Advent meditation, 11 December 2023

On publishing

This year I published a book of poems. It is about grief, love and anger.

It seems to be finding the people I hoped it would find, and a few others besides. Of course, this is completely outside of my control.

One of the things I have noticed people saying to me about it is how angry the book is. Sometimes they have used different words, but this is the tone of what they have been saying. ‘I always thought of your poems as light, but this is really different.’

A neighbour I rarely see told me that he had not realised until recently that as he got older, he was still carrying much of his baggage with him. We were having this conversation because of what he had found in the book. That seems to me a good thing.

I have been giving readings to support the book. In the old days, i.e. pre-everything-changing-when-I had-cancer, I used to jump at the opportunity. Then, somewhere in the middle of promoting my last book, I realised that I didn’t have that feeling any more – not in the sense of not wanting to read my poems, I still enjoy doing it, the big ones, the small, intimate ones, even the ones where no one turns up – in the sense of it finally having dawned on me, thirty-plus years into this business, that the poems don’t really belong to me and are certainly not who I am.

I can pinpoint the moment exactly. I was halfway through a reading at Manchester Cathedral, having judged their poetry competition and given out the prizes. I was about to read a poem in memory of my late friend Mary Jacobs.

Suddenly, maybe it was the theme of death and grief that pervades much of that book, but I realised for the first time, I mean really realised, that the poems I write, however personal, have very little to do with me, and that I needed to get out of their way in order to let them do their work with as little interference as possible. Which was something of a shock. Until that moment I had assumed it was all about me.

So I tried to read the poems from the new book this summer with that in mind. Sometimes successfully, i.e. with spare introductions and lots of bracketing silence, and sometimes less so, qualifying and requalifying, with asides and even jokes.

Like a good introvert I still wince at the moments I got wrong.

I am looking forward to more opportunities to read the poems in the new year, hopefully with as little interference as possible.

With thanks to Helena Nelson and Rob Mackenzie.