Thanks very much for signing up to my newsletter. Here’s the bookish or book-adjacent bits and pieces that have been occupying me over the past few weeks. (You can find more of this kind of thing on my website, too)

The Poetry Exchange

I was lucky enough this month to participate in an online session with The Poetry Exchange, who invite people to talk in depth about a poem that has been a friend to them, in my case Liz Berry’s sensational ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ – which you can read in full here.

I read a LOT of poetry. I’m currently completing my eleventh anthology, and I have read thousands of poems over the past decade. 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 that – for some reason – I’d never before allowed myself. It felt medicinal.

With prompts from The Poetry Exchange’s John and Andrea, I unpacked how the neighbourhood through which I had previously hustled in heels to work was transfigured by crossing that border Liz writes about. I was now one of the daytime denizens, bundled in puked-on cardigans ‘soft as a creature’ against the cold, blearily pounding the pavements. 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’d 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 how that year plugged me back into the seasons’ rhythms for the first time since my own childhood. My daughter’s urban world was bounded by duck ponds and dandelion clocks, snowdrops and squirrels.

The three of us talked for some time about the searing phrase describing motherhood’s ‘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’. We 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.

Talking to John and Andrea about this poem, I discovered new personal reference points in a poem I love and felt anew how much of ourselves we bring to every reading experience. We’d never expect everyone to have the same mental images in response to a song on the radio, and we need to get out of the thinking – a hangover from school? – that a poem or a book is any less personal. What a wonderful thing it is that the Poetry Exchange does. I feel so privileged to have been able to participate.

A fuller article about my experience of participating in The Poetry Exchange can be found here.

You can find out more about The Poetry Exchange here and listen to their award-winning podcasts here. (I love the episode with Succession actor Brian Cox, whose autobiography I’ll be working on later this year!)

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

Talking and Writing

I’m always up for talking about books and poetry or book publicity, whether it’s for school groups, libraries, bookshops, festivals, corporate events or writing groups, so I’ve given the Events page of my website a little spring clean.

I can also talk to your writing group and give an insider’s view of book publicity – find details here.

I really enjoyed talking to Carolyn Jess-Cooke, one of the poets in Night Feeds and Morning Songs who is also the editor of the brilliant anthology Writing Motherhood, for an online event for the Stay At Home Literary Festival. You can watch our conversation here.

It was also a pleasure to chat to Karen Huxtable of Exeter Libraries about Night Feeds and Morning Songs and parenting in a pandemic, which you can watch here.

On June 26th at 12 noon, I’m very excited to be talking online to novelist and poet Polly Clark about motherhood and creativity for the Felixstowe Literary Festival. You can book tickets here.

Recommended reading

Featured poem

This is one of many favourites in Hollie McNish’s new book Slug, which also includes funny, scathing, insightful written pieces. (I loved the one in which Hollie is asked to read a poem about painful sex on a bed which is inexplicably decorated with cuddly toys and asks herself whether Mr Big from Sex and the City would be asked to do the same. What a brilliant yardstick for insidious sexism.)

The whole book is joyous and honest and moving and brilliant and this poem feels like a shot in the arm. You can see Hollie on tour later this year: buy tickets here.

New on the blog

Other stuff I’ve enjoyed this month

• The kids and I are on a roll with great chapter books at the moment. Having just finished Nevermoor by Jessica Townsend, we’re now enjoying The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone.

• Not everybody loved it, but I enjoyed The Pursuit of Love. It’s been a while since I wore anything without an elasticated waist and the colour and glamour of this adaptation was really welcome.

• With a Call My Agent spoiler warning, this is an excellent piece by Eliane Glaser about the damaging cult of perfect motherhood. I’ll be looking out for her book Motherhood: A Manifesto (as well as every coat featured in Call My Agent, obviously.)

• I have completed my set of Rukmini Iyer’s amazing Roasting Tin books by investing in The Green Roasting Tin and I want to put it all in my face AT ONCE. If you’re not veggie and are new to the #Tinlads, I recommend starting with The Quick Roasting Tin. You’ll probably buy all the others about a fortnight later, in my experience.

• Francesca Steele’s new podcast Write-Off looks at literary rejections and I found the episode with Anna Hope, author of Expectation, fascinating.

• I’m reading and hugely enjoying Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House and I came across this elegant essay on books, houses and hauntings by Ursula Brunetti.

Thanks for reading! Any feedback would be gratefully received, and if you enjoyed this newsletter please don’t hesitate to share with likeminded readers.