Poetry Diary featuring a poem by Kathyrn Bevis

Reflections on overwork, grief and the lives of small wild things by Clare Shaw

TS Eliot was wrong: May is the cruellest month. It took Kathryn Bevis away. She was a beautiful human, a gifted poet and a close friend, and I don’t yet have the words for her loss. A week ago, I took the decision to go on compassionate leave. Grief is exhausting, and so is the life of a freelance poet.

This was my working May: half of it delivered on crutches after ankle surgery in April. I marked and graded student portfolios for the “Developing Your Creative Practice” module I deliver to 2nd year undergraduates; I facilitated weekly Writer’s Refuge sessions for asylum seekers and refugees, plus an outreach writing group for asylum seekers with families. I delivered regular online mentoring sessions for writers from Syria, Morocco, Sudan and Pakistan, and I took part in a 5-day working residential to create a collaborative theatre piece; and I delivered New Writing North pastoral mentoring sessions. My working May ended by co-hosting a sunny weekend in the Lakes with Writers Refuge, writing, walking, swimming.

May also saw the first eight of my daughter’s GCSEs, an anxious, revision-packed half-term, and of course, my ongoing work on my fifth collection.   There were also meetings with various organisations, my creative coach, my supervisor and my PA, alongside my work with various local organisations to protect and restore local habitat and wildlife – including the first of my “Rewilding Poetry” online workshops, which raised £650 for a local rewilding project - the second event will take place online on 13^th June - more details here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/911212139037?aff=oddtdtcreator

In the workshop, we looked at what “wild’ means to all of us – everything from unbridled passion and ferocity, to the slow, silent honesty of snails. And we read this glorious poem by Kathryn, which you can find in her collection “The Butterfly House”, recently published by Seren:

Loss of someone you love, no matter how expected that death is, shakes every foundation. In her lyric “Time Lived Without Its Flow’, Denise Riley gives the most exquisite and far-reaching articulation of the impact of grief; how loss and death and loss exceeds our language, even when you are as breathtakingly articulate, creative and intelligent as Denise. For now, I just want to mark the extraordinary life of Kathryn’s poetry; how every word of “starlings” seems soaked in her essence; her ability to transform everything - small creature, empty air, darkness and shit – into something of luminous significance. It’s an outstanding poem of because it’s composed of skill and empathy; an aching delight in life, and in community. What an incalculable loss.

Recognising the impact of grief, along with ongoing health problems, I’ve cut down on my workload – a great leap forwards in my self-care (and a process I’ll discuss in more detail in my next paid subscribers article). And I’ve more time now for the moors and the birds, all the landscapes I’ve been trying to protect.  The starlings are out in force; mobbing my feeder in increasing numbers since the end of May. The sparrows sneak past them; the blue tits quietly make do with the scraps; the goldfinch and greenfinch feed delicately, carefully when the starlings are elsewhere.

We are the many, we are the one. In some of my final conversations with Kathryn, I’d tell her about the birds I could see and hear. Yesterday, on the moors, I watched curlew and lapwing with their tiny, quiffed chicks. In the evening, a hare stood on its hind legs against the skyline, a barn owl circled the meadow. As it grew late, I could hear its soft “hoo” in the darkness.