In The Poetry

In an essay on education, the French writer Simone Weil talks about the way an act of attention is at the very heart of real education. She says, rather severely, each time we truly attend we destroy some of the evil within. Here’s a poem about the act of attention involved in just [...]

Most people have heard of the island of St. Kilda which is the outermost of the outer Hebrides because they think of it as a place of asylum – as such a lonely place. But for that reason everybody goes there so it isn’t. If you’re looking for asylum in the Hebrides you should go [...]

I love the fact that the name Adam comes from the Hebrew word Adomah, which means earth or ground. He was given the name of the substance of which he was made. If the soul is in the name, then there’s a wonderful unity of body and soul.

Adam Means Earth

I am the man
Whose [...]

The Stinking Rose

Everything I want to say is
in that name
for these cloves of garlic – they shine
like pearls still warm from a woman’s neck.

My fingernail nudges and nicks
the smell open, a round smell
that spirals up. Are you hungry?
Does it burn through your ears?

Did you know some cloves were planted
near the coral-coloured roses
to provoke the petals
into [...]

Some time after my husband retired I was appointed writer-in-residence to the University in Singapore and we decided to spend some months in the Far East. Just before we set out, though, my husband broke his ankle on a slippery pavement outside a Do-It-Yourself shop. But he very obstinately decided he was still going to [...]

I spent some time working with the choreographer, Sue McLennan, and her dancers and I began to think of the intelligence within dance, within the body. And in this poem I imagine the most famous of all dancers speaking about physics which she feels and apprehends through her body.

Pavlova’s Physics

Everything in my body
has been [...]

‘Immigrant’ looks back from some years afterwards to the time when I first arrived in London from New Zealand feeling very foreign, in fact very colonial with my New Zealand accent which I hastened to get rid of, and my Marks & Spencers clothes – I was trying to pass as a genuine Londoner like [...]

This poem is called ‘From the Irish’. I was the eighth in my family – it was an Irish family – the first born in England, so I was the only one to that point who hadn’t been taught through the medium of Irish at school. So if my elder brothers and [...]

Beyond Decoration

Stalled, in the middle of a rented room,
The couple who own it quarrelling in the yard
Outside, about which shade of Snowcem
They should use. (From the bed I’d heard
Her say she liked me in my dressing-gown
And heard her husband’s grunt of irritation.
Some ladies like sad men who are alone.)
But I am stalled, and sad [...]

By the time I came to writing my second book, The Handless Maiden, I’d got a lot braver. And one of the poems in it is a poem about marigolds. There’s a whole tradition of writing poems comparing women to flowers, mostly by male poets. It’s a sort of flattery – women are beautiful like [...]