I haven’t updated this site for ages but I am still here and unexpectedly thriving. Chemotherapy didn’t work for me, but an extremely high tech immunotherapy appears to have cleared the Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma tumours in my abdomen. I spent a lot of time in hospital last year, and finally in early October I was given CAR-T therapy, which is explained here.

I was only the 43rd patent in Ireland to receive CAR-T, It’s very expensive. A PET scan four weeks after the therapy showed NO evidence of tumour, and a repeat scan in January confirmed the result.

I am still in a state of disbelief. It seems like 2023 was spent in a nightmare from which I am only just awaking. And no, I haven’t written poems about it. Other writers have done a better job of writing about cancer than I could. I’ve written very little, but I do need to update my publication list because I’ve had some success in the last few months.

Anyway, here’s a photo of the treated T cells waiting to be infused back into my arm. Yes, they might look like chicken liver pate, but they are, in fact, pure sorcery.

I’ve been quiet for a long time. When my head is full of what’s going on in the world, it’s hard to get into the frame of mind for a poem. I’ve tended to sit and brood, between marches, on what’s to become of us. I feel it is imperative for poets to speak about the state we’re in, but when I try to, it doesn’t necessarily make for my best poetry. It’s not emotion recollected in tranquility. However, other poets are doing better than I am. Bill Herbert and Andy Jackson have managed to collect a good crop of poems about Brexit, Austerity, Trump, and the Far Right in the latest chapter of New Boots and Pantisocracies where I was honoured to have a poem included.

It’s a year since my pamphlet came out and I’m grateful for two reviews from people who actually understand exactly what I tried to say. London Grip‘s James Roderick Burns gave a very kind review and Rennie Halstead in Sphinx talks about my interest in the outsider, here. I’ve still got a few copies of the book, by the way, if anyone wants one.

In many ways, poets are always outsiders. It’s easy to notice things when you are observing them rather than being involved. It’s easier to notice the uniqueness of places and people and attitudes when you come from a different place. I remember being forcibly struck by Glyn Maxwell’s poem, ‘Come to Where I’m From‘, for a witty and poignant evocation of a place that maybe few people feel is poetic (Maxwell comes from Welwyn Garden City).

I’m still writing about places; Teesdale, where I am living now, and lots of places from my past. Since moving north five years ago I’ve noticed the huge difference between the way that poets in the Thames Valley talk about their home towns and the way Teesside poets talk about theirs. I’m a bit obsessed, right now, with what makes England, and what makes the English. That’s just a reflection of the times we live in.

It’s very heartening for a poet to get some feedback on their work. Sometimes it feels like we are shouting at the wind. I’d like to thank London Grip and James Roderick Burns for a much appreciated review:

These are not sad poems, or despairing in any way. They simply note the small accretions of feeling with each new location (or perhaps dislocation) that takes place in the poet’s life – the north east, her Scottish roots, the Pennines, London. Images of rootedness lost, the struggle to identify with a new place or circumstance, and inevitable departure pile up page after page, lending the whole volume a rich, melancholy air.

Poet Sarah Watkinson, whose work I very much admire, has also said a few nice things (unprompted!) about the pamphlet on a poetry FB page. Thank you Sarah!

Beautiful poems about place, displacement and identity, soundly but unobtrusively crafted, working together in a way collections rarely do, to create a 4D picture of what’s it’s like to be British. I particularly liked ‘Underworld’ for its picture of ghosts and ‘piston-draught’ in the London Undergound, and ‘Epigenetics’, with its brilliant last line. And ‘Deposition’. The voice is extremely engaging, and personal without egotism. Bravo!

I have two exciting opportunities to read from the pamphlet coming up:

The Witham Arts Centre, Horsemarket, Barnard Castle, on Thursday 27th September at 6pm. My home crowd! Please come along – it’s FREE!

Poetry Swindon Festival, reading with Rachael Clyne and Sarah L. Dixon + Open Mic
Thursday 4th October, Tent Palace of the Delicious Air 13.30 – 15.30.

I’m delighted that a pamphlet that has so much about the North and the South in it, will be heard in both of those places.

My poem “Back to the Six Bells” is based on two things: first of all, my second date with the man who is now my husband, in August 1990. (In case you wondered, our first date was the Brighton Beer festival, where he ate chips with mushy peas in the hope it would impress a northern lass.) We went walking in Sussex, and ended our walk at the Six Bells in Chiddingly, a quintessential English pub. It was a Bank Holiday weekend and as well as a fleet of bikers, there were Morris Dancers, warm beer, and a cricket pitch with a match in progress. The second thing was a dream I had in which England was presented as a quilt (I was glad to find there are artists that do make cartographic quilts, such as Alicia Merrett for example) and I pointed to that part of Sussex and said we should live there. To that extent it was a dream about going back to a beginning, maybe even a time before England went wrong, and that is reflected in the poem.

Back to the Six Bells

Sometimes I dream of England as a quilt
that I run my fingers over, feeling the hum
of motorways like the ribs of flat-felled seams,
the velour of fields, and sequinned towns
that catch beneath my fingernails. I feel
the textured border separating Sussex
and Kent, felted with hop bines and apple trees.
We’re going to live… here, I say, among pantiles
where the stately homes hold plant sales
and vintage cars thread meadowsweet lanes,
near the place where you and I first went walking.
You, in a cowfield in a red T shirt. You, at the pub
where cricketers and morris men wove
through a village soft with sunshine. When we still had
all of England spread out in front of us.

I workshopped this poem with my usual workshop group. A well-known poet, whom I really respect, told me that I couldn’t write about England in those terms any more, because the far-right now own that version of Englishness. When I was putting together my poems for The Ship-Owner’s House, I told this to my editor, the wonderful Jackie Litherland, who agreed with me that we cannot allow the far-right to define Englishness. We have to reclaim our culture in a number of ways, and poetry must be one of them. This thought is going to feature in my work for some time to come.

There have been so many poetry events in the last couple of weeks. On Thursday 26th April I read in York, at the lovely wood-panelled York Explore library, with Harry Gallager and Cherie Taylor-Battiste. It was great to catch up briefly with Carole Bromley. On Friday 27th I read from Deborah Alma’s #MeToo Anthology at Gill Lambert and Mark Connors’ Word Club in Leeds, where I also said hi to Zelda Chappell and met Lesley Quayle for the first time in real life. Those two events are why I couldn’t spend more time at the T-Junction festival, where the pamphlet was officially launched, at MIMA in Middlesbrough. The bits of the the festival I did get to were inspiring. Then yesterday, in tropical Hexham, I was delighted to read with the Vane Women as part of the Hexham Book Festival. I was dreading a hot, stuffy reading, but was delighted to find we were reading in a cellar bar; The Vault, on Hallgate. Although the venue was packed, it stayed cool, and allowed us to make jokes about Underground Poetry. The photo above is of the amazing Gillian Allnutt, reading as a guest of the Vane Women.

Now I’ve got all that excitement over with, I really have to think about writing some more poems. But first I think I should read some of the pile of poetry books on my bedside table.

The book exists in the real world. I collected a couple of boxes last Friday, and yesterday was the official publication day. Not only that, but you can BUY A COPY via the Vane Women Press website, which is here…!

I hope you enjoy it. Please tell me if you do – or if you don’t!

I should perhaps say something about the title poem. When we moved to Barnard Castle, we bought a big brick-built house on top of a hill on the edge of the town. It’s very windy and cold here sometimes, but the views over the back of Arkengarthdale are HUGE!

I did a bit of research into the history of the house, and found it was built by a local architect in 1916 for his own family, but by the 1930s belonged to a family called the Woodliffe Simpsons. Robert Woodliffe Simpson had made his money as a ship owner in Hartlepool. I wondered what he was doing living this far inland, then I came up with the idea that the house was a bit like a ship, riding the wild moors.

The pamphlet is going to the printer’s! Here’s the lovely cover, front and back, made by Pat Maycroft. I am so pleased with the sea monster on the back cover (I will love him and squeeze him and call him Brexit). The words are from my editor, Jackie Litherland.

So far there are plans to read at the following events:

T-Junction festival – Middlesbrough, 25th – 29th April. LAUNCH EVENT!

Hexham Book Fair – Sunday  6th May

Darlington Arts Festival – 26th May

Crossing the Tees Book Festival – June

I’ll update the details when I have them.

Have pamphlet – will travel. So if there’s a poetry gig or festival near you that needs a reader, please mention it to me. I’d love to share my poems with you.

A lovely thing has happened. After ten years writing poetry, I’m going to have my first solo pamphlet published early in 2018. Jackie Litherland and the wise Vane Women, who do so much to support women poets in the North East, have agreed to publish my work and we’ve been polishing a set of poems to include. If there is a theme, it’s disorientation, belonging, and what we mean by home; and it was born out of my move from the south of England to the north, and the many moves I’ve made in my life which were pretty much all necessitated by work. Anyway, here’s the cover, featuring a photo of the Last House on Holland Island, which sank into Chesapeake Bay in 2010. Despite that American reference my book is focused on England, plus a couple of poems about Northern Ireland.There are also steampunk birds, historical figures, red kites, a plane crash and a walk along a canal towpath. I’m excited about the prospect of introducing my poems to the world.
Cover design is adapted from an image by baldeaglebluff, used and licensed under CCBY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Here is Sarah L Dixon, the Quiet Compere, whom I read with in Sunderland the other week. Sarah, recently settled in Huddersfield, has been organising poetry events all over England for a number of years now. The idea is, she doesn’t give the poets a massive big-up introduction; she lets them, and their poems, speak for themselves. Sarah herself has recently had a book published; it’s called “The Sky is Cracked” and it is published by Otley-based Half Moon Books. These are poems about love and break-up, and picking up the pieces again afterwards. Lovely stuff, and you can buy it here:

Half Moon Books

Wishing Sarah (and her little boy, the unique and super Frank) a happy new home and many more Quiet Compere nights.