to only back away two paces as it wound around her fingers, saying through gritted teeth, “Oh, isn’t he handsome?” (It took a herculean effort, though. So many legs!)

I’m never going to be delighted to cuddle a cockroach or tickle a tarantula, but poems and books have helped me be chill around crickets and easy around earwigs. The greatest gift you can give a spider-phobic child is surely a copy of E B White’s Charlotte’s Web and here is one of my favourite poems about creepy crawlies to share.

A Snail’s Advice to His Son

After Gervase Phinn

Always keep your shell clean, son.

It shows the world you care.

Hold your antennae straight and proud

and pointing in the air.

Trail your slime in crisp, clean lines

in parallel to walls,

stick to grass where dogs are banned

(and games involving balls).

If you must steal mankind’s veg

wait till they’re not around.

Steer well clear of allotments (‘least

until the sun’s gone done).

Although you may not have one, son,

be sure to chance your arm.

Confronted by a gang of slugs,

let your response be calm.

Keep your head in times of stress

(inside your shell, if poss).

When I am gone, just carry on.

Smile, despite your loss.

Keep that sense of patience,

never let your stride be rushed;

and don’t take life too seriously, son,

for few survive uncrushed.

Jamie McGarry (From The Dead Snail Diaries, The Emma Press)

Poetry can help us look at the world in new ways, and here it gives us the point of view of a young snail, lovingly advised by his wise father. Ascribing relatable emotions to a creepy crawly can really help a child (or a grown-up!) to become less afraid of a creature. While reading the poem we are firmly on the snail’s side, seeing through its eyes. And of course, on a more serious note, this is part of the enormous power of poetry: it can build empathy and understanding and help us see different points of view. I can think of few things our world needs more.

Here's a final reminder to the scaredy cats, myself among them, that the less cute denizens of the animal kingdom need our protection too (even if the phrase ‘beetle fat’ gives me the heebie jeebies...)

Hurt No Living Thing

Hurt no living thing,

Ladybird nor butterfly,

Nor moth with dusty wing,

Nor cricket chirping cheerily,

Nor grasshopper, so light of leap,

Nor dancing gnat,

Nor beetle fat,

Nor harmless worms that creep.

Christina Rossetti

These poems appear in Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, which is out now in hardback and published in paperback on 30th March 2023.

Poems for Christmas

For me, the greatest gift of the Christmas season is time to read. The schools and lots of the offices are closed. The weather is often appalling. The nights are long and dark and seem designed expressly for the purpose of snuggling under a blanket on the sofa with the tree lights twinkling, a glass of something tempting within easy reach and a great big pile of delicious-smelling, beautiful new books. Here are some of my poetic festive favourites – all would make great gifts, too.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Frost Fair is completely wonderful, and makes me hanker after a re-read of Woolf’s Orlando. It’s so beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, it would make a lovely stocking filler.

Never has the exhilaration of whirling about on ice-skates been better captured than by Wordsworth, in a breathless and beautiful section of ‘The Prelude’ which I included in my second anthology, Tyger Tyger Burning Bright. I speak as a clumsy person, whose few attempts at skating have resulted in the kind of falls that elicit audible gasps from witnesses, some far from family-friendly language and truly spectacular bruising. If Wordsworth can fill me with the desire to sail across frozen lakes under a wide wintry night sky, he can inspire anyone.

‘The Journey of the Magi’ by T S Eliot has an eerie, cold magic to it, perfect for reading and chewing over on a bitter winter’s night.

I love Betjeman’s ‘Christmas’ - hear the man himself read it here, with its evocation of the pull of family even more poignant in the wake of the pandemic years of separation (‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, / And oafish louts remember Mum’) and the seasonal cheer infecting everyone everywhere – from ‘provincial public houses’ to ‘many-steepled London’.

Thomas Hardy’s gorgeous ‘The Fallow Deer at the Empty House’ is a favourite.

And Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ perfectly captures how some scrap of childhood magic can cling to Christmas Eve and the vision of the nativity no matter what age and how agnostic I am.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

A contemporary poem I love is one for the festive refuseniks: ‘Bah… Humbug’ by Gregory Woods. This poem is a hymn to the allure of a solitary, batteries-not-included celebration with ‘books to the left of you, / gin to the right’. This poem was included in Christmas Crackers, one of Candlestick Press’s lovely pamphlets designed to be sent instead of a greetings card – perfect if you’d like to say something more substantial than ‘Season’s greetings’.

I bought a lovely edition of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ a few years ago with Niroot Puttapipat’s beautiful silhouette illustrations and am frankly delighted that the kids insist on hearing it all year round. Due to our – frequently unseasonal – repeated readings, I am now word perfect. This confers an additional advantage: I can name all the reindeer (and, no, Rudolf doesn’t feature) and am therefore a splendid addition to any Christmas pub quiz team. Moore was a slightly unlikely Christmas poet, being an academic whose other works were heavy tomes on Hebrew. Legend has it that he composed this, his only famous poem, to entertain his children during a sleigh ride through Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve 1822, basing jolly St Nicholas on their coachman. I hope it’s true.

Also for children (though not only for children), I recommend the excellent selection of Christmas Poems edited by Gaby Morgan (who I’m lucky enough to have as editor for my Macmillan anthologies) and illustrated by Axel Scheffler of Gruffalo fame. Chris Riddell’s new We Wish You a Merry Christmas anthology is stuffed with good things. And The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland by Carys Bexington, beautifully illustrated by Kate Hindley, is another favourite for little ones with great verse, glorious pictures and clever homages to both beloved texts.

It’s not poetry, but I have to mention A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, which I try and read every year.

Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of Christmas poems is wonderful. My favourite is Wenceslas with its mildly barbaric, magnificently medieval many bird roast. A book as warming as necking ginger wine in a hot bath, also firmly on my list of holiday plans.

Whatever you do at Christmas and wherever you are, I wish you happy reading. May your stocking be full of books and your cheeseboard always groaning.

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On Poems and Trees

They cut down a tree on our road this week.

My daughters and I were sad, and cross. Although already we couldn’t quite remember the exact shape and character of the tree – the branches had been efficiently disposed of, only the stump remained – we were bereft. It had been a kindly tree, throwing green shade over a bench on which people and dogs and occasionally the street’s reigning cat, Binky, sat to watch the world go by.

My six year old ran up to the stump, to its shocking new bright flat top, and hugged it. And then my nine year old joined her, and they made me do it too (although I might have done it anyway.) We counted its rings, and we missed it. I’m sure we looked deeply eccentric, but I’m also sure that any one of our neighbours, seeing that stark and sliced trunk, would have understood the response. Perhaps some of them might even have joined in.

It is difficult to write about trees without writing poetry. They are a wonderful example of an everyday object that can be transfigured by the kind of close attention you have to pay to something in order to write about it. What I love most about poetry is the new ways of looking at the world it offers us. Children, whose perspectives are fresher and less calcified than ours, instinctively respond to this. And when you ask them to look – to really look – at something, they will surprise and delight you with their responses.

In order to write a poem about a tree, you need to have a very good look at it… and they are magic. You need to watch and think about the movement of the leaves, to listen to the whisper of the boughs and the chattering of the squirrels. It’s important to stroke the bark, lie stretched out beneath it and look up into its canopy, inhale its scent, give it a hug. You may have walked past it a thousand times, but it might still be a tree whose shape you wouldn’t be able to recall if it was suddenly gone.

Children build kingdoms among the trees. Whether we clambered high into the branches or looked for fairies or beetles among the roots, trees were our playgrounds. We hoarded their treasures, gathered from the parks and pavements: glossy conkers, sycamore spinners, cherry stones, acorn cups for tiny feasts, tumbled blossom, sticky buds to uncurl in a milk bottle. They furnished us with swords, pilgrims’ staffs and magic wands. They were milestones and boundaries, and a certain well-loved tree might have been – might still be – the landmark that tells us: “You are home.”

Within my private forest of remembered trees stand a friendly magnolia, regularly scrambled up in childhood, and the horse chestnut – in my mind, always bearing its pale candles – visible from a window I last gazed from decades ago. Further in, a hilltop monkey puzzle stretches its sinuous fingers, an ancient oak spreads, and every Christmas tree I have ever loved (which is all of them, perhaps especially the scrawny ones) shines. I also have trees immortalised by poets and writers in my mental forest: from nursery rhyme nut trees to Shakespeare’s bare ruin’d choirs, from Housman’s lovely cherry to Hopkins’ Binsey Poplars.

We need trees and we need people who will plant them, not cut them down. It’s why Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris included Willow, Acorn and Conker in the beautiful spell book The Lost Words, incantations for words excised from the children’s dictionary due to underuse. To lie, once in a while, under a tree and look up through its leaves is a pure and primeval kind of medicine. It is an incredible gift to be able to give and, even for those of us whose days in the classroom are far behind us, a lesson we could all do with learning.

Climbing

          High up in the apple tree climbing I go,

          With the sky above me, the earth below.

          Each branch is the step of a wonderful stair

          Which leads to the town I see shining up there.

          Climbing, climbing, higher and higher,

          The branches blow and I see a spire,

          The gleam of a turret, the glint of a dome,

          All sparkling and bright, like white sea foam.

          On and on, from bough to bough,

          The leaves are thick, but I push my way through;

          Before, I have always had to stop,

          But to-day I am sure I shall reach the top.

          Today to the end of the marvellous stair,

          Where those glittering pinnacles flash in the air!

          Climbing, climbing, higher I go,

          With the sky close above me, the earth far below.

Amy Lowell - 1874-1925

I loved editing The Book of Tree Poems for publication in Summer 2023.

More of my favourite gorgeous poems about trees can be found in Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, a collection aimed at readers aged 8+.

This blog originally appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit website.

Poems about Friendship

The most viewed page on my website (this website, hello!) is a blog about the best poetry about a broken heart. This makes me a little sad — so many shattered hearts out there! — but also underlined something I bang on about almost incessantly: the fact that poetry is useful, and nourishing, and for everyone. Poetry is good for you! Someone has felt this way before, and they wrote all about it so I could feel less lonely, which was good of them. It started me thinking about the other circumstances in which we might reach for a poem and I thought of friendship.

Obviously we all nurture our friendships in different ways. It might be a bucket of lager and a football match, or a caustic WhatsApp group devoted to the boss you love to hate. It might be middle-of-the-night messages over your baby’s head during a nightfeed, or sending them a book you’ve loved in the post as a surprise. (Are my friends reading this? The answer is option 4! OPTION 4!)

We tend not to assemble our most loathed family members in stately homes or riverside pubs to declare how much we love our friends over a period of uncomfortably-dressed hours. There isn’t a special day each year on which they’re duty bound to present us with a card inscribed with their sentiments and, ideally, give us chocolate (although I’m sure there’s a corporation trying to engender this tradition right now.) But sometimes just posting a picture of them grinning like a lunatic with a heart emoji just isn’t enough. So here are some things that poets have written about friendship that I love, taken from my very first newsletter, which was written during lockdown. (You can sign up for future newsletters here if you’d like more of this kind of thing in your inbox every now and then.)

Newsletter July 2020: Poems I’d Send My Friends If My Friends Liked Poems. I miss my mates, and I know I’m not alone. It’s a giggle seeing them on Zoom, alternately blurting and freezing, but it’s not the same. I’m craving a boozy, gluttonous, increasingly shrill and inappropriate dinner out, somewhere someone else does the cooking and wipes up afterwards, or a morning-after with all of us wincing in pyjamas and taking it in turns to lie down. My best friends don’t like poetry, to be honest – takes all sorts, doesn’t it? – but in a parallel universe in which they did (and I’m in the market for parallel universes of all kinds right now) I’d send them these.

Lacing Boots by Helen Burke

One of my favourites in my first anthology of poems by women, She is Fierce. I’ve never read a poem that captured the breakneck exhilaration of running wild with your best friend at lunch break so brilliantly. Helen’s poems are full of unruliness and fun and I heartily recommend her collected poems Today The Birds Will Sing, which you can buy here from splendid indie publisher Valley Press.

Fiere by Jackie Kay

This lively yet moving poem celebrates a life-long friendship. My favourite phrase is:

“we’ve had a whirl and a blast, girl”

And I’m ready to start a campaign to get greetings cards produced that carry that message. There are several women I’d like to send one to. Here’s to whirling and blasting again soon.

We Shall Not Escape Hell by Marina Tsvetayeva

This is a beautiful, searing poem about the girls who didn’t do what was expected of them, and don’t care, and will party together in Hell with all the energy and passion with which they lived. Frankly, I’m already packing.

We shall not escape Hell, my passionate
sisters, we shall drink black resins––
we who sang our praises to the Lord
with every one of our sinews, even the finest,

we did not lean over cradles or
spinning wheels at night, and now we are
carried off by an unsteady boat
under the skirts of a sleeveless cloak,

we dressed every morning in
fine Chinese silk, and we would
sing our paradisal songs at
the fire of the robbers’camp,

slovenly needlewomen, (all
our sewing came apart), dancers,
players upon pipes: we have been
the queens of the whole world!

first scarcely covered by rags,
then with constellations in our hair, in
gaol and at feasts we have
bartered away heaven,

in starry nights, in the apple
orchards of Paradise
––Gentle girls, my beloved sisters,
we shall certainly find ourselves in Hell!

To D.R. by Laura Grey

Laura Gray was the stage name of Joan Lavender Baillie Guthrie, a young suffragette whose suicide – by drug overdose – scandalised British society in 1914. Lavender, an actress, was arrested for window-breaking during the campaign to win votes for women. She was jailed in Holloway Prison with other suffragettes including Emily Wilding Davison, and force-fed after a hunger strike. While there, she wrote a poem ‘To D.R.’ (thought to be fellow campaigner Dorothea Rock).

Lavender was released after four months but her health never recovered. She began to rely on tranquilisers and eventually – tragically – she committed suicide. Her poem is a gorgeous and poignant hymn to her inspirational friend and sister in the struggle for women’s suffrage:

Beyond the bars I see her move,

A mystery of blue and green,

As though across the prison yard

The spirit of the spring had been.

And as she lifts her hands to press

The happy sunshine of her hair,

From the grey ground the pigeons rise,

And rustle upwards in the air,

As though her two hands held a key

To set the imprisoned spirits free.

Monica by Hera Lindsay Bird

And a poem about… uh… Friends, the 90s television show. Which loosely fits here and is also the only poem I have WhatsApped to my poetry-disliking friends. This absolute masterpiece requires a salty language alert but it’s a banger. Like so many of Hera Lindsay Bird’s poems it’s funny and clever and caustic and cool and then it smacks you with a dose of emotional truth you weren’t expecting.

Baby Group by Polly Clark

There are some friends that fall into and out of our lives. These are people we might lean on — sometimes heavily — for a season then never see again, but these intense friendships forged in offices (hi Stef, data inputting with me through the long summer of 1997!) and baby groups (hi Rebecca, thanks for fleeing pilates with me!) can form some of our fondest memories. I included this poem in my anthology of poems about motherhood, Night Feeds and Morning Songs, along with an article about the friends who have lifted me up, The Spirit of Sisterhood.

My Catfish Friend by Richard Brautigan

And here’s a strange, sweet poem about imagining being a catfish that just gets me every time even though I couldn’t explain quite why. Poets’ minds, eh? Aren’t they just the absolute business.

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

Editing a poetry anthology - how it's done

I have compiled eleven poetry anthologies including She is Fierce, She Will Soar, Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book and Night Feeds and Morning Songs. Here are some snapshots of what’s involved.

It starts with reading. I have a lot of poetry books! For weeks I will have my nose in one at all times and never travel without one, adding to my store of treasures on trains and planes, in waiting rooms and, as often as possible, outside. My editors will often share poems with me and sometimes they are in touch with poets and commission new work for a book, which is always incredibly exciting.

To ensure I don’t completely bankrupt myself and that there’s still room in the house for people and furniture and not just poetry books, I also plunder my local library – they order books in for me once I’ve exhausted their poetry shelves – and obviously I love the National Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall (you can borrow ebooks from them online, too).

I also hunt down poems online, which is easiest when I’m looking for poems on a specific theme. One of my favourite jobs as a confirmed cat lady was editing The Book of Cat Poems. Social media is a fantastic ecosystem for sharing poetry and I’ve discovered some of my favourite poets this way.

I make much use of Post-It Notes. I imagine there are few people alive who have used more Post-It Notes than me.

II need to be able to touch, see and shuffle the poems to whittle down the selection. I use an app called Tiny Scanner to create PDFs of the poems I want to include. These are really important as they’re submitted to the publisher as reference images, so they can check no typos have been made when the poems are typed up. Errors creep into all books, unfortunately, and in poetry changing one word or, sometimes, even moving or missing out a punctuation mark can have a huge impact on the poem’s rhythm and even its meaning. I feel a huge responsibility to anthologise accurately.

Once I’ve made my cuts, I have a nearly final selection. It’s rarely final final at this stage, because there will always be poems that have to be dropped because they’re too expensive to use, or because we’ve been unable to trace the copyright holder. In the UK, work is usually out of copyright seventy years after the writer’s death, so in 2022 a writer would have needed to die before 1952 for their work to be in the public domain. Sometimes we’re tracking down agents or even family members to ask for permission, which can mean a lot of detective work. And I will often find something wonderful at the last minute, when the book’s just about to go to press, and beg my editor to sneak it in!

I’ll then divide the poems into the chapters in which they’ll appear in the book. This was straightforward when I edited Wonder: The Natural History Poetry Book – inspired by the museum’s galleries, I had sections on Space, Mammals and Dinosaurs. I wanted reading the anthology to be like the experience of wandering the museum, with new treasures around each corner. It can be more difficult when the poems are arranged thematically, though, as poets are often talking about more than one thing at once. In She Will Soar, chapters included ‘Feeling Free’ and ‘Courage, Hope and Resilience’ and there were often a couple of sections a poem could appear in.

Once the chapters are final, I think really carefully about the order in which the poems should appear – even though I think people generally dip in and out of anthologies, and perhaps I’m the only person who’ll ever read them cover to cover! Some poems belong together, and shed light on each other. It always feels really special when I find poets writing centuries and continents apart who seem almost to be in dialogue with each other, sharing their thoughts about bravery, or loneliness, or the wind, and I can put their work side by side. I also like poems that contrast in tone or style to follow each other, to keep things interesting and varied for the reader. Anthologies are like a poetry buffet, and my hope is that everyone will find something that feeds them on offer.

Once the poems and the chapters are in an order I’m happy with, I begin work on the text for the book. Sometimes this is just a general introduction, talking about the book’s theme, and brief chapter openers. In She Is Fierce and She Will Soar, I felt it was important to tell the stories of the poets. Many of the writers from previous centuries had been forgotten or overlooked, and some of them had to vault enormous barriers to write and publish including racism, lack of education, disapproving fathers, abusive husbands, mental and physical ill health and a scornful male-dominated literary establishment. I researched and wrote their biographies, which was fascinating and awe-inspiring. In Night Feeds and Morning Songs, I begged to include some short essays about my own experiences of motherhood, and still feel insanely honoured to see my own words beside these poems that mean so much to me.

I had a real treat while compiling Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, as I had the opportunity to do some picture research in their online archives for images to reproduce in the book. Did you know that Edward Lear, Victorian poet of nonsense best known for ‘The Owl and The Pussy-Cat’, was a talented artist who even gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons and produced a collection of beautiful paintings of parrots? You do now!

The anthology is now nearly ready! I send my final manuscript to my editor for the text to be set. It’s always exciting to see the book laid out and I’m amazed every time how much difference the font and design makes. I’ll receive proofs for checking and I always do this on a print out rather than on screen. I look at every word, double checking each punctuation mark, capital letter and indentation. (I have to confess I’ve never learned the clever squiggly shorthand editors use, so I make notes on the proofs and send pictures of them.)

I do feel guilty about the amount of paper involved in the production of my anthologies, especially since I can’t print double-sided when I’m shuffling the order of the poems, so it’s all reused by my children before being recycled. They have created their own books to stock a library in their bedroom – I even bought them a library set with tickets and a stamp – and you’ll notice that the Closed sign is also poetic…

The Production team work their magic, and the book is printed. I usually get my author copies a couple of weeks before publication and it never gets any less exciting to see a new collection. I feel incredibly lucky to work with passionate and knowledgeable editors and have such talented illustrators and designers making the books look beautiful.

My publicist will be have been working hard (as a publicist myself with my other hat on, I know just how hard!) on the campaign to promote the book from months in advance, pitching for reviews and features, interviews and events. So there’s still plenty to do once the book is finished! I write articles and blog posts, share content on social media and in my newsletter, give interviews and do events in person and online for bookshops, libraries, literary festivals and schools. I really love this part, when I get to talk directly to readers about these poems I love and send the collection out to meet its readers.

She Will Soar: Why Women Write about Escape and Freedom

My second anthology of poems by women, She Will Soar, takes as its themes wanderlust, freedom and escape – themes which suddenly took on a strange relevance as I edited the book during lockdown. I have always believed in books and poetry as magic carpets that can take you anywhere, to places past, present and future, and realms both possible and impossible. Looking at the history of women’s writing, I felt women had particular cause to long to be lifted from their restrictive or humdrum lives by the power of literature.

Women faced certain bars to writing and publishing throughout history, and women who were not white, middle or upper class, cisgender, heterosexual or helpfully connected had even more stacked against them. Leisure, learning and liberty are key ingredients for any artist, and all have been in shorter supply for women than men throughout history. Even aristocratic women were usually afforded a rudimentary education compared to their brothers, and none at all in the highfalutin subjects considered ‘proper’ literary subjects: the Classics, theology or blood-drenched battle histories. More recently, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sharon Olds was rejected from an American literary magazine for writing about her children: “If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies’ Home Journal”, they acidly suggested.

The role of women was to play muse, not poet. Any who dared pick up a pen themselves faced ridicule, and eighteenth century mothers fretted that their bookish daughters would repel suitors. Women faced condemnation because, in straying into the male arena of literature, it was assumed that they were neglecting their key duties as housewives and mothers. Anne Bradstreet, the ‘first poet’ of America, had to pretend that her naughty brother-in-law published her work without her knowledge, and he was at pains to include a preface insisting that Anne went without sleep to write rather than slacking in her domestic duties. I found a lot of beautiful nocturnal poems written by women from times past – and couldn’t help but wonder whether this was the only sliver of time they had to themselves, when their large families were finally asleep. It was even more shocking for women to promote their own work… so thrusting! So unseemly!

Anne Bradstreet imagined in a nineteenth century engraving

The job description of the wild and free artist popularised by the Romantics, tramping off to rugged and solitary places, was inaccessible to their female contemporaries. It was difficult to pursue such a path when your corsets conspired against you, you needed a chaperone to cross the road, and nobody had yet invented hiking boots. In the Victorian era, many women, particularly of the middle and upper classes, were almost cloistered in the home. I feel this constraint shows in the melancholy and often morbid notes of much women’s poetry from the period.

Women did write, and women did publish. Through the centuries they resorted to all sorts of strategies, and took advantage where they found it. Hannah More, born in 1745, funded her literary career with an annual pension from the man who jilted her after a long engagement. Her independence – and freedom from continuous years of childbearing and rearing – enabled her to become a noted philanthropist and lady of letters.

Hannah More

Some published anonymously, others under male or gender neutral pseudonyms. But often, even if they enjoyed great acclaim during their lifetimes, they were forgotten or fell from fashion afterwards. We know that Sappho was hailed as the Tenth Muse of the ancient world, but we have only scraps of her writing now. (It has been suggested that a pope ordered her ‘scandalous’ poetry burnt, but scholars suggest that, in fact, it just wasn’t considered worthy of preservation: a familiar fate for women’s work.)

Aemilia Lanyer, who wrote a daring epic poem that imagined the crucifixion from the point of view of Pontius Pilate’s wife in 1611, was all but forgotten by scholars until she was put forward as a potential model for the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It seems that a woman is only of interest when fixed in the lustful gaze of a man.

Aemelia Lanyer

No wonder women writers longed to spread their wings. And, in verse, they did. From the first African American poet, Phillis Wheatley, to civil rights activists and stars of the Harlem Renaissance such as Georgia Douglas Johnson and Anne Spencer, they wrote uplifting and inspirational poetry. From women as different as the reclusive Emily Dickinson and the inimitable Amy Lowell, who tirelessly promoted the cause of poetry, come poems that shout and shimmy with the delights of freedom. Suffragettes including Emily Wilding Davison write passionately about throwing open the door to a new world for women. It’s a pleasure and privilege to collect their words and bring them – I hope – to some new readers.

Anne Spencer

It is also a thrill to present the works of these writers alongside work they might surely have enjoyed from some of the most exciting poets writing today. We all know that women’s freedoms are still restricted - in some places dramatically, and in others insidiously. Girls and women in today’s world are still fighting for equal access to education, careers and independence. Here, my husband and I live in the same country, but I live under a different regime: one in which I was taught while still a child that an assailant might seize my ponytail as I walked and that, if that happened, I should shout, “Fire!” to raise the alarm because people don’t come to women’s aid. Women who don’t enjoy the many privileges I have been lucky enough to enjoy face greater barriers in every sphere. So words of both fury and the joy of freedom are still important to us. Poets including Salena Godden, Hollie McNish, Safia Elhillo, Jen Campbell, Kathleen Jamie, Sheena Patel, Caroline Bird, Carol Ann Duffy and Nikita Gill have written blazing and brilliant verses that deserve to be shouted to the sky and written in words six feet high, and it was the best job in the world to gather their poems and those of so many other amazing talents for this collection. I hope their work soars into readers’ hearts.

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is published by Macmillan and available to buy in paperback now from your local bookshop or online.

In Praise of Dogs

I have made no secret where my allegiance lies: I’m a cat lady, through and through. But poets have done their best to turn my head! When I edited The Book of Dog Poems, I wrote the introduction below. Dog people, come tell me, am I speaking your language?

“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs,” Charles de Gaulle is purported to have said. If you have shared your life with a dog, you’ll understand. It’s hard to imagine even the most committed lover or the most adoring family member shouting with dizzy joy and excitement every time you come home from the shops. Yet your dog will never let your arrival pass without wild celebration, or roll its eyes when you suggest spending time together. To live with a dog is to have not just a friend, but a dedicated and enthusiastic cheerleader in your corner.

The verses in The Book of Dog Poems celebrate dogs of all ages – from the frisking puppy to the grizzled and venerable hound. They imagine a dog’s eye view of the world – the tasty puddles, the stories written in scent, the pity felt – as Chesterton’s dog Quoodle says – for the noselessness of poor man, who can’t smell the birds’ breath.

The almost infinite variety of dogs, too, is found within these pages, from the chic and cherished ‘petits chiens de Paris’ immortalised by Helen Burke to the rangy wolfish loner roaming the town’s wild outskirts, maddened by the moon. Their expressions are both keenly observed and lovingly relayed, including the curious attention of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘Dog’, head cocked quizzically like ‘a living questionmark’.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and D H Lawrence are among the writers who are – often somewhat rudely – awoken by their pets. Lawrence’s incorrigible Bibbles tears in ‘like a little black whirlwind’. Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley’s poem ‘We Meet At Morn, My Dog and I’ beautifully describes an early morning scenario many dog owners will recognise: the tail drumming on the bedroom door, the half-shout, and the desperate scuffle before his pet flings itself into the room. Owner and dog greet each other – one yawning and the other in an ecstasy of excitement, swearing ‘fresh love and fealty’ for the day ahead.

Writers have here captured the mad rapture of a dog galloping, racing ‘across morning-wet grass, high-fiving the day’ as in Lisa Oliver’s ‘Flight’. W H Auden once said, “In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag”. One of the reasons our dogs inspire such happiness is their deep and physical expressions of delight. Their naked enthusiasm is a balm in a cynical and sardonic age, in which we sometimes feel we have shed simple joy with childhood. The ecstasy they radiate is infectious. Harold Monro’s wonderful ‘Dog’ lists a litany of easy pleasures: the thrill of a walk, then heading home to the further joy of food to be bolted, drowsing to the chat of your people and sinking, untroubled, into the ‘bed-delicious hours of night’. Dogs remind us – as in Mark Doty’s ‘Golden Retrievals’ – to live with both feet in the present, to taste and savour the day without fretting about yesterday or tomorrow, to cherish the here and now.

The pleasure of exercising the dog has its place in these pages, too. There are roads to ramble and woods to wander, puddles and ponds to taste and a world of exciting smells to track in the countryside, and fire hydrants and flea markets to tempt the sophisticated urban canine.

Not all these dogs are well trained. There is plenty of mischief in these mutts. Dorothy Parker, Rupert Brooke, Jo Shapcott and Dylan Thomas celebrate the naughty dogs, the dirty dogs, the snappers and the scrappers, the destroyers of shoes and newly made beds and nippers of calves. But here, too, are working dogs like the trusty huskies, strong and solid and ready to run.

Dogs remind us that to be with those we love is the most holy of pleasures. The agony of being apart is expressed, beautifully, in several of these poems, as is the utterly joyous nature of the subsequent reunion, for both parties. The loyalty of the pet who awaits long, lonely years like Pope’s loyal Argus is matched by that of the suburban pup to whom the working day seems a desolate century, and both are transfigured with wagging happiness to be reunited with their people.

We close this collection with farewells. Poets have, for hundreds and hundreds of years, been moved to remember their canine companions with some of the most moving verse ever written. The death of such a staunch friend and constant companion is no small sorrow, the poets tell us. It’s right to mourn them as they deserve.

I hope there will be a cocked head, an excited squeak, a trailing tongue or a bright eye here you recognise. Our dogs can’t know how many passionate pages they have unwittingly inspired, but as long as there are walks and woods and puddles and petting and, afterwards, warm feet to sprawl on while you read about them, it will have been a good dog day.

 The Book of Dog Poems is illustrated throughout with Sarah Maycock’s beautiful pictures.

Things I Think I've Done Outside Because of Books

Each year, at the start of March, a snatch of poetry runs through my head:

March, black ram,

Comes in like a lion,

Goes out like a lamb.

It appeared in a book which gathered stories, rhymes and snippets of seasonal lore about winter that I pored over annually as a child. I can’t find any reference to this version of the proverb now, so I suppose the ram of Aries was added purely to give the sentiment a rhyme and rhythm. It demonstrates the sticking power of poetry, though: the music of those lines caught in my mind forever.

I had a bookish, indoors childhood, despite my parents’ best efforts to exhort me out into the fresh air. I admit that the majority of the feelings I amassed about the natural world came from books and poems. It’s no substitute for the real thing, which utterly delights me now - sorry Mum and Dad! - as I chivvy my own reluctant children – sorry, kids! – into the cold to exclaim over catkins, but it did help me build a store of natural knowledge.

It turns out I (and now, my daughters) can identify a dog violet, thanks to Flower Fairies of the Spring. My sense of seasonal aesthetics is embarrassingly obviously influenced by Brambly Hedge. April cannot dawn without Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts from Abroad’ coming to mind. I will always be unsettled by frog spawn, thanks to Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’. And every year, when my children complain about bright summer bedtimes, I find myself quoting Robert Louis Stevenson:

In winter I get up at night 
And dress by yellow candle-light.  
In summer, quite the other way, 
I have to go to bed by day.  

I have to go to bed and see         
The birds still hopping on the tree,  
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet  
Still going past me in the street.  

And does it not seem hard to you,  
When all the sky is clear and blue,  
And I should like so much to play,  
To have to go to bed by day?

Again: sorry, kids.

Later in the year, Rachel Field’s autumnal ‘sagging orchards’ in ‘Something Told the Wild Geese’ come to mind.

Something told the wild geese
It was time to go.
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered,—‘Snow.’
Leaves were green and stirring,
Berries, luster-glossed,
But beneath warm feathers
Something cautioned,—‘Frost.’
All the sagging orchards
Steamed with amber spice,
But each wild breast stiffened
At remembered ice.
Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly,—
Summer sun was on their wings,
Winter in their cry.

The geese will be chased by Nikki Giovanni’s ‘Winter’: ‘once a snowflake fell / on my brow’ and Robert Frost’s traveller, stopped among in snowy trees with ‘miles to go before I sleep’. Have I really not been in that snow-smothered wood? I see it so clearly.

Wordsworth, in ‘The Prelude’, captured the exhilaration of whirling about on ice-skates. It feels convincing even to me as a clumsy person, whose few attempts at skating (on suburban rinks resounding with Radio 1) resulted in falls eliciting audible gasps from onlookers.

It rarely snowed where I grew up. I was never ambushed by a rabble of farting frogs. I couldn’t see pedestrian’s feet from my bedroom. But reading has helped me make imaginative leaps: in the treasure house of my mind, I’ve thrilled to a chaffinch in the April orchard, even though I wouldn’t recognise one in real life if it pecked me on the head wearing a tiny ‘CHAFFINCH’ t-shirt. In my imagination, I’ve sailed across frozen lakes under a wintry sky and not just done the world’s sweariest Bambi impression, resulting in spectacular bruising. These experiences were not ‘real’, but they live in me nonetheless, and I’d be so much the poorer without them.

The success of Allie Esiri’s seasonal anthologies – A Poem for Every Spring Day, and so on, and the beautiful anthologies edited by Fiona Walters – I Am the Seed That Grew the Tree and Tiger Tiger Burning Bright – show that I’m not alone in valuing poetry as a way in to nature for young readers. Gathering material for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, I hoped the poems could inspire young champions for our planet and its wildlife, just as the museum’s collections aim to do.

In a world where we’re ever more disconnected from natural rhythms, I do believe books and poetry can help to plug us back in. And so what if most of my memories of the natural world are stitched together from things I’ve read? I can head out into the world now (dragging my complaining children… sorry, kids!) and look for all that magic this spring. I can gather it and file it with the rest, the real illuminating the imaginary and, together, building into a view of nature that weaves the experiences of so many different writers together… but is ultimately mine and mine alone, built of spring buds and birdsong — and books.

A version of this blog appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit in March 2022.

In Praise of Cats

‘The smallest feline is a masterpiece’, said Leonardo da Vinci – a man who knew a thing or two about masterpieces. From the leaping kitten, sporting with leaves or twitching in gorgeous sleep, to the elegant elderly feline reposing severely before the fire in your favourite – now claw-raked – chair, we can never be said to ‘own’ a cat. They merely consent to share our lives, always archly aware that they are doing us a terrific favour.

This is not to say that our cats do not return our affection. Far from it. People who have never lived with a cat often criticise them for being cold or aloof. Only the cat lover can understand the deep, quiet pleasures of this relationship. “What greater gift,” asked Charles Dickens, “than the love of a cat?” Cats are capricious. Cats are choosy. Your interactions with them will be, always and exclusively, on their terms. So when your lap is full of stretched and purring peace – when cats relax, they show us all how it should be done – you are sensible of the great honour. And woe betide you if you wriggle.

Cats talk to us. There are commands, like the urgent bleat informing you, their reluctant butler, that their stately progress has been impeded by a door. Every cat I have ever known has been excellent at expressing disapproval. An irritable twitch of the tail leaves you in no doubt when you have affronted them, and if cats had eyebrows (do cats have eyebrows?) it’s easy to imagine that one would be perpetually arched. But there are also love songs, eloquent in purr and nuzzle. There is the beseeching pat and the satisfied exhalation as, having been round and about and arranged you to their satisfaction, they sink down onto a friendly lap.

As I edited The Book of Cat Poems, I met cats of every stripe (and striped cats too!) Here are hymns to the malevolent bruising Tom who haunts the city alleys, swishing and wailing and mauling his wicked way through the dark hours. A cat is only ever a half-tame thing, a whisker away from the tiger. The cat who basks and dozes on the rug all day might live quite another life at night, tripping the light fantastic over the rooftops of town or prowling for prey along country lanes.

No wonder the cat is so often seen as an uncanny creature, ‘strange, so strange’, as W H Davies has it. From the sphinx of Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde to the well-worn image of the witch’s familiar, any cat lover knows full well that a little magic lives in their pet.

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods,” wrote Terry Pratchett.

“They have not forgotten this.”

While kittens delight us with their frisking, grown cats can be gracefulness incarnate. Whorled into a perfect circle to sleep, stalking along high fences or simply delicately washing their ears, they move with the kind of languid poise we lumpen humans can only admire. Even hunting – eyes enormous, tail thrashing, bottom wiggling – they are ruthlessly elegant.

Poets have devoted many verses to expressing the particular balletic charms of a cat’s movements. Amy Lowell’s ‘Winky’ – such an undignified name! – immortalises her cat’s ‘glossiness of beautiful curves’ as well as articulating its maddening, demanding but adored personality. Christopher Smart, incarcerated in an asylum with only his cat Jeoffrey for company, conjured the animal’s movements evocatively: the rolling and washing, the claw sharpening, the stretching and the rubbing against things.

Some of the world’s greatest writers have dedicated themselves to the conundrum of describing a cat’s eyes. Swinburne writes of ‘Glorious eyes that smile and burn’, and Yeats of Minnaloushe, dancing in the night with his moon-filled eyes always changing. Harold Monro’s little black cat gives a hard stare to request a saucer of milk. Anyone who has been glowered at by a cat will recognise this stern and disapproving glare, an accusatory reminder that the bowl is empty and the hour late.

I love the poems I found about the contrary nature of cats. I have never met one that didn’t find itself, like the Rum Tum Tugger, on the wrong side of every door. Your knitting will be shredded, your newspaper sprawled upon as you attempt to read it, your slumber disturbed at a ridiculous hour by an enquiring, patting paw and your dinner stolen, quite brazenly and without compunction. Cats are exasperating. Nobody who loves them could pretend otherwise. We wouldn’t have them any other way.

Happiness is a warm cat, purring in your lap, warming your feet, and – of course – nipping your toes if you have the temerity to move. Cats love to be admired, accepting all devotion – including that of some of history’s finest poets – as no more than they deserve. I guarantee that your cat will be positively delighted if you settle down to read these poems in praise of felines on a long, dark evening – as long as you don’t get up again in a hurry.

The Book of Cat Poems was obviously a joy to edit and is beautifully illustrated by Sarah Maycock.

Voyages in Verse: Editing She Will Soar

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is about to take flight in a beautiful neon green paperback. It was the second anthology I edited that gathers work by women from the ancient world to the present day. The previous volume – She is Fierce – had been a general collection, designed to be both broad and friendly, and with no particular thematic focus. She Will Soar concentrates on poems about wanderlust, freedom and escape – all subjects that have preoccupied female writers, who have always operated under more constraints than their male counterparts. And, of course, the verses I gathered took on an extra resonance during the strange, locked-down months of spring 2020.

It starts – of course – with reading.

There were poems I already knew and wanted to include. To add to these, I plundered my own shelves and those in libraries, from the small but much-loved library in my home village to the British Library and brilliant National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre (although they were closed during lockdown, they have some wonderful poetry available to browse online.) I bought second hand books, gratefully accepted bags of delights from my editor, devoured poetry publications and spent hours online. I lapped up recommendations wherever they were offered.

As the kitchen table and living room floor disappeared under the stacks of paper and books, and my apologetic intimacy with the postman deepened, I began to construct a longlist. I’m enormously grateful for technological advances that allowed me to avoid carrying a houseful of books to the nearest photocopier. An app called Tiny Scanner turns pages into printable PDFs when you photograph them on your phone. I turned my houseful of post-it noted books into towering stacks of paper, and closeted myself with them.

I always find the process of whittling down a longlist for an anthology completely agonising. It was important to me to include voices from different eras, points of view and places, so that each reader would find something that struck a chord with them, and so the anthology would have a varied music to it. So when I had two poems that expressed similar feelings, or were very like one another in tone and style, I tried to lose one of them to keep the reading experience broad and interesting. She Will Soar includes, as a result, poems from today’s spoken word superstars (Hollie McNish, Sophia Thakur), canonical big hitters (Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), forgotten pioneers (Charlotte Forten Grimké, Edith Södergran), suffragettes (Emily Wilding Davison herself, no less), talented students (Ellie Steel, Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith), eighteenth century Bluestockings (Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), a scandalous Victorian celebrity (L.E.L.), a ninth century courtesan-nun (Yü Hsüan-Chi) and a few national Laureates (Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay) among many others. It’s fascinating to find the same themes addressed in far flung places and distant eras by women leading such dramatically different lives.

Victorian celebrity poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon or L.E.L.

Since the anthology took freedom, travel and escape as its theme, some chapters suggested themselves readily. There were poems about journeys over land and by sea that travelled happily together. A chapter gathering poems in which birds and beasts appeared as emblems of freedom was eventually dropped, with my favourites from that section flying elsewhere in the volume to roost. I had also originally planned a chapter which looked at some of the ties that bound writers – constraints of society, gender and even dress – which became, as my wise editor pointed out, rather heavy reading. Some of these poems were cut and others placed elsewhere.

Once the whittling had been done, and the poems were divided into thematic chapters including ‘Words can set you free’, ‘Flights of fancy’ and ‘Taking flight’, I closeted myself with print outs of each chapter. I read the poems – silently and out loud, as I hope readers will do – and shuffled the order until it felt… right. I aim for variety but also a sense of flow even though I think anthologies are as often dipped into as read in sequence.

My final task was to write the chapter openings. In these and the book’s introduction I tried very briefly to say something about the particular circumstances of female writers: how limited their social, political, literary, economic and educational freedoms had been through many of the centuries covered. I researched and wrote brief biographies of each of them, and found some of the stories of women from earlier eras immensely moving. Many defied disapproving husbands and fathers, dismissive editors, enormous families, vicious critics or society’s censure. Some faced mental or physical illness, and even fled repressive regimes. At times it was considered so disgraceful for women to publish, they wrote under male names, as the Brontës and George Eliot did. We will never know how many more didn’t feel they could write, or wrote and didn’t publish. But these women wrote. Lots of them have fallen out of fashion, some of them were ignored or didn’t dare publish during their lifetimes. Now, though, I hope they will be read alongside some of the most talented and inspired writers of today.

This article first appeared on the Poetry by Heart website.

She Will Soar is still available in hardback or to pre-order in paperback. Please consider ordering from your local bookshop!

Introducing Primary School children to Poetry

Here’s the headline: you don’t have to. They’re already steeped in the stuff!

I’m writing some school events based around Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book at the moment. It’s so exciting choosing poems to share with children about the solar system, whales and dinosaurs. Questions to be debated include: what planets might taste of, how it might feel to meet a Kronosaurus while swimming and whether or not we’d like to be a whale. Children, you see, aren’t scared of poetry.

If you buy Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book from an independent bookshop during November 2021, email me the receipt and your address and I’ll send you a Natural History Museum postcard with personalised message and a signed bookplate.

By the time we leave school, some of us have been rather put off poetry. Actually – confession time, now – I was. Picking it apart and poring over the meanings and structure throughout my education had sucked some of the simple joy out of poetry. I became paralysed by the thought that I must understand every element, rather than just enjoying it. I had to learn to love poetry again.

Primary school children, however, don’t have any of those associations. The earliest things we hear and learn are usually songs and nursery rhymes: from the sun putting his hat on to the little piggies of our toes. We often read rhyming books with our children: my five year old is word perfect on everything from There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly to Room on the Broom, and woe betide me if I try to skip a verse to get to bedtime quicker! Children are at home in rhyme and verse before they learn to talk, so they don’t have any of the associations some adults have of poetry being fancy, or intimidating, or difficult.

So, my advice on sharing poetry with young children is just to get started! I love Lewis Carroll’s inventive and whimsical poems and I’ve read both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, illustrated beautifully by Chris Riddell, to my five and eight year olds this year. Even though today’s children won’t be familiar with the Victorian rhymes many of them parody (though they might enjoy Mary Howitt’s ‘The Spider and the Fly’, which is one of them) the nonsense and fun of ‘The Lobster Quadrille’ or ‘You Are Old, Father William’ will tickle them. Who can walk anywhere with dawdling children without invoking the lines:

“Will you walk a little faster”, said a whiting to a snail?

There’s a porpoise close behind me and he’s treading on my tail…

Edward Lear’s poems are wonderful too. Ask them to draw the Jumblies in their sea-faring sieve or the Pobble who has no toes, and watch their imaginations soar. For a modern dose of balderdash, Michael Rosen’s Book of Nonsense is great fun.

Poems can help little people tackle big feelings, too. ‘Grandma and the Sea’ in Kate Wakeling’s excellent new collection Cloud Soup will help children to process grief and loss. (It moved me to tears too, so I guess not just children!) Encouraging children to write themselves is a fantastic way to help them express themselves and examine their own emotions. They might be inspired by reading the work of other children, like Take Off Your Brave, a lovely collection of impressive and expressive poems by 4 year old Nadim.

Reading poems aloud, in as dramatic and over the top a way as possible, is a brilliant way to bring them to life to children. My daughter loves A A Milne’s ‘Disobedience’ with its rapid, building rhythm and repetition of ‘James James Morrison Morrison William George Dupree’. If you feel they’ll respond well to a touch of goriness, Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children will appeal – try Jim, who was eaten by a lion. Poet Matt Goodfellow – a former Primary School teacher himself – has a wonderful collection of poems to read aloud called Caterpillar Cake (yum!). If you’re not confident about your own performances, you can find poets reading their own work out loud online to bring it to life for children. I love Laura Mucha’s readings from Dear Ugly Sisters here.

Researching She Is Fierce I came across some wonderful, lesser known poems by women that even young children will – I hope – enjoy as much as I did. Liz Lochhead’s ‘A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly’, and Katherine Mansfield’s playful ‘When I Was A Bird’ are bound to delight younger readers. For slightly older children, the chatty, encouraging tone of ‘God Says Yes to Me’ by Kaylin Haught will appeal. Jan Dean’s ‘Three Good Things’ could inspire a discussion about the three best things to choose from their day. Jean Little’s ‘Today’ – like the poems in Allan Ahlberg’s much-loved Please Mrs Butler – speaks directly to the experience of school-children, and they will be delighted to find themselves reflected there – and with the poem’s rebelliousness.

And Wonder has opened the door to a world of nature poems on every subject from volcanoes to otters, dinosaurs to dodos, meteorites to trees. I’m very excited to introduce this book to children and am planning to schedule both live and online events throughout 2022. If you know a Primary School who would welcome one, do email me.

Poetry to inspire future planet-champions

One of the great pleasures of poetry is that the poets’ dazzling feats of imagination can whisk the reader under the sea, to another planet or to view the world from another perspective in the space of just a few lines. When I was choosing poems for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, I looked for verses that would help me see the natural world in a new way, as many of the museum’s amazing exhibits do. I hoped this shift in viewpoint would encourage children to connect more deeply with the natural world, and encourage a passion for protecting it.

The narrator of a poem can be anyone – or anything: a child, an astronaut, Charles Darwin’s wife, a duck, a dinosaur, a dodo. Children are used to suspending disbelief for the space of a poem, since we have all gorged on a diet of talking animals and magical happenings, often in rhyme, since the days when we were first read to. A poem is a portal the poet asks us to walk through, and on the other side, nothing looks quite the same.

One of the poems I’m most looking forward to sharing with young readers is Gita Ralleigh’s ‘Solar System Candy’.

If I ate the solar system,

the moon would taste

strange and dusty

as Turkish Delight.

Planets would be

giant gobstoppers,

except Saturn and Jupiter –

those gas giants

fizz like sherbert,

or melt like candy floss

in your mouth.

The meteor belt

pops and crackles

like space dust.

Comets leave a minty sting

on your tongue.

Black holes taste of cola bottles.

Or memories

you once had

and lost.

Gita’s poem is full of sensory delights that help readers of all ages to see these distant astral bodies with fresh eyes as they recall familiar tastes and sensations. I had never managed to remember which planets were made of gas, but now they taste like candy floss on my tongue, I’ll never forget! The image of Turkish Delight is perfectly chosen, reminding us of the fact that the moon’s surface is dusty enough for us to leave boot prints in it if we could walk around on it.

John Clare’s poem ‘The Ants’ starts with a human-sized perspective. We see the ants’ procession from our usual lofty height. But with the suggestion of a whispered language among the workers, suddenly the reader is urged to swoop down to eavesdrop, and to imagine the customs and commands that govern the intricately-ordered community.

What wonder strikes the curious, while he views

The black ant’s city, by a rotten tree,

Or woodland bank! In ignorance we muse:

Pausing, annoy’d, – we know not what we see,

Such government and thought there seem to be;

Some looking on, and urging some to toil,

Dragging their loads of bent-stalks slavishly:

And what’s more wonderful, when big loads foil

One ant or two to carry, quickly then

A swarm flock round to help their fellow-men.

Surely they speak a language whisperingly,

Too fine for us to hear; and sure their ways

Prove they have kings and laws, and that they be

Deformed remnants of the Fairy-days.

Some of the poems explicitly ask the reader to think themselves into the mind of a seal, or a tree, or a lizard. It’s a wonderful way to ignite children’s imaginations: who hasn’t wondered where the cat goes at night, or what an elephant might dream about? Geoffrey Dearmer’s poem ‘Whale’ – with its lovely lulling ‘rise and sink and rise and sink’ putting the reader right there in the waves – is a great example. (It will strike a chord with any parent who’s had to negotiate a child into the bath and then coax them out, too!)

Wouldn’t you like to be a whale

And sail serenely by—

An eighty-foot whale from your tip to your tail

And a tiny, briny eye?

Wouldn’t you like to wallow

Where nobody says ‘Come out!’?

Wouldn’t you love to swallow

And blow all the brine about?

Wouldn’t you like to be always clean

But never have to wash, I mean,

And wouldn’t you love to spout—

O yes, just think—

A feather of spray as you sail away,

And rise and sink and rise and sink,

And blow all the brine about?

Asking children to fire up their imaginations by reading – and writing – their way into fresh ways of seeing the natural world can foster a connection with the wonders of our planet. Hopefully, it will also inspire the next generation develop a lifelong interest in protecting it.

I’m looking forward to going into Primary Schools with an interactive talk about poetry of the natural world, asking children to imagine what planets would taste of and how it feels to be a whale, or meet a dinosaur. If you know a school that might welcome a visit, either in person or online, please do get in touch.

A version of this blog first appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit website.

Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book is out now, available from your local bookshop and Bookshop.org among other outlets.

Pregnancy: 'Who will we be when we come back?'

When I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, I asked to include a few short pieces on aspects of motherhood. I did rather regret insisting on this when I found myself combining work - both on the book and in my job as a publicist - with homeschooling my children solo. Perhaps it wasn’t the best vantage point from which to survey parenthood: I was deeply in the trenches of it. But it was still a pleasure - once I finally secured a place at Holiday Club and could hear myself think / go to the loo uninterrupted - to think back to the earliest days of my children’s lives. Here’s what I wrote about pregnancy, and some of the poems from that section I love.

We met early on. There’s an initial, thrilling tick and whirr, a flutter on a hitherto unsuspected inside edge of me. There were moments when I was going about my life – it was still mine then – and nobody but I would know that my attention was far from the meeting room or train carriage. I was straining secretly, inner ear cocked, like a dog vibrating with anticipation, for a wave or a wriggle. The second semester saw my daughter rolling and tumbling and, a scan revealed, even playing with her toes. In the last weeks there was indignant heaving, when a fist or foot could be seen – to the horror of my child-free colleagues – threatening to burst out of my bulk.

I still have ghost kicks now. Gas, obviously, but there’ll be a moment as I’m bellowing about shoes to my five year old when I’ll suddenly feel the echo of tiny her, flickering in my belly. I can’t explain to her why I’m pausing in my shrill school-run tirade but there she is, suddenly, as she was, and I’m transported. Before I thud back down into the now of book bags and morning chaos, there’s a glimpse into that time of magical possibility, when you’re first madly in love with someone you don’t yet know.

From the flood of relief when I saw a tiny ticking bean on an early scan to studying the distances between high street bins in case I had to be sick into them, I found pregnancy a peculiar time. How could it not be? Someone is having hiccups inside you! (Was I the only one who thought anxiously of those world record holders, hiccupping for twelve years straight, every time this happened?) There was the debilitating but oddly luxurious bone tiredness at the start and the end that had me sinking into unconsciousness by 9pm, and the feeling that you’ve got one foot in a new life that is still – with a first child – unimaginable.

Heartsong, by Jeni Couzyn

I heard your heartbeat.

It flew out into the room, a startled bird

whirring high and wild.

I stopped breathing to listen

so high and fast it would surely race itself

down and fall

but it held strong, light

vibrant beside the slow deep booming

my old heart suddenly audible.

Out of the union that holds us separate

you’ve sent me a sound like a name.

Now I know you’ll be born.

We began researching a slightly terrifying world of arcane equipment – from buggies to bedding, and from sterilisers to swaddling blankets. My urge towards thrifty nesting did battle with the anxiety about plunging into parenthood without some essential piece of kit, though in the event my babies seemed unperturbed by the relative cheapness of their pram. (The two things I have done in my life that made me feel most ‘mum’ were folding up a buggy and chucking it into a car boot, and putting in earrings while briefing a babysitter. Peak mum.)

The mysteries of the state of pregnancy have captured the imagination of generations of writers, from Anna Laetitia Barbauld addressing ‘a little invisible being who is expected soon to become visible’ at the dawn of the nineteenth century to Jeni Couzyn, holding her breath to hear her baby’s heartbeat. It’s time for last trips as a couple – Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi being kicked at the Colosseum, and Katharine Perry navigating the cobbles of Lille – before you need an extra suitcase for the baby gubbins and have to snatch baby-free time together during naps.

Singing Lando Lullabies, by Katharine Perry

Singing Lando lullabies to you,

Orlando, Orlando,

your eyelids soft while I dream

of the last holiday

two days in Lille, holding hands and

sleeping all night in ironed, white sheets, undisrupted.

He kissed my hair going out to dinner,

dark green dress against the dark blue night air,

with heels tripping over the cobbles of the old town.

Seven courses and marble stairs and glistening glass.

They made a special effort not to serve blue cheese,

so that you were safe.

And on the train, through the streets,

eating chips at lunch,

and delicate meats at dinner,

we talked about your name.

Felix Lexington;

Too many ‘xs’.

Orlando Lexington;

too many American places.

Lexington after the pub in Kings Cross

where we met on the dance floor.

I wanted Leonard,

He wanted Ulysses.

I mentioned how handsome he would look

if his name was Orlando.

And I think about handsome you are now;

my little Lando.

We look, half shyly, at children of all ages and wonder: what will she be like then? And then? What will it feel like to hold his hand crossing a road, to tuck her into bed, to carry them on my hip instead of within? And, as Liz Berry asks in ‘The Steps’: ‘Who will we be when we come back?’ Parents are newborn, too, when their children arrive.

Already looking into an invisible distance, already handing in our resignations from our child-free existence, my fellow parenting class students and I lumbered increasingly slowly around the neighbourhood. We lowered ourselves like hippos into the water of the local lido, chuckling at the panic on the skinny lifeguard’s face as he calculated which of our massive frames he would be able to heave out of the water if necessary. We awaited dispatches from the ones who had rudely interrupted these last hazy days by doing the thing we each, privately, thought wouldn’t really happen to us – giving birth. We obediently ate our pineapple and sipped our raspberry leaf tea. And we waited.

Taken from Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, published by Trapeze.

Books about art and artists

I’m absolutely loving Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from French by Jessica Moore. The writing - about art-making but also about being in your early twenties and pinging around Europe (sob!) - is sumptuous and sensuous, with whole paragraphs so beautiful I have to read them a few times. (Plus utter kudos to my colleagues at MacLehose Press for creating an artwork of a goldie-looking book - honestly, she’s a stunner.) So I thought I’d gather some other writing about art and artists I have loved for my newsletter (sign up here if you like that sort of thing) and put it here too.

The Naked Muse by Kelley Swain

I worked on the publicity for this beautiful little book from indie publisher Valley Press in 2016. It’s an elegant, thought-provoking memoir of Kelley’s time as an artists’ model. She’s a poet, and the writing is delicious. She talks about how it feels to disrobe in a room full of clothed strangers, and to see yourself as others portray you. I learned so much from this book about art, the act of looking and being looked at, and our relationship with our bodies.

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth MacNeal

Set among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Victorian London, this wonderful novel is drenched with great period detail. Elizabeth is brilliantly eloquent on artistic ambition and the weight of male expectation and attention - and obsession - on women, and there are fun cameos from Millais, Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal and a suffocatingly tense and gripping denouement.

The Bellini Madonna by Elizabeth Lowry

A lost Old Master, a stifling heatwave, a crumbling English country pile, its innocent - or is she? - young custodian and a corrupt art sleuth. All this AND Robert Browning in Italy. I had the pleasure of working on Elizabeth’s Mantel-approved gothic masterpiece Dark Water, and I’ll read everything she ever writes. Get into her - you won’t regret it.

Desperate Romantics by Franny Moyle

This was the book that kick-started my interest in the Pre-Raphaelites. For a while I was a book reviewer for BBC Radio Oxford, and this was one of the books that was sent to me for consideration. I just fell in love. It’s non-fiction (so doesn’t take all the liberties with the history that the entertaining BBC series based on it did) but it’s deeply researched, lively and fascinating.

Fake Like Me by Barbara Bourland

A book I loved working on, Fake Like Me is a dark, sharp, feminist art-world satire boasting a gang of infamous, crazily talented young artists, legendary parties, a no-name artist desperately re-making her most triumphant works and an eerie but opulent house designed by her dead artistic hero. But… a lot still needs to be explained about Carey Logan’s tragic death. And, just in case you’re not already sold, the book is a sly modern take on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Delicious.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

It moves so slowly! How did she keep me so completely entranced? This Pulitzer Prize winning novel about Theo Decker’s life after he is orphanned in the bombing of a museum is a many-splendoured thing. It’s adorned with fantastic writing and intriguing plotting and at its heart lies a tiny painted masterpiece.

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

I recommend this book A LOT but it deserves it! It’s darkly funny but agonisingly acute on humiliation, loneliness and need. Tom is a spectacular writer. He asks what makes a great artist, and what damage might they be permitted to wreak due to their talent. It’s a delicious satire on connoisseurship, too. The sections with larger-than-life artist Bear painting and partying in glamorous bohemian 1950s Rome are especially wonderful.

Effie by Suzanne Fagence Cooper

I loved this lively biography of Effie Gray, who married John Ruskin - the foremost art critic of the Victorian age. The marriage was never consummated and was eventually scandalously annulled, freeing Effie to marry wunderkind painter John Everett Millais, with whom she had fallen in love during a peculiar Scottish trip during which he painted her husband’s portrait. It’s a fascinating look at Victorian high society and the art world. I loved it so much I was quite starstruck when I worked on Suzanne’s book on Ruskin’s writings, To See Clearly - a brilliant introduction to this incredibly prescient thinker who was interested in conservation, the value of work, the natural world, responsible travel and so many other issues that resonate today. She is now working on a book about Jane and William Morris that I cannot wait to get my paws on.

‘Not My Best Side’ by U A Fanthorpe

I love poems about art and artists (and perhaps that’s another blog) but here’s one that always tickles me: ‘Not My Best Side’. It’s inspired by Paolo Uccello’s eerily beautiful painting George and the Dragon, which can be seen in the National Gallery. I love the knight’s assertion that

‘I have diplomas in Dragon

Management and Virgin Reclamation’.

So… what did I miss?

I’ll get kicked out of the booklovers’ club for saying this, but I wasn’t blown away by Ali Smith’s How To Be Both, which boasted some lovely writing but somehow it didn’t quite hang together for me.

Please note that this article includes affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you buy through them. I only link to books I really love.

The Poetry Exhange

I first became aware of The Poetry Exchange after meeting John Prebble at the 2019 Chiddingstone Literary Festival. It was a wonderful day full of treats: a fantastically lively event, a surprise appearance from one of my former English teachers and Joanne Harris making friends with my mum in the Green Room, making her the envy of her book club. Meeting John and learning about The Poetry Exchange was another gift. I so hope we can have those experiences again soon.

The Poetry Exchange invite people to talk about a poem that has been a friend to them. They have an excellent podcast - I’ve recently enjoyed interviews with actor Brian Cox and about Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’ - but they also give people the chance to explore their relationship with a poem in depth, with the Exchange’s poetry gurus. I was beyond thrilled to be asked to participate, and the poem that first sprung to mind was Liz Berry’s sensational ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ - which you can read in full here - so I asked to bring that to the discussion.

I read a LOT of poetry. I’m currently completing edits on my eleventh anthology, and I must have read many thousands of poems over the past decade, many of which have become cherished talismans. But to have the opportunity to dive deep into a poem I love, to pore over what it meant to me for an hour or so, was a novel luxury and a completely wonderful experience. It felt medicinal. I recalled the first time I met ‘The Republic of Motherhood’, stumbling across it online when my youngest daughter was one and we were still in the grip of baby madness. I was electrified. I had never seen a poem that spoke like this or about this.

The image of the totalitarian state of motherhood - the uniform, the ritual, the red book bureaucracy, the prescribed choruses - is perfect.

‘As required, I stood beneath the flag of Motherhood
and opened my mouth although I did not know the anthem.’

I know Liz is saying something deep and true about the expectations placed on mothers not to deviate from the sanctioned hymn sheet of baby-wrangling bliss, but she also managed to remind me of my bafflement at parachuting into this strange territory without having learned the language. Where did the five little ducks go swimming one day? How did everyone else know when to Zoom Zoom Zoom their nonplussed babies? What actually was weaning, or mastitis, or cluster feeding?

Liz captured so vividly how the neighbourhood through which I had previously hustled in heels to work was transfigured by crossing that border, the mundane made strange. I was now one of the daytime denizens, bundled in puked-on cardigans ‘soft as a creature’ against the cold, blearily pounding the pavements. My suddenly small world was landmarked by draughty church halls, weighing clinics, libraries offering Rhyme Time and coffee shops with enough space between the tables for me to bump and shamble my buggy through. On the outskirts of one of the world’s most exciting cities, I pottered between municipal amenities in an exhausted daze.

I had been so avowedly urban, such an indoors cat, that I hadn’t owned a waterproof coat until I had my first baby. I always figured that if it rained I would use an umbrella (impossible to hold while pushing a pram) or just, I breezily told my husband, “go in a shop.” With a baby who was frequently incensed in company but tranquil when I pushed her for miles, I became an outdoor creature. When Liz writes of pushing her pram through freeze and blossom and, later, daffodils, I was reminded - by the sensitively incisive questions from John and Andrea - how that year plugged me back into the seasons’ rhythms for the first time since my own childhood. I don’t think it was just that I spent so many hours tramping the Common, although my daughter’s urban world was bounded by duck ponds and dandelion clocks, snowdrops and squirrels. There’s something about parenthood that links us to the turning world again: a growing baby is a yardstick against which to measure the years.

What Andrea and John helped me to understand was something I already knew on an intellectual level: that we bring our own emotions and memories to every piece of art we encounter. When speaking about poetry, I often point out that nobody expects two people to listen to the same record and have the same response - there might be a sticky-floored nightclub in my mind’s eye and a sun-soaked beach in yours - but school has left most of us with the idea that there’s only one way to understand a poem. Discussing the poem in such detail made realise just how deeply, vividly personal my response to Liz Berry’s Republic had been. It looks like Tooting to me, but everyone who reads it will map their own psychic geography onto the poem, and it will belong to them.

Liz also talks about the physical toll of childbearing, in a way I hadn’t previously seen literature of any kind do: the fistfuls of moulting hair, the aching, exhausted ‘spindled bones’. If you’re lucky, a first pregnancy can be a deliciously cosseted time: take my seat! Don’t lift that! Build yourself up with nourishing meals! The poem brilliantly evokes the shock of being plunged into an unfamiliar, manual job with round-the-clock demands - the tender drudgery of ‘Feedingcleaninglovingfeeding’ - while feeling like you’ve been run over. There never seemed to be time to get going on that vegetable garden I had so naively planned for my maternity leave. There was barely time to prepare any food for myself that required more than one hand. By four months in, I was about 95% biscuit. I have a shoulder and a bladder that will never be the same again, and Liz told me I wasn’t alone.

The image of the doctors in the poem - ‘slender and efficient’ - is quietly devastating in opposition to how the new mother feels. And the three of us talked for some time about the searing phrase ‘its unbearable skinless beauty’. There’s a poem called ‘Vixen’ by Glenda Beagan, also in Night Feeds and Morning Songs, which opens with the line: ‘motherhood peels me bare’. With John and Andrea, I probed these phrases. Why had they struck me so emphatically? There was much to unpack about the vulnerability I had felt in early motherhood, poised to panic when my baby erupted and, later on, the heartache of your children’s fragility when they are out in the world, out of your arms, blithely oblivious to your agony that they could be scalded or trampled or sneered at by the world.

It feels, to me, as though ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ builds to a climax that is a shout of sisterhood. Fervently, devoutly, the narrator asserts her citizenship of this wild queendom and her solidarity with its denizens - especially the traumatised, especially the haunted. The poem underlined the sense I had all through editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs of these verses forming a literary community during a locked-down time when we couldn’t access a physical one. Poetry of all kinds has been important to me this past year, and I don’t think I’m the only one. It can be gobbled even when time is short or attention is scattered to feed us by reminding us of our fellow travellers and our shared feelings.

Talking to John and Andrea about this poem felt intimate, emotional and deeply therapeutic. I discovered new personal reference points in a poem I love and savoured each beautifully constructed line and striking image with new relish. The sheer indulgent pleasure of being asked to examine the chords it struck in my memories and mind shouldn’t have been a surprise for someone who has been working with poetry for over a decade, but somehow it was.

There are now many people, publications and organisations who bang the drum for poetry’s mental health benefits: William Sieghart, whom I was lucky enough to interview about his Poetry Pharmacy books and Deborah Alma who edited The Emergency Poet anthology and runs the Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire among them. I’ve often written on the subject myself for publications including The Daily Express and Red Online. But being given time and permission to spend this long with a poem that has been a friend to me was an extraordinary and unexpected gift that gave me a deeper understanding of how poetry works on us as well as a greater love for this poem in particular. I resolve to make time to sit with a poem in this way more often, to suck out its marrow and let it work its magic on me. The Poetry Exchange is a wonderful thing and I’m so grateful to have encountered it.

You can find out more about The Poetry Exchange here and listen to their award-winning podcasts here.

You can buy Liz Berry’s wonderful pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood here or from your local bookshop.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs, an anthology of poems about motherhood, can be bought here or from your local bookshop.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)

Poems for Christmas

For me, the greatest gift of the Christmas season is time to read. The offices and schools are closed. This year, pubs, restaurants, shops and cinemas will be off the menu for many, too. The weather is often appalling. The nights are long and dark and seem designed expressly for the purpose of snuggling under a blanket on the sofa with the tree lights twinkling, a glass of something tempting within easy reach and a great big pile of delicious-smelling, beautiful new books. Here are some of my poetic festive favourites – all would make great gifts, too.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Frost Fair is completely wonderful, and makes me hanker after a re-read of Woolf’s Orlando. It’s so beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, it would make a lovely stocking filler.

Never has the exhilaration of whirling about on ice-skates been better captured than by Wordsworth, in a breathless and beautiful section of ‘The Prelude’ which I included in my second anthology, Tyger Tyger Burning Bright. I speak as a clumsy person, whose few attempts at skating have resulted in the kind of falls that elicit audible gasps from witnesses and some truly spectacular bruising. If Wordsworth can fill me with the desire to sail across frozen lakes under a wide wintry night sky, he can inspire anyone.

‘The Journey of the Magi’ by T S Eliot has an eerie, cold magic to it, perfect for reading and chewing over on a bitter winter’s night.

I love Betjeman’s ‘Christmas’ - hear the man himself read it here, with its evocation of the pull of family even more poignant this oddest of years (‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, / And oafish louts remember Mum’) and the seasonal cheer infecting everyone everywhere – from ‘provincial public houses’ to ‘many-steepled London’. I want to be in that country pub and on those glittering city streets for Christmas 2021.

Thomas Hardy’s gorgeous ‘The Fallow Deer at the Empty House’ is a favourite.

And Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ perfectly captures how some scrap of childhood magic can cling to Christmas Eve and the vision of the nativity no matter what age and how agnostic I am.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

A contemporary poem I love is one for the festive refuseniks: ‘Bah… Humbug’ by Gregory Woods. This year, there will be lots of people perhaps missing the jolly chaos of a family Christmas, but this poems is a hymn to the allure of a solitary, batteries-not-included celebration with ‘books to the left of you, / gin to the right’. This poem was included in Christmas Crackers, one of Candlestick Press’s lovely pamphlets designed to be sent instead of a greetings card – perfect if you’d like to say something more substantial than ‘Season’s greetings’.

I bought a beautiful edition of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ a few years ago with Niroot Puttapipat’s beautiful silhouette illustrations and am frankly delighted that the kids insist on hearing it all year round. Due to our – frequently unseasonal – repeated readings, I am now word perfect. This confers an additional advantage: I can name all the reindeer (and, no, Rudolf doesn’t feature) and am therefore a splendid addition to any Christmas pub quiz team. Moore was a slightly unlikely Christmas poet, being an academic whose other works were heavy tomes on Hebrew. Legend has it that he composed this, his only famous poem, to entertain his children during a sleigh ride through Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve 1822, basing jolly St Nicholas on their coachman. I hope it’s true.

Also for children (though not only for children), I recommend the excellent selection of Christmas Poems edited by Gaby Morgan (who I’m lucky enough to have as editor for my Macmillan anthologies) and illustrated by Axel Scheffler of Gruffalo fame. And The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland by Carys Bexington, beautifully illustrated by Kate Hindley, was a new favourite last year with great verse, glorious pictures and clever homages to both beloved texts.

It’s not poetry, but I have to mention A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, which I try and read every year. And this year I have put Carol Ann Duffy’s new collection of Christmas poems on my wishlist.

Whatever you do at Christmas and wherever you are, I wish you happy reading. May your stocking be full of books and your cheeseboard always groaning.

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On 'Strange Meeting'

When I was fifteen, I had words on my wall. Between the pictures of Kurt Cobain, Withnail and Bagpuss I taped up my favourite poems: Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. (I would have felt it necessary to defend Bob’s inclusion at the time, but a Nobel Prize for Literature is a good passport to the pantheon of poets in anyone’s book.) ‘Fern Hill’ is all beauty, a hymn of pleasure tinged with the delicious ache of a nostalgia I was too young to really understand. ‘Mr Tambourine Man’’s lines about dancing beneath the diamond sky chimed with all the yearning for hedonistic beach parties a landlocked British teenager could muster (a lot). But why Wilfred?

I studied the First World War in class, like generations of school children since that cataclysm. We traced the underlying causes – the webs of European alliances, the scramble for arms, the rallying drumbeat of nationalism – and the fate of Franz Ferdinand. We learnt about the battles, the tactics and the casualties. But it wasn’t until we began to read war poetry that the terrors endured by the men - boys, really, most of them – came alive for me.

The Great War encouraged thousands to put pen to paper, producing plays and novels as well as poetry. Ordinary people turned to writing to process their experiences, and a generation of ‘trench poets’ sprang up almost overnight. In 1916 a canny London publisher printed an anthology called Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men – with a portable lightweight edition for the boys at the Front – and a second volume followed in 1918. Rupert Brooke’s patriotic war poetry and tragic death – from a mosquito bite, rather than in action – set the tone and his 1914 and Other Poems became a runaway bestseller. The disenchanted work of poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Owen found few fans at the time.

After the Armistice in November 1918 most of the war poets stopped writing – nobody mention the war – and only Brooke continued to sell in any numbers, bringing comfort to a grieving nation. However, at the end of the 1920s controversial memoirs of life in the trenches including Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front began to appear. These books ate away at any remaining illusions about the conflict. The writers whose patriotism turned to horrified disgust in the face of that war’s horrors are the ones whose words touch us most deeply now.

‘Strange Meeting’ is a work of hallucinatory horror. The epic language – vain citadels, blood-clogged chariot wheels, the swiftness of the tigress – evokes the colossal scale of the tragedy. Owen forces the reader to contemplate the squandered value of every one of the millions of lives lost, on both sides. Owen met Sassoon while recovering from shell shock in Scotland – ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were’. Both men longed to close the vast gap of understanding between the troops at the Front and those left behind in Blighty, and ‘Strange Meeting’ is part of that quest. It is an enormous poem, straining with emotion, but written with extraordinary control. The unsettling half-rhymes (swiftness/tigress) and pararhymes (hall/Hell; groined/groaned) are designed to disturb. The time was out of joint; easy rhyme and gentle rhythm would be a betrayal of Owen’s message. The poem is a howl – though it isn’t without beauty: ‘hunting wild’ was a phrase I liked so much, I remember doodling it on my exercise books.

Wilfred Owen

There are other poems by Owen that are perhaps better known – ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ among them – but this was the one that had spoken so clearly to me I have never forgotten it. The experience of a sheltered suburban schoolgirl was light years away from the troops mired in mud on the Western Front but, like all great poetry, it seemed to take me there. Poetry is personal. It has been a privilege and a joy to edit volumes of it, and I can heartily recommend compiling your own anthology of favourites – physically and, if you can, in memory.

Reading brings so many rewards. It can parachute us into other lives, and whisk us off to exotic – or even imaginary – places. It can arouse powerful emotions and readers develop empathy through experiencing, second-hand, what the writer has endured or enjoyed. Poetry, with its inventive use of language, feels even more intimate than prose. Committing poems to heart helps us to absorb this nourishment even more fully, as we add the poet’s words to our mental furniture. In a world in which there is still so much war, ‘Strange Meeting’ is as essential to the canon as it was a hundred years ago.