Writing the third collection

Circling around and around

I invited myself down to my good friend Amanda Dalton’s house this week. Amanda very kindly said she would read through the draft of my collection, and then because I now live just up the road, I was able to pop round after dropping my daughter at school and we could have an actual real-life conversation about my book, whilst sitting in Amanda’s beautiful garden.

Amanda has a giant brain which can step back and look at the bigger picture and structure of things. I’ve got lots of work to do, but I can see a path through the trees, to unapologetically use a cliche.

One good thing that happened is that the poems I’d thrown in at the last moment in a panic in case I didn’t have enough poems were the ones Amanda flagged as being ones she wasn’t sure fitted the collection. It was kind of uncanny how accurate she was, and also confirmed that there was a reason that I hadn’t put them in from the start.

It’s taken me a long time to realise that many pivotal moments of learning and shifts in my thinking come from conversations with people. From talking through the collection with Amanda this week, I realised that repetition and circling back around to themes and ideas is something that is going to be a feature of my next collection. At the moment, and this might change, there are multiple poems about giving birth. One is called “Giving Birth with Anne”, one is called “Our Lives as Gazelle” and one is called “Her Birth”. They feel like very different poems, but they are also very similar. Perhaps they are like looking through three windows at a slightly different view. Or with different glasses on or something.

three windows

A long time ago, I had a really lovely and interesting conversation with the poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin, which has obviously been swirling around in my head since then. I included this conversation (with Annemarie’s permission of course) in a blog post for the Poetry Foundation - but the link appears to be broken at the moment. Here is an extract from that blog post:

“This idea of circling back round to thematic material is something that came up at a recent Q & A session at the Cork International Literary Festival with the poets Liz Berry and Annemarie Ni Churreain.  Annemarie’s second collection The Poison Glen had just been published, and the host asked her how she saw the progression of her work from first to second collection. I was struck by her reply and wrote to her afterwards to continue the conversation on, and she’s kindly given me permission to quote extracts from her reply here.

She told me she was ‘struck by the comments of a male poet recently who expressed his surprise that I would be writing ‘again’ in this second collection about the theme of family seperation’.  She goes on to say that ‘The pressure to move away from a theme, to not return to a trauma, to ‘perform’ a forward-momentum in our writing seems to me to be a patriarchal, misogynist and deeply capitalist idea that takes away from the lived experiences of women, away from the wild landscape, and further away still from a sense of the mysteries at the heart of the human experience.’”

To perform a forward-momentum. I don’t want to move forward. I want to circle around birth, and what it can teach us, what it changes in us, what it leaves the same. I want to write about the same thing over and over and in so doing, say something about confessionalism, about performance, about truth. Which poem is the most true? Is that even the right question to ask?

This is when I know a collection is starting to come together - when conversations I had years ago that I still remember start to show themselves in poems when I didn’t see them before. When I start to feel connections between things I’ve read, things I’ve heard, experiences and thoughts and everything starts to talk to everything else. I’m really excited about returning to the collection with a fresh perspective now and re-hanging it all together.

Our next post will be an exclusive for paid subscribers, and it will be an audio recording! On this audio, you will find

a) Clare Shaw
b) the birds in my garden
c) me
d) a reading from Clare of the first five minutes or so of their draft of their fifth collection
e) a reading from me of the first four poems from my draft of my third collection
f) deadly silence from the neighbours who were subjected to our impromptu performances

Thank you to each and everyone of you for reading.