Why did we move from the (now infamous) Barnard Castle, across the Irish Sea to Malahide, in North County Dublin? It’s always the same reason. Work. I didn’t have a job, and my husband was made redundant (Imagine! His expertise is in the sterile filling of injectable biotech products – e.g. vaccines – into vials ready for injection…) so we both job-hunted in the UK in 2019/20 and found nothing, which I think is an indicator of the damage Brexit is doing to the UK economy. Then a headhunter approached him about a job in Dublin, where there are LOTS of jobs in pharma / biotech manufacturing, so as of July 2020, here we are.

This happened just as I had got to the end of writing Following Teisa, my pamphlet-length poem about the River Tees. I thought the house move would scupper any attempts to have it published, but I have been lucky enough to attend Poetry Society Stanza meetings in Penrith, led by Kathleen Jones, who runs The Book Mill. She saw many sections of this poem develop over the last few months and has so kindly agreed to publish it as a book. We are at the exciting stage of formatting the text, commissioning some original artworks, and choosing a cover – of which more in later posts. I hope to be able to support the launch and publicity for this book in person, or on Zoom – the technological saviour of the last 18 months without which many of us would have been totally bereft.

In the process, two sections of the poem-that-is-ninety-miles-long have been fortunate. The first section: ‘Teeshead to Cow Green’ was first published in Reliquiae (Vol 8 No 1, Corbel Stone Press 2020). ‘The Tees Roll’ section was commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2020. These sections were both included in Not Past But Through – Poems About Rivers from Grey Hen Press 2021, edited by Joy Howard.