Talking with ghosts: how my new collection leads me to unexpected places.

By Clare Shaw

After I finished my last collection, I considered I wanted to spend the next three years obsessing about. It should be something that fascinated me, something rich in poetic and metaphorical potential, which would allow me to research and procrastinate to my heart’s content. I came up with three options – caves, ruins, and ghosts.  

Ghosts got my vote. Every house that I lived in as a child was haunted, and it seemed, every property we visited. It’s only in very recent years I’ve realised that not every childhood is coloured by floating lights in the attic and disembodied whispers. 

There’s a common belief that poltergeist activity is associated with troubled teenage girls: we had plenty of them, and troubled boys too. Did we attract the bad spirits? Or did the creative and chaotic energy of our troubled minds manifest itself in the remote moving of objects, the unexplained noises and visions? And is poetry the right place to make sense of these experiences?

In our Catholic, working-class Burnley, belief in ghosts was not unusual – break into a good ghost story and people are almost certain to join in. It’s not so true in the secular, middle class world I now inhabit. Here, seeing ghosts marks you out as superstitious, uncultured – to be honest, a bit common.  

But I’ve been told enough times in my life that my world view is mistaken or just plain mad – so a hierarchy of knowledge which dismisses millions of people’s accounts of their own lives as uncivilised nonsense is something I’m not just going to accept. Even more than that, I’m fascinated by the assumptions and processes which underpin of knowledge of the world. How do any of us know what we know?