In my latest post, I was talking about re-writing in general, and I mentioned a poetry blog site, How a Poem Happens, that had inspired and impressed me, and I’d intended to write in more detail about this today – But this has been a great week for poetry and that’s now going to have to wait a day or two, as I’m too excited about a package that was delivered by Royal Mail on Friday: I received my own ‘contributor’s’ copy of a wonderful anthology, ‘Cracking On’, in which I’m immensely privileged to have two of my own poems.

It’s edited by Joy Howard, of Grey Hen Press, and this short extract (below) from the Foreword by Guardian writer, Michele Hanson, will give you some idea of why you might want to take a look inside!

“ Outrage is easier for me, but that is here too, particularly in Mind the Gap, which challenges the young head on, rather than fading out quietly and letting them, and everyone else, continue to believe that youth is everything and old age is nothing much at all. Unrepentant, unapologetic, brave, confident and beautiful, these poems show that we older women deserve to live as full and rich a life as any other generation. And the nearer we get to the end, through Sick and Tired, Nearly There and into the Departure Lounge, the braver we get. Or at least these poets do. For those of us who are scared stiff, then these poems can help us through it.”

I’ve not yet had time to do more than dip into a few of these, and what struck me at once was how fresh and unusual these poems are, and how rarely I’ve come across any poems that deal with aging at all, let alone ones which, as Penelope Shuttle is quoted as saying, are ‘Electric, formidable, challenging, witty, sombre, enduring, heart-felt, tender, reflective, valedictory poems.’

No wonder I feel privileged to be among this company! One of mine, (Legacy)has already appeared in a previous post, so this Poem of the Week is the other one from Cracking On.

First Born
For my mother

My other dead are setting out to greet me,
their sprawling years
weighing them down like clay

I’ll mould my lips into the secret smile,
recover that sense of wonder - the key
to heaven. They’ll let me in.

This might seem a bit confusing to some readers if they don’t realise that the ‘I’ of the poem is my mother, and the ‘you’ is her first born child, the one referred to towards the end of ‘Legacy’ as ‘our long-dead brother’.

The journey through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean in this poem was made by my mother as a young woman, travelling out to India to marry my father, who was in the army out there during the war. Throughout our childhood,our oldest brother, who only lived for about three days, was regularly mentioned in night-time prayers.

It was only when I became a mother myself, that I started to realise what a tragedy that baby’s death would have been.

This week there’ve been two quite separate items that have made me ponder the art of re-writing. The first was from a poetry blog, describing a process of drafting and re-drafting that chimed with my own experiences of bringing a poem to completion.(I’ll be giving a link to that in my next post) The second was an article in this Wednesday’s Times 2, and it made me wince. To be more accurate, it was the subject of the piece (Jeffrey Archer) that had this effect on me, (not its writer (Erica Wagner).

I’m all for re-writing both prose and poetry as many times as it takes to reach the state of being ‘as good as it can be’. The real difficulty is identifying the bits that need to be changed or cut out entirely.

I’m often asked how long it took me to write my first published novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society(my third novel for adults). I never have the full story plotted out from beginning to end – I have a general idea of where I’m heading, but I write in order to find out what my characters actually do and how they achieve this. I tend to do a lot of editing as the story unfolds, and I enjoy honing the pages the following day almost more than creating each new scene. It’s an integral part of the creative process for me.

The Dangerous Sports has 87,000 words (308 pages) but the original version was over 20,000 words longer. Click here to read more about how I made the novel much stronger by doing this. When it finally set out on its journey as a published book, it was, in spite of any shortcomings, a done deal.

What I’ve had to learn all over again, with my soon-to-be-published next novel, Paper Lanterns, is that re-writing each section at least once (and often three or four times) as I work my way towards a satisfactory conclusion of the novel, does NOT mean that this version is anything other than a first draft. I’ll expand on that in another post.

Paper Lanterns hasn’t yet been sent to the printers – there are a few more things to be sorted first, such as copy editing, and the cover design – something that’s put me into in a state of high excitement as I’ve only just received some initial ‘visuals’. I’ll be posting these and other versions here soon and will welcome readers’ views.

But getting back to the re-writing - I still feel fully justified in tweaking parts of some of the scenes in this novel, because it’s still in manuscript form and is yet to be delivered into the world as a finished product. Once it’s been printed and bound, with a lovely front cover and informative back cover, and all the pages in between, there’ll be no more re-writing.

What really made me wince in the Times article was an extract from Archer’s re-written book, Kane and Abel. I read it when it came out thirty years ago, and quite enjoyed it as an escapist read. I hadn’t thought it was presenting itself as anything other than that, and I would never have imagined that he would have bothered to write the whole thing again – especially if his explanation for doing so was really the true reason: “30 years later one is a better craftsman, one is better at one’s job’. I’d have thought that a ‘better craftsman’ would have preferred to demonstrate his improved craftmanship by writing a completely new novel.

I could go on, but I think that this article is available on the Times On-line, if anyone wants to find it. As for the art of re-writing, there’s a lot more to be said about the part it plays in the creation of a poem or a novel and still lots more for me to learn.

I was in Sussex visiting my mother this weekend, and for a change, Gardening Husband came with me. I’m always happy to let him drive, because it means that I can have a good long stretch of reading time. (Something I often find hard to do at home). I’d just started Breath, by Tim Winton, and was able to finish it by the time we arrived. I need more time to mull over this book – I found it enthralling, but haven’t sorted out my thoughts and feelings enough to write anything coherent about it yet.

My return journey took me about a third of the way into RJ Ellory’s A Quiet Belief in Angels. I wish we’d been driving up to John O’ Groats, and back to give me a chance to finish it. I don’t think I’ll get much of a chance to read more long chunks of it this week. I’ll just have to be patient, and wait to find out what happens next.

Yesterday was cloudy with an almost gale force wind. Coming down over the brow of the hill towards Seaford, I could see the white horses scattered across the dark green and purple sea, but today has been another one of those Indian summer days, with a clarity of light that I associate with fine weather in October.
That leads me nicely to this week’s poem – especially as it’s the traditional time of Harvest Festivals.
Light Harvest

This morning I escaped into a park
where light lay ripe and waiting for my eyes,
trapped on wet black mud – splintering on dark
green spikes of holly into shards so bright
I’ll feast all winter on this hoard of light.

The original inspiration for this poem came while I was on my MA course at Nottingham Trent. We had one of the occasional Saturday meetings, and went out into the nearby countryside. The sky was absolutely clear and blue, the sun was warm, but there was a hint of chill in the air, and we gradually became aware of strands of tiny threads of cobwebs drifting around us and glistening in the sunlight.

I was delighted when this poem was accepted for publication in Acumen 2000. It’s one that I’m still happy to be reminded of at this time of year.

It’s a funny thing, looking back at poems I’ve written several years ago. The poem of this week is one I wrote for my daughter, and now reading it again I find that it’s the secondary theme of this poem that strikes me first.

Both my ‘children’ now live in London, and I always look forward to their visits home. This weekend, it was my daughter who came with her boyfriend. There were a couple of things on their itinerary which we managed to achieve on Saturday – the first was a guided tour of her dad’s allotment.

It was several months since I’d been down there and I was overwhelmed by the amount of vegetables still thriving and demanding to be harvested. Of course, I knew about these, as he’d been bringing samples of them home for supper week after week.

The other was on the request of daughter and boyfriend: a trip to Imran’s in Birmingham’s Balti Belt. It was getting on for two years since we’d been there and it was even better than we’d remembered. I was glad that the honour of Brum was upheld!

So where does Dublin come in to this? It’s not even mentioned in the poem below. Daughter and boyfriend have been together for two years now, and the poem dates from about six years ago. This is a mother and daughter poem, so yes, it is about her, but it has a more general significance, in that it’s about the state of being in love. She looked so glowing with happiness when she arrived that it brought it all back to me (but not, I hasten to add, the previous cause of her joy) .

Take a look at the poem now, and if I tell you that I was at Trinity College in Dublin, and met my husband there, you might get the Dublin connection.

That Place

She’s a sunlamp! Her voice on the phone
emits a radiance that fills the hollow space
behind my breastbone, filters down

and my heart, a supernova,
flaunted itself on my face with such dazzle
that passers-by would flinch and shield their eyes.

Unlike some of my other poems, there’s nothing in this one that I’d want to change. It’s also a good one to read aloud and I find that most people who hear it seem to be moved by it.(It’s funny how little things like a back pockets of a pair of Levis can be forgotten for years, and then make such an impact when they suddenly surface.) Ah, youth!

Like most things in my life, I only get round to making a major change when I’m more or less forced into it by some outside intervention. In this case, it was having double-glazing installed in my lovely little writing room – not just the door and the big window overlooking the garden but also the French windows that we’d never opened in the twenty years since having this room added to the back of the house.

So most of today and all yesterday, I’ve been rearranging everything in this room. It opens onto the garden and is full of light on sunny days, so, with the doors and windows open it almost felt like being outside.

I hadn’t realised quite how long this would take me, and once I’d piled up all my books from the three bookcases onto the floor and every other available surface, I had to carry on. And it wasn’t just the books. The knee-hole desk I’m sitting at now has nine small drawers, and the tiny table I was using as a desk , also has a drawer, and then I’ve got a large carved camphor wood chest, and all these were crammed with accumulated papers and other odds and ends that had to be sifted and sorted.

I feel very pleased with myself now that it’s all finished, but I do regret not being able to catch up on other things I wanted to do, such as writing a post about R.J.Ellory’s inspiring talk to Bookcrossers on Friday night at Hudson’s – but that will have to wait.

Meanwhile, here’s my poem of the week:

Preservation

His mother’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
Each night she listens as another stitch
that binds those skins together snaps.

Now sun slants in between the blinds
jostles motes of dust, and something
like a boulder is worked loose.

This is a poem that I first wrote at least seven years ago and was published in my small collection, Single Travellers. In spite of it also winning a place in the Ragged Raven Anthology, Writing on Water, (2005) I’d never been quite satisfied by that version (see below) so I’ve spent the last hour chopping and changing it. At the moment, I think this version is more effective, but when I read it again tomorrow,
I’m very likely to want to make other changes. (I’ve just read it again, and am not sure what I think now!)

I’d be very interested in your comments about these two versions.

Preservation

There’s barely room to navigate the decades of newsprint,
calcified narratives stacked on the carpet like
dry-stone walls. Does he believe

they can shore up the present? Beneath accretions of
photos and bric-a-brac, the clenched piano
is choking back old tunes.

Her mother-in-law’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
At night, lying above those stitched-together
skins, she feels them stir.

Years back, on the edge of Lovers’ Leap, he
told her about limestone crags, billions of
fossils from aeons ago.

Now she’s found them on the net, sea-lilies,
feather stars, swaying and feeding in tropical seas.
All that life!

Sun edges in through smears of condensation,
its slanting shafts jostled with motes of…dust, is it?
or particles of

something more ingrained, intangible,
worked loose at last
from the boulder in her throat

I’ve always loved trees so a visit to Kew Gardens in glorious sunshine this Saturday was real treat for my birthday - even more so as we were able to walk there from our daughter and boyfriend’s new house, just a minute’s walk from the Thames. Better still, our son, who also lives in London, joined us for the weekend.

I’d looked it up on the website beforehand and was very excited to see that there was a tree-top walkway, over eighteen metres high.

I was surprised by how low the river was on our walk towards Kew, with a ‘beach’ of grey mud and stones. On our return, the water had been splashing over the path, and the whole atmosphere had changed.

This morning I went for a jog along the river before the others had woken, and the warm air was full of jasmine and buddleia.

This was the cue for selecting my Poem of the Week:
Lady of Shalott

I can forget the mirror sometimes
pretend I’m out there
strolling in the meadow by the river
Not looking straight at things is bad enough
not touching’s worse
I close my eyes and use my sense of smell
to measure seasons

Clods of mud release hints of
earthworm slither
fat white roots of grass and scarlet dreams
of dormant poppy seeds
I play the rain’s aroma like a scale
to harmonise with notes of mistletoe
fungus, moss and winter apple trees

When I catch the tremulous warm
breath of hibernating dormice
I leave my needle with its crimson thread
dangling from a ray of setting sun
in yet another landscape
curl up against the cushions and
adjust my breathing to that slow rhythm

but when summer’s sticky fragrance spills
into my rounded room
honeysuckle, lilies, buddleia
juice of cut grass, ripe corn, all
cling in my throat. It’s then
I quicken clammy fingertips
across the mirror’s face

I wrote this poem about seven years ago. I’m usually very visual in my use of images when writing poetry, and this time I was experimenting with using a different sense. I remember that I enjoyed ‘getting into’ the character of someone who can only experience the world from a distance , and I enjoyed focussing on all the different seasons, particularly summer.

Reading it now after all those years, I think that it expressed what I was trying to say then, but I don’t rate it very highly as a poem in its own right and I now find it a bit sentimental. I wouldn’t want to change any of it though - it exists as a part of my past.

It’s beginning to seem that whenever I’ve planned to write about poetry, I really feel like posting about fiction, and vice versa. Therefore, since I’ve designated Sunday for my Poem of the Week, it’s no surprise that I really want to tell you about the work I’ve just been doing on my novel, Paper Lanterns.

So here’s a short digression first. Although I produced the final version of this novel a few months ago, there were one or two of the early parts that I’ve kept tinkering with - especially the first part of Chapter One, and now I really do think it’s sorted.

The other thing I’ve been doing today relates to aspects of sign-posting (which I may, or may not keep to, when I’m laying out the final PDF version ready for self-publication). I’ve been experimenting with giving dates and titles to different sections, in order to present an initial overview for the reader. I’m very visual myself, and I like to see the overall shape of what I’m about to read.

I’ve also made a list of the 35 chapters, with just a few words about the content of each, in case I decide to give them all a title (that’s not very likely, though).

Not counting the brief prologue (Sutton Coldfield 1971), I’ve identified ten section headings – starting with:
Sutton Coldfield 2008 – Ann; (chapters 1 to 3)
Hong Kong 2008 – Vivienne; (chapters 4 to 10)
Hong Kong 1930 - Belle (chapters 11 to 13)

I now have an A4 page with the relevant chapter numbers and brief details arranged under the different section headings, and I like the shape of the book’s structure!

And now, it’s back to poetry again. My post last Wednesday mentioned the event at the Kitchen Garden Café, so here’s one of the three that I read that evening

Legacy
Through her camouflage of mohair
my fingers meet a sudden shoulder blade
and jut of rib. Bone of her bone is nothing new.
Flesh of her flesh. But this is new:
that stem cells of a foetus make their way
into the very marrow of their host –
renew themselves, year after year. So
I transmit my thoughts, electric pulses along
axons and dendrites out through my palms
and fingertips into her skin then down
to the dark centre of bone where my own
cells and my siblings’ cells and the cells of our
long-dead brother, her first baby, jostle each other
and I tell them push your strength into her.

I wrote this a few years ago, inspired by an article that caught my imagination (I can’t now remember where). It revealed that the bone marrow of mothers contains some of the stem cells of their own children – and these are still renewing themselves many years after the birth. I read this shortly after returning home to the Midlands after visiting my mother in Sussex. She was in her late 80s at the time, and I’d noticed that she seemed to have become thinner and more frail since , and I’d last seen her. (She’s now 92, and still doing well, so maybe those cells have been doing their job! )