May has been a pretty brutal month for me in terms of work. I’ve been drowning under acres of marking, from university. I’ve also been completing my first term as an External Examiner for Edge Hill University - which has been interesting, but also exhausting - in the way that doing anything new is exhausting in its uncertainty.
My freelance work has also been pretty lively as well - I did my first very local guest reading at The Dusty Miller in Mytholmroyd for Carola Luther and Judith Wilson’s reading series. I had my first mentoring meeting with a couple of new mentees, which was a joy. I travelled to Huddersfield to deliver a workshop for Live Poetry, went down to Eton to do a reading. I presented online at an academic conference called “Creative Health” where I talked about my NHS residency - 6 months as a Writer in Residence at Trafford General Hospital. I also presented at a Creative and Critical research symposium for Lancaster University, where I talked about innovative ways of carrying out PhD research.
In between all of that, we’ve had half term here (no childcare but lots of fun) and my daughter’s birthday.
It has been a month!
I did also find time to do the Manchester 10k with my friends Janice and Tracey from Cumbria. We got discounted entries through the university and some stylish orange t-shirts to match.
The team photo was fun - if you squint, you might just see my head in the bottom right-hand corner - Jan managed to get on the front row, whilst Tracy was sadly blocked by the pillar..
It was all very jolly, and we were very excited that we got a Team Orange t-shirt and an official race t-shirt, which after all is one of the main reasons for putting ourselves through such things.
Once we got to the start line, Jan announced she was going to try and run 10k in 50 minutes. My target before this moment was 52 minutes (based on what I’d been doing at park run, training etc) but, carried away by Jan’s enthusiasm, I decided to try and stay with her, and hope that all the hill running I’ve been doing on the moors would pay off.
I can’t help but be competitive when I race, although I’m only ever competitive with myself really - it’s my time I want to beat. It’s why I never really tell anyone I’m doing a race as there would be little point in them coming to wave hello - I am usually so focused on what they are doing that they would barely get a grunt. I am also the queen of the finishing strait grimace, as you will see below.
My time in the end was 50.02, but I don’t mind about the 2 seconds - that is my fastest time in probably six years so I am chuffed with that!
You might be thinking, I didn’t sign up for this - boring stuff about running! Where is the poetry? Well, gentle reader, it is coming…
This is to say that I am hoping (perhaps foolishly) that June will be a much slower pace, and that there will be space for writing and some reading, which I have already started to do. As part of my random posts about poetry and poets I like, I would like to introduce you to my lovely friend Amanda Dalton. Here she is!
Amanda’s latest collection is called Fantastic Voyage and has just been published with Bloodaxe. Here it is, artfully placed next to my garden pond.
Whilst taking this picture, I noticed a little frog had its head poking out to see what all the fuss was about. I read a poem or two to him - this was his expression throughout my impromptu poetry reading. A rather majestic fly decided to land on a leaf and have a listen as well.
But back to Amanda’s book - as might be expected from a poet that works across multiple forms, and is well known and celebrated as a playwright and essayist as well as a poet, Amanda’s poetry always has an eye on how the lyric poem can carry, or contain, or subvert or poke fun at the idea of narrative. There are a number of sequences in Fantastic Voyage. My favourite of these is “Ten Signs of Possession” - one of those ideas that I wish I’d thought of. These ten poems are written in the voice of someone, apparently possessed, although of what they are possessed of it’s never quite clear. That’s not the point anyway - the whole book is about being haunted - by grief, by memory, but also perhaps by the possibility there may be another ‘you’ inside your own body, looking out with your eyes.
The first sign of possession is apparently superhuman strength - so the first poem in the section starts “My love / there is no doubt - today, with just one hand, / I could lift this house and everything in it / carry the load to a field by a river / whereever you are.”
The fourth poem in the sequence is titled after the fourth sign of possession which is “Appearance of Wounds that Vanish as Quickly as They Appear” and starts mysteriously “A bruise where nothing knocked or held or pressed; heels that blister as she lies on the unmade bed;”
The collection also contains the really beautiful radio version of Notes on Water (another version of this was published as a pamphlet of the same name with Smith/Doorstop) - both versions are worth checking out, and I’m sure a PhD student in the future will be writing about the different ways that these various ways of publishing shaped and changed the work.
I’m going to share one of my favourite poems with you here, with kind permission from Amanda. It’s one of the poems that stands outside the sequences I’ve talked about here, whilst being connected to them thematically. It’s called “Missing” and it’s a poem that holds many of the themes of the collection - the idea of being haunted, of things not being quite what they seem, of the way darkness and humour can throw each other into stark relief. The notes at the back of the collection tell us that the poem was inspired by a true story in the news from 2012 - a woman on a coach trip was thought to be missing and search parties were organised. Eventually it was found that she’d been there the whole time, and had in fact joined the search party looking for herself.
You can see that although the poem has been inspired by a story in the news, it moves far beyond that - into the utter unknowability of the self.
MISSING
AMANDA DALTON
If they'd called my name I might have heard myself
but they didn't know my name. Or if we'd spread
across the high land to search for a heart as active
as the Katla volcano, I might have realised.
But non one dared to cross the unbridged river,
no one would climb the unpredictable slopes.
I was fire canyon, impassable glacier. I was the fall.
We barely spoke on the bus - it was not that kind of tour
and I was glad of it. Those days my own voice
sounded nothing much like me.
Lost in that fissure that ran through the landscape,
I'd turned to molten liquid long before. No wonder
I changed my clothes at least three times a day.
I didn't recognise myself.
We were looking for a woman in blue
when I wore red, looking for a quiet, bespectacled
spinster when I was roaring, my optic nerves burned out
in the heat. If they'd only asked,
I could have told them, we might have given up
the search, got back on the bus, discovered me.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts… wish I could do a PhD with you …