Endings and beginnings.

A journal writer all my life, and am shocked to find at one of the most significant points in my life, with my first book just published, I have stopped and am feeling adrift. Perhaps a beginning in a new media will help me start to reflect again and record ideas, images, thoughts that matter to find where I am.

I have been struck by the eloquence of Carol Ann Duffy in her first pieces as Poet Laureate. I share her grief at the death of U.A. Fanthorpe and was so glad to see her acknowledge UA as 'an unofficial, deeply loved laureate for so many people for so many years'. (Guardian Review 02/05/ 09). So good that she takes the opportunity to introduce her 'sisters in poetry' and says how the tribe of poets, the brothers ans sisters in poetry she knows ' all share the certainty that poetry, the music of being human, matters deeply to a huge and growing number of people in this country. '

I was asked in interview recently what poem UA was most pleased with. I said it was a hard one to answer becuase there were so many gems in the Collected 1978-2003. Hard to select one. I remembered her telling me that the poetry was part of the life and the life was a quest to get better at being human. U.A. as a Quaker was a truth seeker. All that of course along with my references to her generosity of spirit and largeness of heart and capacity to make even nobodies like me feel welcome and loved was edited out.
Later I remembered how pleased she was with the title sequence from Consequences ... said she had long wanted to write a sequence poem where the sections interrelated in a fugue-like way. This did it and she'd been pleased to share it with fellow poets Carol Ann and Gillian Clark at Lumb Bank. It's quite troublesome thinking back over that interview ... the things that got said ... the things that should have been said.