Hello! Thank you very much for signing up to my newsletter. I’m going to use this to point out things I’ve seen, read or heard that I’ve enjoyed as well as sharing what I’ve been up to.

Poems about friends

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. Most appear in She is Fierce, now out in an unmissably orange paperback edition.

Lacing Boots by Helen Burke

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.

(For those of a certain vintage, see also all records by Shampoo… It cannot be said I’m not offering a full range of artistic experiences here, you’re welcome.)

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.

National Poetry Day News

I’m frankly completely giddy to report that National Poetry Day (1st October) have chosen my forthcoming anthology, She Will Soar, as one of their recommendations this year. This book includes poems about freedom, wanderlust and escape by women – a theme that was chosen in 2019 and suddenly had a new and unexpected resonance as I finished the collection in lockdown. I’ve found some wonderful poems, some old and some brand new, for it and can’t wait for people to read them.

What I’ve been reading

Featured poem

We have all had such different experiences of this pandemic. I’ve been closeted with my children, often exasperated but safely removed from the frontline. My amazing sister works in Intensive Care, and the gap of experience between us feels a bit like wartime soldiers in the trenches versus Home Front ladies doggedly digging for Britain but also whinging about butter shortages.

One of my favourite poems in These Are The Hands is ‘Explaining my night shift to my mother’ by Consultant Paediatric Intensivist Colin Begg. I think it describes this gap of understanding beautifully. Thanks to Nadia Kingsley of Fair Acre Press for permission to reproduce it here.

New(ish) on the blog

Other stuff I’ve enjoyed this month

• Vanessa Kisuule’s brilliant poem about the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol - watch her perform it here.

• This excellent episode of the Backlisted podcast based around Frost in May by Antonia White, a book about a girl at a convent school that I was absolutely obsessed with as a teenager.

• Watching the Greta Gerwig Little Women with my daughter (and trying to explain why I was softly weeping about copyright at the end.)

• I’ve been working on the publicity for Candice Brathwaite’s I Am Not Your Baby Mother: What it’s like to be a black British mother and her interview about race and motherhood with The High Low podcast was especially brilliant. Listen again here.

• Cooking from my beloved One Pound Meals and Roasting Tin books (even if my children are not always truly thankful for what I put in front of them.)

• Listening to Emily Maitlis give the inside scoop on news reporting in her fascinating book Airhead.

• Supporting an issue of Modern Poetry in Translation edited by the brilliant Dead [Women] Poets which focusses on - yep - poems by dead women translated into English. Very much my bag, obviously. You can support the issue and buy a copy here if it’s also yours.

Thanks for reading! Any feedback would be gratefully received, given this is my first attempt at a newsletter, and if you liked it please don’t hesitate to share with likeminded readers.