Poetry

My poetry appeared to… spring, rather than gestate - out of a long winter of the soul. I’d written the odd spot, as a teen or at uni. Suddenly, in my late 20s - I was a poet, and that identity felt indelible. It was therapy (I can hear my own groans) that unlocked something and I realised what an unpoured person I was. The things I learned, in those white walls, felt like revelations of biblical proportions. When you’ve been so severely unwell, when you’ve come back from those mindtrenches, it’s hard to explain to civilians (with time, you come to feel it’s us souldiers who are lucky). My poems were an attempt to communicate a hellscape but also penning them was what dug me out. I heard, recently, there’s a genre called “trauma poetry” which is apparently young and unfashionable - like emo music, I guess. Well, I’m so proud of my early pieces, I’ve exhibited a few on my portfolio page. With hindsight, they’re place-based in that they’re trapped and they play with place metaphors - walls, doors, maps - to find a way. They show me opening - from placing my own trauma, to placing myself in a body, to where within family, then romantic relationships, and onto community at large. I’m calling my early poems “traumaps” and I’ve recently edited many of their pronouns from “I” to “you”, for a few reasons: to open them from my drawer out to readers; they’re about experiences where I learned to dissociate (a superpower and a curse); they seem so distant as to be written by someone else. More recently, I’ve found myself writing about a garden, a cathedral, the nation state, the universe(!) and even imagined localities like a “word bank”. I’m excited that now my poetic topics seem to be in the same ballpointpark as those prose and professional concerns. I’m making a place for them, I suppose - and visitors are very welcome.