Category: bird of winter

Making and sharing poems that hold the central acts of our lives : Mary Mulholland, Wendy Allen and Natalie Whittaker at The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden.

From October 2028 – seven years now, and counting – I’ve been part of a loose affiliation of poets who work with complex materials. Drawing together our earliest members, my hope was to create a group whose participants would co-resource each other. I wanted us to collaborate creatively, and editorially, but also offer mutual support – especially where confidence and courage, and above all, tenderness, might be needed. What we had, and still have, in common was knowing that we were working with materials that had the potential to be dangerous to us, and to each other. Together, we enact our shared commitment to go gently as we allow new work to take shape. Many of us work with our individual experiences as starting points to travel outwards towards the world, and inwards towards the wider histories and geographies that have embedded themselves within our spaces of being and are ask to be spoken to and of.

While work always originates with the maker who creates it, since that autumn evening in 2018, many collections, and pamphlets, including my own debut bird of winter, have gained strength and momentum through being brought, one poem at a time, to our group’s monthly meetings. We started out above the Poetry Café in Betterton Street in Covent Garden, then moved to the foyer of the National Theatre on London’s Southbank, waiting for the audiences to take their seats before getting down to our feedback.  Having gone online during the pandemic, we have stayed there ever since, freed from geographical restrictions. 

In different ways, all of us have been nourished by the conversations around process, and working practices, which open every session. The privilege of meeting each other’s works in progress, and giving them our careful responses, has been powerful and generative. Natalie Whittaker, Wendy Allan and Mary Mulholland have all engaged at different times with the group. When I heard they were planning to share a reading at The Poetry Café, I was thrilled to be asked introduce them.  It seemed like a true celebration to hear their work and voices out loud and proud, two floors down from where our group began.

The evening didn’t disappoint. In fact far from it.  Going to places where many might fear to tread, Mary Mulholland, Wendy Allen, and Natalie Whittaker make poems to hold the central acts of our lives. Through their words, we live, love, bleed, heal – and  meet life towards its endings, as well as its beginnings. The audience’s warm engagement with their passionate, wry, fiery readings, and the conversations we had about the poems following on from them, made me want to share something of that evening with a wider audience.

What follows are my introductions, and videos of Mary, Wendy and Natalie reading their sets, which they filmed individually at home afterwards.  At the time publication, Wendy’s was still on its way. The blog finishes with a question from me for each of them, engaging with a theme that’s central to their practice. I’ve also included the all-important buy-links within the titles of their books, so you can go deeper, and support them, and, the publishers bringing this essential work onto the printed page and into beautiful bound volumes. 

Mary Mulholland reading at the Poetry Cafe.

A few words about Mary Mulholland, now, before the video of her reading. Her first two publications were both collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell, published by the inimitable Nine Pens. All About Our Mothers led the way, with its logical sequel, All About Our Fathers, following. Both acid-sharp pamphlets.  Her first solo pamphlet, the wonderful, not entirely woolly, What the sheep taught me, then came out with Live Canon in 2022. Most recently the elimination game, published this year by Broken Sleep.  Rebecca Goss hailed it as “an illuminating, fearless study of the rich intricacies of female life”. Beyond Rebecca’s tribute, Mary Mulholland is widely published.  More recently her poems have appeared in 14 magazine, Anthropocene,  Stand, and are forthcoming in Finished Creatures. Mary also founded the generative and nurturing, live and online gathering, Red Door Poets, and is Editor of The Alchemy Spoon. 

Speaking more personally, for me one of the delights of Mary’s penetrating poems is how they encompass adventure and irreverence as life-giving energies, but then move in a heartbeat to questing, questioning vulnerability. Time is folded and unfolds itself from moment to moment, as we move from a “kohl-eyed girl in a purple kaftan” to a “bronze age mummy” smelling of “honey scent and sweet bark”. Elsewhere an older woman enters an arctic whose cold “takes her back to childhood,” only for the mood to shift again as we come upon “a cluster of Parisian grandmothers” who are “elegantly chatting and laughing”, entirely  oblivious to their charges’ high risk play choices. 

Here’s Mary’s video.

Here’s Mary Mulholland’s ‘Woodstock’ from the elmination game as a bonus.

Our next reader was Wendy Allen, who shot, more or less fully formed, into the poetry firmament, after a first career in aviation. Early on, Caroline Bird hailed how “reading Wendy Allen’s poetry makes me realise there is a precision to the erotic, every line feels like a held breath.”  Wendy’s debut pamphlet, Plastic Tubed Little Bird, was published by Broken Sleep, in 2023. She has since collaborated with Charley Barnes on freebleeding (Broken Sleep 2024) and Galia Admoni, i get lost everywhere, you know this now (Salo, 2024). Most recently, we have Portrait in Mustard from Seren. All are magnificent, and unmissable. Wendy’s currently in the final year of her Creative Writing and Art History PhD and is a tutor in Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Met. 

Wendy Allen reading at the Poetry Cafe.

I love how Wendy’s work is centred on, and translated through, the variously fertile female body, and its desires, and despairs, often calibrated relative to made artworks and consumable objects. In ‘Apricot’ the narrator ends up inside the said fruit only “the stone is missing, and I am/ curled up in the pit where/ time should be.” Moving through such landscapes, Wendy’s poems creates a magic lantern play of shadowed and projected selves. They rise up and deliquesce away, even as their “nipples tiara against an/ endlessly repeated new-start sky.”   

Finally, our third reader was the extraordinary Natalie Whittaker, celebrating the launch of The Point is You Are Alive, her heart-stopping first full collection which came out with Broken Sleep in April this year. As many of you know, Natalie writes with a spareness and precision that allows her poems to vibrate with imagistic intensity. Writing for the Poetry School, Jonathan Edwards admired the way “elegant sentences and striking images cast enormous shadows, conjuring something much bigger than themselves.” 

Natalie Whittaker reading at the Poetry Cafe.

Integral to the work she makes are Natalie Whittaker’s roots in South East London. A poet and teacher, she is the author of two stunning previous pamphlets: Shadow Dogs, published by ignition press in  2018, and Tree, published by Verve in 2021. Natalie was also a London Library Emerging Writer from 2020 – 2021. 

Deeply embedded in landscape and place, Natalie’s poems often ask us to see visually, as a starting point to participating in an act of shared perception. In SANDS, facing the loss of a child, “it is November  I steer headlights through drizzle / pull up outside a church    that’s switched off”. Earlier, there had been a “ghost dog […] beneath the ice”. Finally, and redemptively, comes SPRING “in a contagion   of blossom/ a pink blooming   pandemic” – where, paradoxically, life can start again. 

Here’s Natalie Whittaker, reading her specially recorded poems.

And this is a ‘Jenga’, from Natalie’s set.

To close, the three questions, which transitioned us from the live readings into a wider discussion with the audience. It’s always so powerful to hear poets speaking about the making and thinking of their work, bridging the gaps between the creative energy as it first came to them, and the shapes it forms on the page. 

Firstly, a question for Mary Mulholland.

ah: You’re a savagely witty, wry writer in a way that is pure delight for your readers. Tell us about humour as a lightning rod shooting us deep into the complex heartlands of your work? In short, why so wry?

MH: I suppose I find people behave in funny ways. The disjunct between what they say and do. Our secret lives. And life/ fate has its own sense of humour, which is not always kind, but perhaps serves as a reminder that things are always changing. I never set out to be funny so I guess it’s ingrained  – I have a fairly existential approach. Life’s taught me there’s much that one should not take too seriously. Seeing the ridiculous or ironic in difficult situations can ease the tension and laughter is infectious, it connects us, releases endorphins, transforms, breaks through, like shining a light in the dark.When my father who was so sharp and accomplished developed dementia, the subsequent crazy conversations we’d have ironically enabled me to get to know him better, as if a lid had been lifted from his controlled way of being. It’s irony mainly that I enjoy. Humour is a bit like playing with fire. Of course not everything can or should be laughed at, but without humour life would be very heavy going.

ah: Wendy, as you write her, the female self is infinitely expansive, imaginatively, physically, and aesthetically. Also witty, and hungry. Tell us more about working through seemingly individual female experiences as portals to something much larger. In short, why so radical? 

WA: Why so radical? A conversation. 

Dear alice, Mary, and Natalie,

I’m writing this at the onset of my period. I am so tired I feel like I’m filled with lead. 

You may, at this point, be questioning why you need to know this. You need to know this because I write what I am, and what I currently am is a body about to bleed. 

I have just started teaching at a university, and one thing I repeat to my students, is the value of feeling the poem – to understand our bodily response to the poem – to its visuals -to its (the poem’s) body. 

Recently in the news it has been reported there has been research into how visiting a gallery and looking at art is beneficial to our health. 

I think the same about looking at the poem. 

I love looking, and by that, I mean really looking, at poems, just as I like looking at my menstrual cup, just as I like looking at the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth (and we all know I like that).

My poetry is not a book of hidden desire. It doesn’t mute desire or mask its own pleasure. All my books speak of desire with pride. They paint desire on a huge canvas and make pleasure so large that when you walk past it in the gallery-that-is-a-book, you are unable to not see it. The fact that sometimes, my poetry may provoke a response which questions its necessity, simply highlights that there is a need for this. I think of Eileen Myles here. I love writing like this. 

In answer to your question, alice, why so radical?  Because it makes me sad when I see bestselling books of women sharing their fantasy as a hidden desire. In Portrait in Mustard (Seren Books, 2024) the speaker of my poems uses poetry to display her pleasure, her disappointments, her sex as her art. She wants to flaunt this –

In April 2024, I attended the For Art History conference at York University. On the final day there was a panel on the work of Art Historian Griselda Pollock, and at the end, Pollock gave her own response to the papers.

I will never forget that in her introduction to the lecture, Pollock acknowledges the work of the panel but raises the point that her work’s impact should not be viewed as a singular, rather, because of the community of women she worked alongside, whose belief and desire for change, collectively changed feminism in art history, and the wider sphere. Radical practice involves collaboration. It is incredibly important to me to address this notion of change through my poetic practice. 

At the recent reading at the Poetry Society in Covent Garden with yourself, Mary and Natalie, our conversation reminded me that collectively, we can achieve so much. Our practice may differ, our poetry may be thematically different, but when we are together, when we share our work and engage with each other, as we do within our Stanza community, that, then, is where the change happens. That is where we are at our strongest. 

Wendy x

ah: Natalie, your collection holds some tough material, around societal harms, and the profound loss of stillbirth. At every turn, though, your  poems pulse with fierce life, and an intensity of being that sees off their darknesses. In short, where does the joy come from?

NW: The joy comes from writing poetry; the joy of playing with language and experimenting with form. Even though the subject matter of my poems is often something that has troubled me in some way, there is usually a real joy in the act of writing a poem. The ‘Tree’ sequence is an exception, as I can’t honestly say that I ‘enjoyed’ writing those poems. But there’s a different sort of joy in those poems; a slow-burning joy that comes from transforming painful experiences through art, and the joy of sharing my work with others who may be going through something similar.

‘Finding new flight patterns’: working creatively to heal beyond trauma at the Newcastle International Poetry Festival 2024.

Every city we travel to, we meet a new version of ourselves. Meantime, the city becomes a different version of itself through our eyes. That was certainly the case for me when I arrived in Newcastle on 9 May, the day of the train strikes. With all the dazzle of fresh green growth, and light, bright clothes, summer was coming in a sudden rush of heat, that caught us all half unawares. Confirming the sense of a new world, York station, normally a constant to-ing and fro-ing of trains and passengers, was all but empty. Under a blue sky, cafes were closed, the lines and platforms silent, as I waited for my connection.

Newcastle itself was alive and bustling once I left the station and walked along the Tyne. The hotel the Newcastle International Poetry Festival had booked me into was directly opposite the glamorous 1930s Baltic Arts Centre. The air felt warm and tender, the river was quiet and glassy, the passersby lingering over drinks on waterside terraces. With a sense of adventure, I left it all behind to head uphill to Newcastle University, and the Northern Stage venue. Walking through the layers of the town its history was written in its built structures, from solid Victorian municipal buildings to Sixties and Seventies car parks and office blocks. Buskers turned the long shopping streets into layers of sound that inscribed the always changing present moment.

Millennium Bridge, Newcastle.

To enter the Northern Stage venue, where the Newcastle International Poetry Festival was taking place over three days, we had to pass alongside the student encampment, protesting the genocide being committed in Gaza, and the larger international and institutional complicities enabling this. It felt right and necessary that Abigail Parry, who joined Jane Clarke for the T.S. Eliot Prize Reading, to close the first day, directly referenced the huge disparity between our security and comfort within the theatre, and those co-inhabiting the planet with us who are denied a place on our ship of plenty. These thoughts and images were in my mind as I walked back after eating with the festival poets. The party streets of Newcastle were unfurling nights of summer hedonism and along the jet black Tyne where the Millennium Bridge formed a shark’s mouth of rainbowing colours.

Occupation Camp, Newcastle University, Photo by Anita Pati.

Wanting to prepare both for the workshop I was running on the Friday, about colour as a conduit and energy portal, and my own reading on Saturday, exploring healing beyond childhood trauma, I sat on the public deck of the Baltic Centre in the quiet of early morning, looking out across the Tyne, and seeing the seaweed exposed where the tide had flowed out. Built by Rank Hovis from the 1930s as a flour mill and huge grain silo, it once stored 22,000 tons of grain. Now a community and arts space, the Baltic Centre held within its built structure the memory of the 300 workers employed there during its 1950s heyday. Back then, it was only one of several silos and grain stores along the Tyne. As I looked across the water, shimmering with reflections, to the cafes and bars on the far side of the river, it was impossible not to think of the acute need for grain and foodstuffs in Gaza, and other parts of the world afflicted by shortage and famine.

The changing presences of history made themselves felt again during the Newcastle Poetry Festival’s readings for that afternoon, when Kit Fan and Jennifer Wong spoke of what it meant to them to have grown up in Hong Kong, and the almost unimaginable shifts currently underway in that city. Chaired by Festival director, academic and poet Theresa Munoz, they were also reading poems and speaking with Troy Cabida, of the connections arising from their shared heritages, discussed in the interview exchanges of State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation. Having bought the book at the excellent Poetry Book Society bookshop upstairs, I read it all the way back on the train to London, and warmly recommend its paired conversations between poets and writers.

Closing Friday evening’s performances with her longtime friend Carol Ann Duffy, Imtiaz Dharker shared work from her new collection Shadow Reader, noting how “the map of this country/ is made of scars” and asking “can the writer be forgiven/by the one who is written?” Over dinner, in a former monastery, with stone walls, and high, beamed ceilings, I talked in depth with Jennifer Wong and Marjorie Lofti on the impacts of displacement and childhood trauma on the adult self. We were agreed on the need to tread carefully in adulthood, and recognise the vulnerabilities that necessarily remain. Having read and loved the collection, I was also able to tell Marjorie how much I appreciated her debut with Bloodaxe, The Wrong Person to Ask, exploring her childhood flight from the Iranian Revolution, and what she witnessed before her family was able to leave.

On Saturday, for the Royal Society of Literature lecture ‘Nostalgia: Architectures of Longing’, poet, musician and academic Anthony Joseph spoke accompanied by photographs he had taken of the Caribbean. Approaching from multiplying, interconnected angles, he used the images to explore the process of becoming conscious of your separation from your place of origin as a pre-requisite for being able to comprehend it creatively. Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert, which takes the death of his father as its starting point, was one of my most revelatory and moving reads of 2022. I shared poems within my Newcastle workshop. It was therefore even more of a gift to hear Anthony Joseph remember his own arrival in wet, April London, and the resonance of this shift within his subsequent creative output. He explained “you don’t become a Caribbean person until you leave the Caribbean”, but that “this liminal space is full of uncertainty, where the work of being occurs.”

Anthony Joseph: Nostalgia, Architectures of Longing, Newcastle May 2024.

I had the great privilege of opening that final afternoon’s readings with a celebration of Pavilion Poetry’s tenth birthday, alongside Hannah Copely, whose extraordinary second collection, Lapwing, was published by Pavilion this year. Fellow Pavilion poets Linda Anderson and Anita Pati were in the audience. Titling my talk ‘Finding New Flight Patterns: Healing Beyond Trauma’, I decided to explore the bird poems of bird of winter, and specifically how they helped the collection navigate beyond the trauma of childhood sexual abuse towards healing. The slightly expanded text of my reading follows. If you would prefer to watch the video, please click this link, kindly supplied by the Newcastle Poetry Festival and the Bloodaxe Books team.

alice hiller by Anita Pati

[‘Finding New Flight Patterns: Healing Beyond Trauma’ talk given by alice hiller at Newcastle Poetry Festival, 2024, photo by Anita Pati].

Thank you for inviting me to this beautiful festival and city. It’s a real privilege to celebrate Pavilion’s founder Deryn Rees-Jones, Alison Welsby, of Liverpool University Press, and of course my wonderful fellow poets.  Like everyone on the Pavilion list, I value how gently Deryn holds the radical risk-taking and uncensored experimentation which is integral to our hatching new work. In bird of winter, Deryn guided me to bring together a collection which directly addresses the global crime of childhood sexual abuse, and its long aftermath – but also documents creative paths towards healing and reclaiming ourselves. 

As some of you may know, I was sexually abused by my mother until I turned thirteen, in 1977. Incorporating both that hurt, and my recovery beyond it, and paying tribute to Hannah Copely’s brilliant Lapwing, my reading’s structured around the bird poems of bird of winter. With an emphasis on hope, it’s titled Finding new flight patterns: healing beyond trauma. 

As we share this space, I would ask you all to keep in mind the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Let us stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and the occupation encampment honouring them outside the Northern Stage, looking with them to when they will regain their territorial freedom and autonomy.

Whatever our histories and circumstances, as humans we instinctively define ourselves by what we love, not the injuries we may receive. Connecting with where we feel joy can help us recover our agency, and resilience, no matter the challenges we face. Reading my bird poems, I’ll focus on how they were created as acts of beauty and care for my younger selves. Linking them to larger patterns and processes of art-making and art-sharing, I’ll also show how I wanted to change the energy around difficult times which they record, and my relationships to them. 

I’m going to be talking about complex subjects, but I’ll be careful to keep us safe. From the start, birds are at the heart of the collection’s voicings and transformations. They appear in the first poem, ‘o dog of pompeii’. Going in search of the dog’s buried howl, we enter “my mother’s house where the garden/ hides dark sheds   hung with limp pheasants” and “the dead eye of the bird bath/ looks up    but sees nothing”. 

This is rural Wiltshire during the early 1970s. I was nine, and being regularly raped. In their stillness, and apparent lifelessness, these pheasants offer images of my child body in my mother’s bed. But they also hold the possibility of flight in their folded wings, linking into a long tradition of representing the soul as a bird. This reaches back at least to Ancient Egypt, whose treasures nourished me when I discovered photos of them in books at my primary school.

‘o dog of pompeii’ was the second poem I ever wrote. Although it wasn’t consciously planned, as I continued to work with the darknesses of my childhood experiences, I found that more and more birds kept flying in. A robin took my place in ‘the holly tree’, which responds to my homelife while I was learning about the pyramids and Pompeii. 

An Easter chick helped me record where I hurt during, and after, those nights in my mother’s bed. It also registers how very young and vulnerable children remain, when adults injure them, and how this experience colours every waking moment, and follows them into their dreams.

Shaped visually like a clutch of eggs, ‘cyclical/ house of the cecii’ is structured on a rotating axis. I wanted to reflect how it’s always open season for sexual abuse, but also claim the poem’s place in the tradition of works that turn with the year. The interleaved text, of a hunting scene fresco from ancient Herculaneum, links the collaged images to the tradition of art that records the hunting of prey. This reaches back to the cave paintings that I also learnt about at school. Looking back on those times, I have understood how crucial the sense of adventure, choice and growth implicit in learning were to helping me retain a sense of myself notwithstanding the abuse. They also resourced the art-maker I have become, laying down places of resonance to which I could return.

If birds are emblems of hurt, they can also provide markers of healing. My poem ‘bains de mer’, meaning literally ‘sea bathing’, remembers the Normandy holidays I spent throughout my childhood with my French bonne maman or grandmother. Celebrating the two of us us heading down to the beach below her clifftop house, to swim together at high tide, she is “eighty-four   your robe zipped/sure-footed as a penguin/ me your chick kept close”. Every day that we spent together, Bonne Maman let me know I was loved, and through this anchored my identity and sense of self, helping me to withstand the crime my mother was committing against me. 

There was a limit to Bonne Maman’s protection, however, as she lived in another country. A couple of years later, birds in a snowy English churchyard near where I lived with my mother in Wiltshire, gave me another freeze-frame image of myself while the abuse was ongoing. 

Aged twelve and a half, in the icy winter of 1976-77, I was becoming able to see in ways not possible when younger. ‘snowfall’ dramatises the moment of revelation, something like the separation that Anthony Joseph identified in his lecture, that would allow me eventually to “speak winter”. The mood music comes from Breughel paintings of snow scenes. I remembered them from Brussels, where we lived until my father died when I was eight, and where my Bonne Maman continued to live when not by the sea in Normandy.  Breughel’s tiny, busy figures suggested the persistence of life – as mine returned. The painting below is from the Brussels Royal Museums, and is titled ‘Winter Snow with Bird Traps’ by Pieter Breughel.

A much darker experience had precipitated ‘snowfall’s’ moment of seeing. It is recorded in other frozen birds, naked “plucked pheasants” held within my mother’s house, in the poem ‘december 1976’. The poem is preceded by the epigraph “seize your slave girl whenever you want it’s your right”, taken from Roman graffiti in Pompeii:

On the night of 24th December 1976, my mother had claimed that my visiting uncle needed my bed, rather than sleeping on the couch in the living room. This meant I had to sleep with her after the carol singers had left, leading to the poem’s feeling of heaviness and soiling the following morning. I wrote the first draft of it in a workshop run by Sarah Howe, also attended by Mary Jean Chan, and it came to me with the sung quality of a carol of the unspeakable. Because the subject was so painful, the beauty and control of the long open syllables and child-like images – threading stars through the prickly branches as an image for the rape that occurred – gave a measure of safety to their holding.

I went back to boarding school when the holidays ended, and after seeing the birds in the churchyard, and myself within them. Come the Easter holidays of 1977, my mother used a short holiday to Stranraer, in Scotland, to make me share a bed with her again. Aged nearly thirteen, I finally saw a way out, and decided to stop eating, and refuse her. By that autumn my weight had dropped to 28.5 kilos, or 4.5 stones and I was hospitalised. ‘primary or classical anorexia [1977]’ revisits this experience through a sparrow child. Like call and answer birdsong, it grows from two merging voices.  

The more authoritative voice paraphrases Obesity and Anorexia Nervosa: A Question of Shape, published by Peter Dally, who treated me.  Fortunately my main doctor was Peter’s less conventional, more compassionate ex-wife, Ann Dally.  She recognised the risk my mother represented, though I wasn’t able to speak directly about the sexual abuse. Remembering Ann’s daily visits, the pill-shaped title poem, ‘bird of winter’, learns from a chaffinch that the possibility of being heard can support healing. 

Ann Dally made it a condition of my release that I couldn’t live full-time with my mother after leaving hospital. During the school term, I was taken in by relatives in London. I began ordering Spare Rib and feminist zines, and going to the cinema and the theatre, and to free art galleries. I was connecting myself to the conversations of consciousness-raising, and art-making and sharing, and being nourished and transformed by them. Bonne Maman had encouraged me to engage with all forms of artworks from when I was very small. The next poem pays tribute to her and her magical flat in Brussels, where my bird-self was safe. 

Life was improving, but I was still a long way from being out of danger, as the pigeon chicks reflect in ‘when they begin to have feathers’. It alternates my teenage memories with advice by the Roman author Varro on preparing squabs for the table, to reflect the vulnerability that persists in adolescence for people who share my history. Once again, the words that came to me were very simple and light, suited to a teenager who couldn’t begin to understand the world into which her body was leading her, while her mind closed off what had gone before.

Even as I was being preyed upon, I was simultaneously finding and opening my own wings, helped by partly the languages I was learning at school. Absorbing their separate vocabularies, their layered literatures, I climbed further out of the tight, silenced box of the abuse into larger, more possible modes of being. Through books, I met Violette Leduc, Camus, Italo Svevo, Primo Levi, Dante and Ovid. Each writer gave me new words, and let me know that I could mediate my lived experience through my own forms of art-making, however long it might take me to be able to do this.

‘libation’, which recalls my father’s death on 22 November 1972, is informed by the myth of Leda and the swan, inviting a “cygnet” and a “swan beak dress” to hold something of what it meant to be to be told that news by my mother when I was eight. 

In a place of the most absolute darkness, birds open their “wild wings” to hold me to life. Like the birds in cave paintings, or Ancient Egyptian tombs, they are conduits to resurrection and new being. Reflecting this, and how poems may also perform shamanic rituals of healing, ‘libation’ sits opposite a short found poem. This describes an object found in one of the graves of Pompeii, onto which the ritual libations of wine would have been poured to link the living and the dead, as I imagined myself being connected to my papa by our shared love of endives. 

Almost at the end of bird of winter, more songbirds appear in ‘vesuvius’ which re-visits the eruption as an experience of revelation and refusal of silencing. Working from film footage of the 1944 eruption, the poem asks the volcano to “pour down ash and pumice/ muffle our streets with mourning” and to “press your lips against/ those who turn their faces”. It ends in an image of healing and new growth, that arises from the rich soil created in the aftermath of volcanic eruptions: “let grief melt the ash/ until vines climb your slopes again/ until birdsong is heard.”

Far into adulthood, flocks of birds flew in to help as I felt my way back towards understanding how transformatively I was loved by my lost father, at the start of my life, and how this love had contributed towards me finding my own wings, and voice. The title of the next poem translates as ‘birds of winter’. It’s dedicated to him.

A found poem which follows immediately after communicates how my bird and human selves live relative to each other. It’s captioned “wall painting from the ‘villa of the mysteries’ pompeii”. I’ll read it, then end with ‘o goddess isis’, the last poem of  bird of winter. I wrote it on the train back from Liverpool, after Deryn had said Pavilion would like to publish my poems. Please place your feet flat on the floor, then breathe slowly and gently, as we move through these words, into the light of this late spring afternoon. 

If anything I have written about has been difficult for you, the Mind website is a good place to look for support.

bird of winter can be ordered here.

‘Words as pathways to freedom’: thinking how language can hold and release trauma, reading in support of Gaza by way of Pompeii’s ‘entombed cities’ and ‘absent peoples’ at Verve 2024 in Birmingham.

Some blogs begin upbeat. Others have to work their way towards hope. This falls into the second category. But stay with me, and we’ll travel towards a light of reclamation together. Like most of you reading this, I’ve never been bombed. I’ve never had to leave my home and live in a tent in a refugee camp. I’ve never fallen asleep on the ground not knowing whether the people I love will be killed as we sleep. In some ways, there is a gulf of uncrossable distance between me and the Palestinians who are being subjected to genocide by the current Israeli government in Gaza.  

But in other ways, less so. That is, I have some insight into aspects of what Palestinians may be going through. Partly as a result of reading the firsthand accounts that people are managing to get out of Gaza and following videos and news reports. But also because my late father-in-law, the sculptor Oscar Nemon, lost twenty-four family members to the genocide of the Holocaust during World War II, including his mother, his brother and his grandmother. The man I met in 1980 had lived by then for forty years in the shadow of that loss, and been transformed by its absences. The drawing below is a mourning sketch by Oscar Nemon, as is the image at the top of the blog, written on a ‘Don’t Forget’ notepad which he used more than once for these memorial sketches.

The German branch of my own Messel family of origin was similarly truncated by genocide. As a teenager in the 1970s, I visited two elderly relatives, an architect and his wife, who had escaped from Berlin during the 1930s, and by then lived in Swiss Cottage. Like my father-in-law Oscar Nemon, almost all their family members were transported to their deaths by the Nazis as a result of having been identified by the Third Reich as Jewish.

I also have some understanding of the longer term psychological consequences of what is taking place in Gaza. This comes from my own history of growing up being subjected to the powerlessness, and violence, of childhood sexual abuse. For these reasons, and because I am a human being, it haunts me to know the current Israeli government has chosen to put a neighbouring nation in hell – and keep them there, with long-reaching intergenerational consequences, even beyond any ceasefire.  

In mid-February 2024, preparing to read as one of three headline poets at the legendary Verve Festival in Birmingham, with the brilliant, ferocious Nicole Sealey and Rebecca Goss, the Palestinian fight for life and freedom has been very present to me, as it has been to so many of us. Drafting the text I planned to read, I continued to follow news updates and saw the horror worsen by the day, as food supplies in Gaza became even more insecure, notwithstanding the trucks lined up and ready to deliver essential aid at the border.

With this in mind, I built my set from bird of winter to explore ‘words as pathways to freedom’ from poems which held both my own childhood experiences, and references to the current occupation of Gaza. I wanted Palestinians to be honoured, and kept with us, through every word I said in Birmingham’s Hippodrome Theatre. I needed the progression and evolution of my child self from oppression and injury through to reclamation and freedom also to articulate our and Palestine’s hopes for their nation. 

During the week before Verve, writing and redrafting my linking words, rehearsing the chosen poems, I started to re-experience childhood injuries arising from the abuse like those described in ‘remnants/silvae‘, which you will see below. Through them, my adult body expressed its memory of what had been done to me fifty years earlier. Rather than backing off, I kept redrafting and rehearsing, while also take time out to safe-guard myself and swim. I recognised the oppression that had overwhelmed me when I was too young to refuse it, but knew I was managing it as a side-effect of generating the possibility of transformation and healing.

As I took the train up to Birmingham on Friday evening, where I was also going to lead a workshop on colour for Verve on the Sunday, a violet wash of sunset illuminated the dregs of the ending day. The sky seemed to sing hope and promise to the muted greys and the greens of the winter landscape. 

I took this as an omen for my Saturday performance with Rebecca Goss and Nicole Sealey, hosted by fellow poet and former archaeologist Jo Bell. The next morning, after catching Holly Pester’s brilliant Verve/ Poetry School lecture, I carried my script for the evening to the canal side, and sat on a bench in the sun rehearsing quietly. I asked for the day’s energy to illuminate the darkness in which Rebecca, Nicole and I would perform together, and bring from it light.

The words which I shared with a packed theatre space in Birmingham, on 24 February follow. What Rebecca Goss and Nicole Sealey read was no less searing, as you’ll see if you follow the links here through to their work. Rebecca’s poems illuminate what it can mean to lose a child, and then and live beyond that loss. Nicole’s ask us to face how institutional racism wounds, and that it destroys not only individual lives, but also the societies from which they grow.

As you read my own words spoken in the Hippodrome Theatre, which follow, imagine me swinging a sacred sistrum out over the audience to initiate the poems, then overarm-bowling a red rubber ball among them to be chased by the resurrected ‘dog of pompeii’. At the end, as ‘vesuvius’ closed, I joined my palms in a gesture of prayer, raising them up to eye-level, and then opening my arms out to form the branches of a tree, symbolising new growth and a healing future for all of us in the theatre and beyond.

words as pathways to freedom 

alice hiller Verve Poetry Festival, 2024

Thank you for inviting me to Verve.  It’s heartening to be here, particularly at such a hard time, as we witness the genocide underway in Gaza.  Like many of us making our lives beyond trauma, I rage, and grieve, that what is taking place under the Israeli invasion will continue to impact the Palestinian people for generations, even after their land is restored. I have chosen poems whose imageries stand in solidarity with their fight. 

When I speak of ashes and rubble, of ‘entombed cities’ and ‘absent peoples’, let your thoughts go also to Gaza.  When I ask that our streets may be ‘muffled with mourning’ think of their streets also. But when I speak of growth and reclamation, be with Palestinian peoples, who are fighting for their own secure future. 

Plaster casts of the fugitives, who died in Pompeii, fleeing the Vesuvius.

For all of us facing hardships, even on a lesser scale, words open pathways towards freedom. I hope to share one aspect of this process tonight, through the poems of bird of winter. They respond to my experience of sustained sexual abuse in childhood, but also of finding healing beyond a crime that impacts millions of us around the world. Whether in therapeutic, creative or social contexts, arriving at language that can hold and release trauma is, of course, tough. 

To speak, we may have to re-enter spaces of near annihilation, and reclaim the selves and memories we left behind in order to survive. Recognising the real dangers this represents, my work also plays out the opposites of what I was subjected to. Where I was without agency, my poems summon it. Where I was left in darkness, I claim light. Where I was hated, I counter this with love for the child and the teenager I once was, and the woman we have become.  

Because I want the collection to perform acts of resistance, and restitution, as well as witness, bird of winter interleaves the sexual abuse by my mother, and its aftermath, with poems honouring what allowed me to come through. I also celebrate the nurture I received, and still receive, from the world around me, having turned outward towards it very young, with no secure home for shelter. 

In bird of winter, this sustaining communion is channelled through found materials arising from the buried Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was first drawn to their histories as a child when the abuse was ongoing, perhaps because I sensed in them mirrors of my own experience. I’ve been deeply absorbed by them ever since. 

Taking us beyond injury into healing,  found materials from Pompeii and Herculaneum seed all the poems I’ll share with you. ‘o dog of pompeii’, which opens bird of winter, includes a plaster cast of a guard dog, and the charm bracelet found on a child in Herculaneum. Engaging with them let the poem rise up and take flight. The dog is below, and the charm bracelet concludes this piece.

Erasing an epigram by the Roman poet Martial, that featured before and after images of Vesuvius, allows me to honour the beauty inherent to my body and spirit as a child. It also suggests what was done to me. 

In bird of winter, the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius is a recurring expression of the onslaught of sexual abuse. The rock, into which that volcanic ash and debris hardened, solidifies also into the difficulties I meet, trying to dig down into my past. Against this, three shrines rescued from Herculaneum’s harbour, hold energies which sustain my spirit. Through them, I was ultimately able to face down what sought to destroy me.

The poet Statius was born near Vesuvius. His work helped frame my reflections on what it means to live beyond rape in childhood.  Written a decade after the volcano erupted, a fragment in his long poem Silvae imagines when the landscape will have healed, but asks what this new growth could hide.  I translated his Latin and then interleaved our couplets.

As happens for many abused children, while I was growing up, and the crime was ongoing, most people around me looked away. Aged thirteen, I was hospitalised weighing twenty-eight kilos.

Water is my healing element. I cleanse and rediscover my body with every immersion, every length I swim. Photos of a mosaic found in the House of the Faun in Herculaneum were the starting point for ‘sea level’.

The image above is of the charms taken from the ‘burnt child’ found on Vesuvius’s shoreline in ‘o dog of pompeii’. She was awaiting rescue with others in the harbour area. Many were good luck charms, presumably collected for her by family members who loved her and wished her well in her life, at least until that fateful day when the volcano began to erupt. The child was also holding the beautiful vase photographed below them. These objects moved me deeply when I saw them, because they gave us back her life, and her humanity, and the tenderness in which she was held. When I wrote the poem, these objects nestled a kernel of hope into the harsh images of what was done to me.

This hope is also present to those people currently trapped in Gaza, as they fight to stay alive day after determined day, as they have had to for so many years now. The last poem I’ll read comes close to the end of bird of winter. The force of the volcano has been reclaimed to represent the energy needed for change. With it, we stand at last in a place of healing and growth. 

 

The poems quoted are all from bird of winter, published by Pavilion Poetry, who are ten years old this year.

‘I am a spring/ The storm enters her’: Sarala Estruch on making art that transforms the silencings of family, history and diaspora.

Few journeys are ever single or simple. Whatever we leave behind often moves alongside us – whether as a source of harm, or healing.  In ways that feel radical, and necessary, Sarala Estruch’s revelatory debut poetry collection, After All We Have Travelled, invites us to look with new eyes at the complexity of diaspora, and how the violences implicit in empire may impact successive generations. The poems also reflect strong energies that arise in speaking beyond the silencings of history – as Estruch does here, through fragmentation and uncertainty.  

Published by Nine Arches, and edited with great thoughtfulness and care by Jane Commane, After All We Have Travelled is a collection which speaks additionally to me as someone who lost their father in childhood, as Sarala did. This is something about which Sarala and I have talked about briefly in person, and in more depth within the interview which follows this review. Because I feel that both her poems, and the themes she explores, will speak to many of us with multiple heritages or languages, and complex histories, in addition to reviewing her collection in this blog, I wanted to offer Sarala a space to talk about how about how the collection came together, and the thinking, and reading, and living which informs the poems.

Review of After All We Have Travelled by alice hiller:

After All We have Travelled’s prefatory poem, ‘On Sound’, notices how it remains at a “frequency / our ears // cannot touch/ but // the body / hears”. In the speaker’s history, this reverberation is true of the separation before she was born (at the insistence of his family), of her Indian father and European mother. ‘Starting from a Dream, 1983’ observes the speaker’s pregnant “mother-to-be” waking at night in a separate room, in his family’s home.  By day the family appear “as though they are // already / watching her leave”. At the close of the poem the speaker’s unborn self rises up into an act of self-claiming that fuses separate perspectives into a voice that is simultaneously scattered, and whole: 

All too soon, the “single star” of the speaker’s father has been extinguished by his early death. Elegising his gifts to her, and honouring the inarticulacy of childhood bereavement, ‘the things that remain’ is made up of fourteen tiny couplets, laid out as seven pairs, with a central dividing space running between them. Enacting smallness, the worn objects hold a potent residue of love alongside the grief through which they have been cherished:

Speaking to a theme to which Will Harris, Sarah Howe, L.Kiew, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Nina Mingya Powles and others respond, this second section also documents the complexity of growing up of mixed cultural heritage, and the fragmentations and dispossessions of self that can ensue. In ‘Freight’, these include “believing people/ were praising the whiteness/ in me when they called // me ‘pretty’.” Set alongside this is the confusion of travelling alone to India to meet the plethora of loving relatives who nonetheless chose to be strangers during her father’s lifetime. ‘Home/Home’ begins “It is hard to feel Indian when this country is as unknown to you/ as you are to her.” 

Like a tide flowing back, from the midpoint, the poems shift towards reclamation as the speaker understands what she has lived without, and becomes more able to heal. ‘how to talk about loss’ reflects “for // decades i’ve been a river-bed/ bereft ~ not a drop of// what i was made to hold ~ ”. Responding, ‘To leap’ is one in a sequence of passionately alive love poems encompassing an energy of deep regeneration. Opening with an epigraph from Toni Morrison, ‘I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.’  this honours “pitching your strength/ at every atom that has pressed// you down & soaring”, then ultimately  “learning to live// with doubt, learning to rise in it;/ learning to love like that.” 

The collection closes with multiple reintegrations. Arriving at “Indira Gandhi International Airport” in ‘Return’, the speaker and  her Jamaican husband are told by the immigration officer that their children are “universal.”   ‘Dear Father’ records a sense of homecoming in India when the grandfather, who originally refused her and her mother, now welcomes her husband and children, making her lost father also present again with them: “These rooms pulse with you, motes/ of thought and feeling still in motion.”

Three powerful poems directly address the harm resulting from the British Empire. ‘The Residency, Lucknow’, documents “crumbling walls pierced with exit wounds.” ‘Vaisakhi, Vaisakhi’ contrasts the speaker’s family observance of the Spring Festival in 2019 with the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, when the British Army killed somewhere between 400 and 1500 of the people who had gathered peacefully in Amritsar to celebrate, wounding many more. ‘Grandfather Speaks (Via Audio Recording)’ documents how the family dispossession of their home, in the Punjab during Partition, remains unspeakable by him even in the present day: 

The final poem, ‘Ghazal:Say/ After Will Harris’, centres around a memory of the speaker running to meet her father in a “garden”, and cutting her knee. Her spilt blood is both historical fact, and a metaphor for the redemptive interpersonal transactions that occur through the reactions of art-making and art-sharing, and the energies that they confer on those who create and receive them. In a way that encapsulates both personal experience and the reverberations of history, the speaker realises: “All I know is you’ve been gone these long years and, at the same time, you haven’t,/ you’ve been right here.” The collection ends with loss and connection inseparable from each other, remembering a father and daughter who have moved beyond fixed time into the resonant indeterminacy of art and memory: 

Interview between Sarala Estruch and alice hiller

alice: We both started out trying to write novels – then found our projects translating themselves into poems. I found the wildcards, and subconscious dark woods of poetry helped hold spaces in bird of winter that simultaneously required, and denied, language. What led you into poetry from prose, Sarala, and how did writing in this form help you realise After All We Have Travelled?

Sarala: Yes, ever since my late teens, I had been wanting to write about my parents’ story – how they met, loved, and separated. I kept trying to find ways into writing it. For years, I thought the book would be a sort of historical novel set in London in the 1970s and early 80s (where my parents met and then lived together for several years). Then, in 2016, after reading Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, I tried to write the story as an experimental novel or a hybrid work of prose/poetry, but eventually realised that what interested me most – where the energy really resided – was in the poetry. 

I came to see that I was less interested in narrative progression and more interested in language, specifically language’s ability and inability to explore the complexities of human psychology and emotion. Saying that, narrative is still important to me, and, in some ways, my collection could be described as a novel-in-verse, but the experience of feeling and thinking beyond the ordinary day-to-day parameters is more important, if that makes sense. 

And yes, as you’ve said, poetry is a place where it is possible to attempt to speak about things for which ordinary language doesn’t suffice – inexplicable loss, complicated and prolonged grief, devastating personal, communal and/or intergenerational trauma. Poetry helps us in our attempts to articulate that which cannot be articulated, to create a language (or a non-language) of the unspeakable. 

alice: That’s such a beautiful and thoughtful answer. I love the idea of the ‘language (or a non-language)! Following in that train, during your launch with Nine Arches Press, you referred to the voices of the poems in After All We Have Travelled as coming from their ‘speakers’, rather than necessarily articulating your single experience. I see my poems as speaking through and with me, but coming from a larger hinterland. Would you be able to say something about how your poems are voiced?

Sarala: I think when I insist that the voices in After All We Have Travelled are those of ‘speakers’, I am trying to draw attention to the fact that, while I have drawn on personal experience and family history, these poems are not purely works of autobiography or biography. The poems are works of invention and craft; throughout the writing of AAWHT, factual accuracy was less important to me than emotional and imaginative truth. 

In addition, a huge source of inspiration for my work, beyond my personal experience, is the work of other poets. The poems in AAWHT were created in conversation with the works of writers including Bhanu Kapil, Marie Howe, Emily Berry, Sarah Howe, Sandeep Parmar, Kayo Chingonyi, Ocean Vuong, Will Harris, and many others.    

alice: Those are all poets whose work has also been crucial to me in different ways. Some of them, like you and I, also operate in more than one language. ‘Bouchon’, meaning stopper, explores your work’s relationship to language, and to the blockages which also shape it, but moves beyond them towards a space of freedom and speaking. The poem ends ‘There are no stoppers –’  How has this journey come about in your own work and life as an artist?

Sarala: These are all such excellent questions – thanks so much for your care and attention to the work, alice. I think, in terms of ‘Bouchon’, the poem is speaking about how language can get in the way of experiencing things, how language can sometimes ‘stopper’ the world by making us see things in a habitual way, rather than allowing us to experience things afresh, as children do, without language. This poem is about having a complicated relationship with language, fearing how language can ‘hold things down. Its false claim / to ownership’ (which, of course, can also refer to the colonial impulse of ‘naming’ that which is ‘unknown’, but which may already have a name). I think this poem is about embracing the joy of not knowing; how there can be real joy in being in a place where you don’t have the language to describe the things around you, which takes you back to experiencing the world in a sensory, pre-verbal way. I suppose, in my work, I am interested in exploring ‘the nameless / things, a poet spends her life chasing and / never quite arriving at’. It’s a way of accepting that we can’t know or control everything; that it’s OK to ‘just be’ – this is also a form of belonging. You don’t need to know everything in order to belong.

This was a new way, for me, of writing about unknowing, which is a strong theme of the book and of my life, if I’m honest. There is a lot about my family history and  about my parent’s countries and cultures that I don’t know and that I often feel shut out or apart from, since both my mother and father immigrated to England before I was born (from France and India, respectively) and, also, as a result of the difficult, painful things that families avoid speaking about and which are enveloped in shame, such as my paternal relatives preventing my parents from marrying and being together. However, in this poem, the speaker is embracing the state of ‘unknowing’, how it can be a fertile and joyful ground to stand on. 

Of course, another important theme of the book (and one that is even more significant in my pamphlet Say), is the journey of moving from being unable to speak (about trauma, childhood bereavement, and complicated grief) to finally finding a language and the courage to be able to voice these experiences and emotional states, so yes, that is also another possible reading of the poem – thank you.

alice: Developing what you say here, poems including ‘The Residency, Lucknow’, ‘Vaisakhi, Vaisakhi’ and ‘Grandfather Speaks (via Audio Recording)’ address the ingrowing silences and shames that living beyond catastrophic loss may precipitate for some individuals, and considers the ways that art-making can offer spaces of communication, as well as commemoration and witness, which confer agency on both creator and recipient. Was that something which was important to you? 

Sarala: Yes, very much so – thank you for putting it so beautifully. Attempts at communication and connection are central to my work, as are attempts to create poetry of commemoration and witness. Trauma is carried in the body and passed down through generations, so speaking about and sharing our experiences of trauma, in a safe way and in a safe environment, can create space for reparation and healing, which is so important – otherwise we become stuck in cycles of suffering. 

Thank you for everything you’ve said here, particularly about the poems’ attempts to confer agency on both creator and recipient – this is such a vital component of the work.

alice: It is a collection which means a lot to me Sarala. I feel changed by reading it, which was part of why I wanted to share my response to the poems and ask you more about them. In reviewing After All We Have Travelled, I was strongly drawn to your experiments with form, and the freedoms these gave you, which of course generate agency for both reader and writer.  Would you like to say something about this space of deep play, perhaps with reference to ‘Camera Lucida/ After Roland Barthes’?

Sarala: Yes, I consciously wanted to include a wide variety of forms in this collection, having been inspired by Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade, in this regard – Howe’s use of multiple poetic forms really highlights and illustrates the points she is making about the instabilities and multiple possibilities of language/meaning, and also in terms of shaking up the English canon and creating a space where multiple poetic forms (originating from various countries and cultures), languages, cultural myths and histories can sit side-by-side and be enriched by one another. Howe’s work also creates a fruitful space to think about the many possibilities inherent in cross-cultural and mixed-race relationships, and mixed-race identities. I was drawing on all of this while writing AAWHT.

It was also, as you say, a space for deep play – a liberating and (mostly) joyful (although, of course, at times highly challenging) experience to write these poems in the forms they asked to be in. 

‘Camera Lucida’ was strongly inspired by Barthes’ eponymous text on photography and mourning. The poem began because I had a memory of seeing a photograph in my father’s photo album which carried a lot of significance to me. I told Sarah Howe (who worked with me as a mentor on these poems) I wanted to write about this photograph but I wasn’t sure how. She suggested that I read Camera Lucida. As soon as I began to read Barthes’ text, I very quickly felt the urge to replace the word ‘photography’ with the word ‘father’ or ‘lost father’. Barthes seemed to be, from the very start, speaking directly to my experience of losing a parent, while, at the same time, speaking very intelligently about photography. I, therefore, played with Barthes’ words and incorporated many of them into the poem (the words in italics are direct quotations lifted from Camera Lucida) – so this poem is, in part, a found-poem. 

Early drafts of the poem included several parts, which were short and fragmentary, like discrete photographs. Then my editor at Nine Arches Press, Jane Commane, had the wonderful idea of drawing faint boxes around the separate parts of the poem, so that they would visually appear to be photographs in a photo album. In addition, I asked Jane to typeset the poem so that ‘the photographs’ slowly fade over the course of the poem, so that the final ‘photograph’ is only faintly visible, evoking how memory (like photographs) fades over time. At least, that is my reading of the poem. I am open to other interpretations; I don’t think an author has absolute authority over the meaning of their work, and, in fact, there is often a lot in a work which the author does not know is there, since it is as a result of the work of the unconscious mind. 

alice: I agree very strongly with what you say about the role of the unconscious mind in generating and shaping the work we make. Continuing with the theme of the deep experiences which inform our beings, I wondered if we might think alongside each other about early childhood bereavement, which I touch on in my review also, and is something my own work addresses. One of the most moving and profound journeys of After All We Have Travelled is towards finding forms of words to hold this succession of losses, which travel alongside a child as they grow towards adulthood and find their parent is absent also from the new places that are opening in their lives. Could you say something about the process of creative reclamation which your collection performs, and the sense of nurturing presence it generates? 

Sarala: Wow, alice, I can’t quite express how very grateful I am for your careful, close reading of AAWHT and what the work is trying to do. 

Yes, the central journey of the collection is the process of moving through life as a child who lost a parent, then as an adult and, finally, as a parent oneself, and all of the different and cumulative losses of growing up and living without a parent throughout the various stages of one’s life. However, as the closing poem ‘Ghazal: Say’ suggests, even while the person who was bereaved in childhood has keenly felt the loss of their parent throughout their life, they have also, at the same time, keenly felt their parent’s presence: ‘All I know is you’ve been gone these long years and, at the same time you haven’t, / you’ve been right here’. 

The creative reclamation of After All We Have Travelled is the acknowledgement and expression of what bereaved persons know to be true: when you lose someone important to you, at whatever stage of your life, the person never fully leaves you; they are still always here, with you, within you – in your mind and in your heart. They are always present in your life, just as the loss of that person is also, simultaneously, always present. Expressing this perplexing, contradictory, and yet strangely beautiful truth gave me much solace, and I hope that readers of these poems will find a similar solace. 

alice: I personally felt that beautifully realised, complex, tender solace Sarala, and it is one of the many elements of your work that I wanted to bring to others. Finally, and to close, can I thank you again for the gift of your poems, and ask what you are working on now, and where we may hear you read from After All We Have Travelled in the months to come?

Sarala: Yes, I am currently working towards a second collection of poetry, as well as a work of creative non-fiction. Both continue to explore and develop themes of identity, (un)belonging, and loss, which are so central to AAWHT, although in new and different ways. 

In terms of readings: I am reading at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Lounge (online) on Tuesday 27 June, at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 1 July (with Stephanie Sy-Quia), and at Deal Music and Arts Festival on Saturday 8 July (with Jessica Mookherjee). I am also teaching an online poetry workshop on writing poems about memory and family history for Verve Poetry Festival on 18 July.  

‘black river’ or ‘fiume nero’: exploring how meaning and sensation move across the boundaries of geography with poet and translator Piero Toto – who translated poems from ‘bird of winter’ for ‘Atelier’.

‘black river’ or ‘fiume nero’ : the Arno by night.

Studying Italian at school in England, I never dared dream that I’d write poems that would be re-created in the language of Dante and Fiorucci, Italo Svevo and cappuccino – by the distinguished poet and professional translator Piero Toto. I speak to him here about the larger project of travelling curiously between cultures. We also explore how meaning and sensation can move from word to experience across the boundaries of geography. 

River Arno by day.

Writers, clothes, food, Pompeii from my school textbooks, films with people riding fast through Roma on scooters – as a teenager during the late Seventies, for me Italy was the land of gritty glamour. Somewhere I longed to visit. A language I wanted to grow up into.  I got my wish the summer I turned sixteen, when I spent two months in Florence. After running away from my family of origin, I funded my trip by working in London as a cashier in a supermarket by day, and then a nightclub-come-restaurant by night. By July, I could afford to travel to Firenze on a hot, jolting sleeper train, pleasurably full of rucksacks and backpackers. 

Leda and the Swan at the Bargello Museum, Florence.

Florence in the hot summer of 1980 was not today’s tourist Airbnb honeypot which I revisited in 2019 to take these photos. Aged just sixteen, I found a shadowy city where men wolf-whistled me me on dark streets, followed me on hot summer nights, propositioned me, invited me into their cars.  But it was also the city of blazing, luminous sunshine, the city of train stations. I met a girl from Catania in Sicily, working as a secretary. She took me travelling on weekends. We came to share a room, drank our morning cappuccino standing up at the bar together. With her beside me, I was beginning to find myself in a body that had known sexual abuse in childhood, but was now coming to feminity, coming to maturity – as poems like ‘imprint of a young woman’,  translated for Atelier by Piero Toto as ‘impronta di una giovane donna’, record. Because I grew up between French and English, and then added Italian into the mix, I understand something of the challenges of translation, which made more valuable the gift of being able to discuss them with Piero.

Firenze dopo la pioggia / Florence after rain.

ah: Thank you so much for translating my poems from bird of winter, Piero.   It was a huge honour to be translated so beautifully by another poet into his mother tongue. I feel I am meeting my work with new eyes, new senses. Can I begin our conversation by asking you to say a few words about Atelier, for readers who may not know its work?  When did it begin? What’s its mission? Who are the team behind it? 

PT: First of all, thank you for accepting my invitation to be published in Atelier. Like I said in our recent pre-translation chat over Zoom, I knew we had to do something together the moment I saw you perform at the Forward Prizes back in 2021. Luckily the opportunity to collaborate came with my involvement as translator for Atelier, one of Italy’s most prominent poetry magazines. It is produced by Giuliano Ladolfi Editore in two different formats, online and in print. It was founded back in 1996 to bring attention to the new generations of poets, but also to feature critical contributions on 20th century poets and poetry in translation. Throughout the years, Ladolfi Editore has also published monographs, conference proceedings and other publications dedicated to contemporary poetry, critical essays on poetry and new voices in the European poetry scene. The current Atelier team is made up of poets, critics and writers who all contribute pro bono to both the online version of the magazine and its print sister. I am part of the online editorial team.

ah: It sounds like a hugely important and necessary space of cultural transmission. I know you have been collaborating with Atelier to showcase contemporary English-language poetry in translation. You have translated Andrew McMillan, Peter Scalpello, Anthony Anaxagorou, André Naffis-Sahely and Golnoosh Nour so far, with more poets lined up for 2023. How did this come about and did you have any particular criteria for the poets you chose to translate? I noticed that a number of the poets you have chosen identify as queer poets, as I do myself. 

Bacchus by Caravaggio, the Uffizi Gallery Florence.

PT: The main criterion I follow is to include poets that are little known or completely unknown to Italian-speaking audiences. The process for choosing them is very easy: does their poetry speak to me? Does their poetics or collection introduce something new for the Italian poetry scene (in terms of form, content, language, imagery, etc.)? UK and American poetry are very different from Italian poetry, which tends to be slightly more ‘lyrical’ compared to the more prosaic tendency of English language poetry (with exceptions of course). The other question I ask myself is: in my current position of privilege, can I use my voice to amplify (other) marginalised voices? Especially as a queer poet, I feel that it is my duty to make sure that I can support other queer poets’ work by offering them a platform – if I do not do it, who will?

In the early selection stages, a deciding factor behind the inclusion of a poet was whether or not I knew the poet personally, as this would speed things up: as a matter of fact the first two poets I published are poets I am close to and whose work I deeply admire. The later selections were based on whether the poets were known to Italian-speaking audiences or whether they had an upcoming collection. Apart from the poets’ own bios, I hardly introduce the poets or their work, so as not to influence our readers. When we decide to include a note or a short explanatory introduction (as I did for Peter Scalpello or with your own poems) it is because we feel that it is 100% integral to the poetry itself.

Luminous with young, female possibility – Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ or ‘Spring’ in the Uffizi.

ah: I was very grateful that you should have translated my note about living beyond grooming and childhood sexual abuse with the poems from bird of winter. Bringing words to this space where there has historically been so much silence is integral to my creative project. You bring to your translations both your academic background as Senior Lecturer in Translation at London Metropolitan University, and your creative process as a poet who writes in both English and Italian. Could I ask you how you set about translating poetry, as opposed to other materials? 

PT: I have been working as a translator for almost 20 years, dealing with a variety of materials, genres and clients. Compared to commercial translation, where most of the time it is the target audience’s needs that must be kept in mind when translating (depending of course on your clients’ instructions), with poetry I constantly try and remind myself of honouring the original poet’s voice, their lived experience, and this is probably more prominent in my case because I am a poet myself and I have been translated too, so I know first-hand how it feels to undergo the process of translation, and once again I felt that if I am in a position to be able to lend my services to introduce new voices on the current poetry scene, then I must do that. Other poetry translators will probably say differently, but for me this is my main mantra when translating. That is why I tend to approach contemporary, living poets with whom I can have a chat beforehand or whatever, feed off their energy and intuition, and then try and channel that in my translations. Basically, though, I just keep my fingers crossed and hope that everything goes well!! [joking of course]

Piero Toto, translator, academic & poet.

ah: In my own case, I found that your translations brought out beautiful textures and subtleties that the English could not deliver in the same way, being a terser language. From ‘imprint of a young woman’ translating “the husk of your voice/ musked my being” to “il graffio della tua voce/ muschiava la mia essenza” laid the lingering sensuality of that encounter down onto the page through Italian’s long vowel sounds, and whispering, sibilant consonants. It was a true gift. Following on from this, what was your own route into translation, and how did you decide on this as part of your career path?

PT: I believe I can be described as a xenophile and a citizen of the world rather than belonging to a specific nationality, so my need to explore different cultures and different countries as well as being able to put my language skills to good use, to be of service, are at the core of everything I do. This has motivated most of my personal and professional choices. 

Inspirational mysterious Etruscan female figure alive with power for my teenage self from the Etruscan Museum.

ah: You are not alone in feeling that way, Piero. In an interview in the current issue of The Paris Review, [243], poet Rita Dove looks back on beginning to learn German as a teenager in Akron, and thinks of it relative to the process of coming to understand poetry.  Dove was a Fullbright Scholar in Germany, and is a fluent German speaker, married for many years to German writer Fred Viehbahn. She speaks as someone used to moving between languages: 

At that time I also started learning German – Akron had a sizeable German population, so our teacher was a native speaker. I realized that figuring out how to talk about poetry was, in some ways, similar to speaking in another language – with practice it was something I could master but, ultimately, true understanding of a poem happened on a level beyond words. It was untranslatable. 

Would you care to comment on Dove’s insights, both as a poet, and as a translator?

PT: We often hear the traduttore traditore [translator traitor] expression in translation circles, meaning that there will always be a level of imprecision in our translations and ineffability in the original pieces of work which make the act of translation seemingly redundant. I would tend to agree with Dove: the superficial symbols (the language) that we use to write poetry can merely represent what has been revealed to us, what has emerged out of our experience of the world. It is in the interstices of those symbols that we need to seek meaning: it takes only one vibrational deflection from language to reveal its limits (its untranslatability) and at the same time its power beyond these limits. Meanwhile, though, we must make do with the instruments at our disposal (i.e., translation) to get by. Because, what is the option otherwise? 

ah: I couldn’t agree more with you.  I love your formulation of ‘vibrational deflection’, and the idea of meaning occurring at the ‘interstices of symbols’. Thank you for those Piero. As I mention in my preface to this interview, I learnt Italian for three years at school as a teenager, and lived alone for two months in Florence the summer I turned sixteen. Before that, I had grown up speaking French to my French grandmother from my earliest childhood. In both cases, I understood without consciously articulating it that I thought differently when I was expressing myself in a different language. In French you say J’ai peur, j’ai faim, literally translated as I have cold, I have hunger. It is if these sensations come bodily to inhabit you, rather than define you, as they do in English. Developing this idea, I loved the way the lines of my poems were transformed as well as translated in your transmission of them into Italian. I wondered if you might say something about how this came about?

Hills beyond Firenze

PT: Firstly I think it is important to acknowledge some of the basic structural differences between languages, and in our particular case Italian and English, in terms of grammar, sentence structure, etc. Having said this, poetry is probably the one ‘language’ that allows us to deconstruct those very same differences and take some liberties in order to honour the poets’ voice. When translating extracts from bird of winter, I considered the ‘mood’ of the collection and the vivid imagery contained within it. For example, when translating the first verse of the poem elegy for an eight year old, where the English opens with the subject “she” followed by a verb in the present form + an adjective to describe how the protagonist is sitting, I turned that into a past participle [seduta dritta] instead to create a vivid snapshot of the little girl and to put even more distance between the reader and the initial scene, which for me sets the tone of the whole poem. In this way, the reader is slowly shown the image described in the opening verses, as if it were a slo-mo camera approaching the eight-year-old girl. It also introduces the repetitions of “d’s” and “t’s” to enhance the soundscape. Compensating with other rhetorical/stylistic devices for what is lost in translation is an essential part of poetry translation, or at least for my own practice. In this case, however, I do not see it as a loss. 

ah: I read ‘elegia per una bambina di otto anni’ as both a miracle of subtle empathy, and a truly generous gift. In her recent memoir, Dandelions, writer and translator Thea Lenarduzzi reminds her readers of the weft of indigenous languages across Italy, from Sardinian and Neapolitan in the South, to Friulian in the North, that underlie and co-exist with ‘standard’ Italian. Do you feel that growing up in a country where the construct of language is in and of itself so diverse, and at times also so politically charged, helped shape your own relationship to communication as a space of nuance, opening and possibility, rather than fixed meaning? I know you co-edited Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom: Training the Doers, which published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan. 

PT: I guess you could say that. When growing up, especially in the heel of Italy – which is where I am from – you are exposed to dialects, which are languages in themselves, with their own grammar and lexis. They are imbued in the fabric of society and carry a lot of history within them: my own dialect comes from Latin but has strong French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic influences, for example. So code-switching (almost without realising) is a thing!

Etruscan woman in terracotta from the Etruscan Museum in Florence – one of Italy’s many cultural inheritances.

ah: And indeed genre switching. After so much generous support of the work of other poets, could we close with a few words on your own career as a poet writing in English and Italian. You published tempo 4/4 in 2021 with Transeuropa Edizioni, and have published many wonderful individual poems in Italian, German and English periodicals and magazines from La Repubblica to Queerlings and harana poetry. For readers who would like to read more, would you like to say something about the themes which your own work is drawn to explore, and where you see your career taking you next creatively? 

Il Duomo, Firenze.

PT: I recently completed my first poetry collection in English, which I hope will find a good home soon. I am attracted to the value and meaning of human relationships, of existence per se, and the way our experiences forge our vision of life. In particular, exploring sexual identity and incommunicability. Constantly shifting between languages, harmonies, sounds and meanings can be a rather messy business… as I said on another occasion, I navigate through multiple cultural and linguistic identities inhabiting the world on its margins. I am not sure where I will be creatively in the near future, given the many hats that I wear (as a bilingual poet, as a translation scholar, as a poetry translator…) but poetry-wise I intend to look at the overlaps between poetry and the visual arts, specifically poetry-music and its digital fruition. For those interested in my work, you can check out my linktree.

ah: Thank you again Piero. I will be first in the line to buy your collection. It can’t come too soon. And thank you also for your generosity in conversation and in translation.

If anyone would like to join me in an online, hands on workshop exploring bringing our bodies into creative practice, I will be facilitating one for Tsaa with Roma on 22 June at 14 00 BST. There are free places available for those facing financial hardship.

Chaired by Jennifer Lee Tsai, I will also be performing live and online with Padraig Regan to explore ‘Form as Radical Midwife: Queering the Page’ at the Ledbury Festival on Sunday 2 July, 14. 00 BST, 2023.

The link to Piero Toto’s translations of ‘black river’, ‘elegy for an eight year old’ and ‘imprint of a young woman’ for Atelier is here.

You can find bird of winter here.

The ‘fiume nero’ of the Arno seen from the bridge at night.

Inviting the reader to collaborate dynamically in the act of reading – an interview and essay by alice hiller with Arc Magazine in India on how working experimentally can confer agency around complex materials.

Back in March, when spring was only beginning in the UK, Dr Pragya Suman asked me if I would contribute a short essay and three poems to Arc Magazine. I chose to explore what working experimentally can bring to those of us whose work responds to complex materials, and was given permission by Pavilion to reproduce ‘her door is missing’, ‘and now came the ashes’, and ‘tessellation’ to evidence what I was saying in practice. Pragya and I also explored the topic further in a mini interview. The beginning of the essay is quoted below, and you will be able to read it in full, along with the other powerful material featured in Arc’s spring 22 issue if you follow the link at the end of the excerpt or here:

alice hiller in Arc Magazine: When I was growing up during the 1970s, England experienced intensely cold winters. Walking through the graveyard of the parish church with my mother, I would sometimes find small birds lying curled in the snow.  Seeking shelter within yew bushes, they had frozen to death overnight, then fallen from their perches. Although I could not articulate why at the time, the hunched shapes of their still, undefended bodies resonated with me. 

During those same years of unlocking the church, polishing its brasses, singing hymns on Sundays beside my mother, I was also being subjected to penetrative sexual abuse by her. We had moved together to Wiltshire from Brussels when my father died, the year I turned eight.  In the English countryside, surrounded by darkness and silence, my mother took me into her bed. I was not able to tell anyone what came to pass between us for two decades beyond the physical abuse ceasing. 

Writing bird of winter in my fifties, which gives creative witness to this crime, also on behalf of the millions who are subjected to childhood sexual abuse around the world, I knew the poems needed to exist in relation to the white spaces around them. I wanted them to communicate at a somatic and an instinctive level, through the shapes they made on the page, as the birds’ hunched outlines in the snow connected with me to suggest my own body when I was word-less.  I wanted the freedoms of more experimental poetry to open pathways to healing. 

Working visually as well as texually in bird of winter, I invite the reader’s conscious and subconscious selves to collaborate dynamically in the work of ‘reading’, conferring upon them an agency that the abuse denied me. Through this they become discoverers, rather than recipients of this complex material, and participate in the collection’s journey into meaning and resolution. They can also calibrate their depth of engagement, as I hope these three featured poems reflect. 

If you would like to keep reading, please follow the link below.

Link to Arc Magazine spring 22 with full essay by alice hiller, plus interview and 3 poems.

Speaking a rainbow: performing live at StAnza Poetry alongside Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka.

St Andrews, Scotland.

Note: this blog contains non-explicit references to childhood sexual abuse in a context of witness and healing.

Preparing to travel to St Andrews, in Scotland, for the StAnza Poetry Festival 2022, I flickered between nervousness and excitement.  It was my first long trip since October 2019. The traveller in me was thrilled to be seeing new places after so long. But I was going there to speak about ‘Erasure – what cannot be said and how we say it’, alongside Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka. Writing respectively about Ireland’s foundling homes, and Romania’s orphanages, and my own childhood experience of being sexually abused, our work does not hesitate to enter complex areas, while being strongly committed to healing through creative witness. I knew the event would be a powerful one, and would need to be approached carefully. I spent the days leading up to departure working on my talk and performance, which you can read at the end of this blog or watch via the video link on the StAnza website which includes Annemarie and Maria’s readings as well.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin

To reach St Andrews from London meant five and a half hours of constantly changing landscapes, and a succession of passengers sharing the communal table where I was working.  Around York, three generations of women settled in beside me, the same beautiful bone structure playing like variations in music across their faces as they laughed and chatted.  Later, a mother came with a toddler, who rode firmly standing.  He was mainly eating crunchy snacks or wailing the extremely convincing siren on his police car. This repeatedly turned heads down the carriage as we sped through roadless fields. Finally, from Newcastle, a woman whose hair made a waterfall over her face as she fell into peaceful sleep. So many strangers in close proximity, after months of limited contact, felt bewildering – but wonderful. 

Maria Stadnicka

Towards Berwick upon Tweed, the sea became the train’s companion. Winds had blown away the grey that we left London under, and the waves were turquoise under a blue sky. Beyond Edinburgh, as we sailed through the air over the Forth Bridge, the clouds returned and the sea became shades of pewter and silver. This same wind was blowing hard as we disembarked at Leuchars, then travelled onto St Andrews. It was whipping up the waves as I followed the street on which my guest house stood, down to the sea which lay beyond a fence and low granite cliffs. 

After watching events on zoom from London, the live festival began for me  with fellow Pavilion poet and former civil rights lawyer, Mona Arshi’s, inaugural address in the auditorium of the Byre Theatre in the centre of town. Mona’s subject was the Nationalities and Borders Bill currently passing through the UK Parliament.  If passed into law, it will reverse many of the key tenets of the 1951 agreement on refugee rights.  These were put into law following the genocides of the second world war.  With examples from poets, and guidance from a barrister who has written on the proposed changes, Mona left her live and online audience in no doubt about the urgent need to protest the bill. She explained that it seeks to criminalise and penalise the seeking of refuge in all but the most narrow and restrictive of circumstances, and make it impossible for people to arrive in England without prior approval, even when the channels for this approval are largely absent.

Mona Arshi

Why our cultures are so deeply enriched by travel and migration was borne out by the headline event for Friday evening.  Kayo Chingonyi, who came to the UK as a child from Gambia, and now lives and teaches in Leeds, and Safiya Sinclair, who originated in Jamaica, but now works and teaches in the USA, shared the stage with the Syrian poet Nouri Al-Jarrah, reading from A Boat to Lesbos.  As an audience, we were on the edges of our seats for nearly two hours with a short interval, as you can see if you view the recording via the StAnza website, where Mona’s is also available. At other events, brilliant Irish poets included my fellow Forwards judge Stephen Sexton, Gail McConnell, whose The Sun is Open, was one of my most compelling reads of 2021, and Padraig Regan, whose Some Intensity has just come out with Carcanet.

Safiya Sinclair joining from the USA

The following morning the clouds were gone and the skies were blue again. From my room, I could hear the wind was still blowing hard, feathering the sea with a lace of frothed foam.  I’d come down to breakfast shaken by the news from Ukraine, and nervous about my own reading. I found Stephanie Sy-Quia already in place, having travelled from France to read from her debut Amnion, which responds to her families’ multiple heritages, reaching around the world from the Philippines through Europe and beyond. Stephanie was followed in short order by the Latinx-British poet Leo Boix, who was performing both his own poems and those he had translated. We were then joined by Saturday and Sunday nights’ headliners, Holly Pester and Luke Kennard.  To breakfast amid so much kindness and friendliness was the best possible start to the day. 

Holly Pester live on Saturday night

Then it was time to thread through the streets of granite houses back to the Byre theatre again, to catch Pascale Petit and George Szirtes talking with Yang Lian’s translator about rendering Chinese poetry into English. They discussed the very different structures of the two languages, and also the implications in Yang’s poems of working within a literary tradition that extends back 3000 years. As a bonus, Yian Lian was on hand to comment, and read one of his poems in Mandarin before a Saturday evening showcase. For the travel-starved among us,  Pascale and George remembered their own journeys to China to meet Lian, and visit the Forbidden City and Shanghai.

George Szirtes, Annie Rutherford and Pascale Petit.

Pascale had mentored me very generously under the Jerwood Arvon scheme when I was finding my feet as a poet. Afterwards, we caught up as we walked her back to her room through sunny St Andrews. Saturday morning shoppers and university students were beginning to head out into the town’s coffee shops, boutiques and ice cream parlours. Next it was back to my room to run through my own reading which was due to begin at 2.00. 

My unimpressed audience of seagulls

To steady myself, I practised my set for an audience of seagulls, who were more interested in launching themselves into the gusting wind from the chimney pots of the rooftops opposite. Within the performance, the poems fall down into my personal underworld of being groomed and then sexually abused as a child, before climbing back up into the light of witness and healing. Reading what I was going to say to a sky of rushing clouds helped anchor what I was going to share into light and life. I wanted to absorb and transmit that energy.  I had read, and loved both Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka’s work, but finding Annemarie waiting in the auditorium by stage, and Maria guarding us from the screen like an angelic presence, further strengthened my hope that we would be able to create something of value together. 

Annemarie opened with the foundling hospitals and mother and baby homes of the Irish state, remembering those who had brought their babies there because they had no other options. Helping us feel their great loss, and the loss also for Ireland as a nation, Annemarie set it within the larger wound of the country’s forcible colonisation. She also reached back into an early, mythological past to create songs of healing. Maria Stadnicka’s work is likewise a place where institutional and state actions are examined – through the impacts on Romania’s population of Ceausescu’s and the Communist party’s rule. Specifically the ban on abortions, and the resultant filling of state orphanages, where over 10,000 children would contract HIV Aids. Like Annemarie, her work engages with great compassion, as well as creative strength, in bringing neglected experiences to the page and through this into our lives. 

Annemarie Ní Churreáin reading from ‘The Poison Glen’

And then it was my turn, to introduce and then perform the full sequence of the erasure poems in bird of winter. As I mentioned, you can see the video of us all, on the Stanza Poetry website until 31 March.  To speak out of my childhood darkness into the light and warmth of the Byre Theatre felt like an act of profound transformation.  Closing, I led a safeguarding exercise where we could join together, to honour the space we had made between us by our co-participation in the works shared by Annemarie, Maria and I. 

Once the event was over, and the book signings and warm conversations with the audience were all done, Annemarie and I realised how very urgently we needed coffee and cake to put ourselves back together. Heading out with our StAnza chair Robyn Marsack, we were stopped short by a broad rainbow. `It was rising like a realised wish up over the blue sea, that lay at the end of the street down which we were heading. In that moment, it seemed as if the light we had created together through our readings had assumed a visible form. 

Annemarie’s and my conversation was as warm as it was nurturing. After, I wanted to get myself out into the sea air and feel the hugeness of the beach backed by dunes. Walking across the sands, lit by runnels of water holding the last of the light, that sense of being supported by the living world stayed with me as the sun dropped and the sky dimmed to the glimmering purples and greys of a Scots mid March dusk.  The following morning, before and after seeing Emily Berry and Fiona Benson perform for the Poetry Book Society showcase, I discovered the ruined cathedral and stone-walled harbour, and climbed down onto the small enclosed beach below the ruins of the castle, where the water swirled in over the coarse granite sand and luxuriant seaweed. 

I had slept fitfully, still caught up in the energies of the places my poems had opened, but being out in the North Sea air dissipated those memories and helped me re-enter the present more fully.  Boarding the train south again, albeit with considerable regret, I took with me the certain knowledge that, through the sharing of our work, Annemarie NíáChurreáin, Maria Stadnicka and I had brought about an alchemical transformation that we and our audience would carry forward into new adventures.  

Below you can read the text of my performed set at StAnza, together with recordings of the individual erasures. Play them by clicking on the title as you read through. The video will be available until 31 March here: 

If anything you read is difficult for you, the Mind website has valuable resources. 

If you would like to read the erasure poems I have recorded on the page, they can be found in bird of winter via this link. 

Erasure: what we cannot say and how we say it : text of performance by alice hiller 

Is it possible to translate silencing back into sound? To voice complex experiences, we need first to access them.  As some of you know, bird of winter, offers creative witness to my childhood experience of being groomed and then sexually abused by my mother, but also of finding healing beyond this crime. Like many, who share my history, the impact of what was done to me meant I wasn’t able to talk about the abuse until my thirties.  

When I came to write about it in my fifties, through bird of winter, I found that making hand erasures created scratch cards through to my unconscious, and allowed some of the toughest, but also most needed, poems onto the page.  The erasures also generated the fractured narrative spine of the collection, as I’m going to show you, by reading them in sequence. 

Before that, I’ll say briefly how they came into being.  All bird of winter’s erasures grow from texts about Pompeii and Herculaneum, which have absorbed me since childhood.  As an adult, the eruption of Vesuvius, and subsequent, laborious excavations of materials buried under the volcanic rock and ash, became central to how I understand the slow, often dangerous, recovery of my buried past. 

Each of the erasures I’ll read was generated over a day, circling words and phrases, and blacking out, allowing the poem to emerge. I was letting my eye see, my hand move – before my mind could censor.  Working through texts read by many people, over the centuries, also gives communal witness to this global crime, which impacts millions of us. 

Visually, the erasures in bird of winter ask the reader to hopscotch from phrase to phrase. But even as the islands of words travel towards revelation and reclamation, they co-exist with the blacked out passages witnessing the unarticulated materials which are also present.  Reading today, I’ll tread carefully,  to keep us all safe.  If anything I speak about is difficult for you, the Mind website is a good place to go. I’ll close with a short, grounding exercise, to bring us all securely back into the present. In the meantime, if in doubt, keep breathing!

Erasure is of course a function of trauma.   Our brains conceal or remove what is too dangerous for us to bear, especially when traumatic events occur when there is no support, as happens in the poem, ‘black river’, remembering my childhood. 

black river

when the fingers came
at night your weeds rose up

when the rocks arrived
you rushed my brain’s sluices

when the day returned
no hurt could surface

‘the stupendous task’, my first erasure in bird of winter, directly answers ‘black river’. From Herculaneum, Past Present and Future, it takes Charles Waldenstein’s demand for excavation of the site as the collection’s manifesto and call to arms:   

the stupendous task

 The second erasure,  ‘destruction impact landscape’ grew from the poet Martial’s account of the eruption of Vesuvius.  As it took shape, I realised the poem held its own before and after, divided at a midpoint, like mirrored reflections. Taken together they signal that something is not destroyed merely because it is attacked. 

destruction impact landscape

The next erasure,  ‘gardens fountains’, combines Columella’s and Flores’  descriptions of Pompeii and Herculaneum before the eruption.  Explorations of trauma often focus on the aftermath of the crime. It was important also to witness the unhurt place, or indeed the innocence of a child’s body, where ‘spring flowers blossom twice’:

gardens fountains

From this stronghold of beauty, we drop hard down into an underworld of darkness.  The next erasure, ‘eyewitness’ emerges out of a Times article from 1863.  Describing two figures revealed by pouring plaster into the voids left in the ash that fell over Pompeii, it also gave me a way to show my mother and I in her bed.  Like the excavations, these plaster casts are central to bird of winter’s understanding of how artworks manifest  out of voids or absences, and make visible what otherwise remains unseen. 

eye-witness

Coming next, ‘remove the solidified mix’, responds to the difficulties of creating bird of winter. It began as a description of  tunnelling down to the Villa dei Papyri during the eighteenth century in Herculaneum: Italy’s Buried Treasure. This work was often undertaken by convicts and forced labourers because of its risk.

remove the solidified mix

What happened down one of those eight hundred dark tunnels is documented in ‘and now came the ashes’, erased from a letter by Pliny the Younger. His description of Vesuvius erupting becomes also my mother and my eight year old self in a cottage in Wiltshire. I was given permission by Pavilion to reproduce this erasure which you can see and then hear below:

and now came the ashes

and now came the ashes

As you’ll see, the lineation of the  poem breaks down at its centre point, as my own life did following my father’s death in 1972.  Indeed, beyond the word “death”, there is no single or clear path forward, playing out how trauma refuses a conclusive act of narration but in its fragmentation draws us back and back. 

‘and now came the ashes’ is spoken by my child self, but bird of winter is in fact a dialogue between past and present.  Immediately afterwards, the sexual abuse I experienced is revisited in ‘this happened during winter’, erased from Seneca the Younger’s Natural Questions. Here, my adult self asks the reader for their empathetic engagement within a process of transformation:

this happened during winter

From this shared, mutually supported place, reader or listener and speaker can take their final steps down into the darkness of the repeated rape of a child by an adult, which is at the heart of bird of winter. ‘Gladiatorial training school’ works through an excavation report from 1766 to open a pathway to the deepest substrate of memory. 

gladiatorial training school

In “the hole/ the/ bolt/ passed” the secret assault by which my abuser controlled and subjugated me is finally out on the page. From there, only one more erasure is needed to guide us together, back up into the light. It’s from Fiorelli’s 1830 account of entering the ‘House of the Faun’, with additional words by classicists Alison E. Cooley, and M.G.L. Cooley.  

the house of the faun

As I end, I would like you all to place your feet firmly on the ground. Take some slow, comfortable breaths, in and out, holding in mind that “decoration/ in the shape of dogs/ gilded protecting deities/ with various colours and with gold leaf.” Breathing comfortably, we are passing together up from the underworld.  Greeting us is “a large festoon of flowers and fruit” created by our mutual solidarity – online and in this physical space.

Where silence is refused, healing can come. 
Thank you all for travelling with me today. 
When we stand together, we stand strong. 

The full source details of the erasures are credited in bird of winter.  My deepest thanks to those writers whose works I have used.

Thanks to Dr. Katie Ailes for the final photo.

If you would like to buy bird of winter to see the erasures on the page you can here.

‘When we stand together, we stand strong’ alice hiller by Dr. Katie Ailes

Welcoming back ‘the little cat’: holding and healing the hauntings and recurrences of childhood trauma within the artworks we make.

Trigger warning: non-explicit references to childhood sexual abuse.

This has not been an easy blog to put together. I have written, and redrafted its plain sentences, bare as winter branches, but like winter branches, holding within them the promise of spring. For those of you who are thinking of reading further, I should warn you that I write honestly about the challenge of living with a complex history, and the fact that resolution can seem hard to find. But I work my way through these hard places, to arrive at a point of hopefulness, which you will hopefully also reach if you stay with me and with these words.

In life, as in art, we’re encouraged to think in terms of beginnings, middles and endings.  Progression and resolution give structure to stories. When an artwork responds to trauma, the requirements change.  Anyone who has experienced, or observed the impacts of traumatic events, knows that they continue to resonate and replay themselves for many years.  To generate a truthful creative transaction between a traumatic subject matter, and the work into which it is translated, calls for forms of expression which can suggest recurrences and hauntings.  Through this act of creative witness, we may begin to change their power and reposition our relationships to them.

Living beyond, and making art that responds to, my own experience of childhood sexual abuse, amongst other subjects, I face this challenge myself.  As the light dims towards the end of November, and the days grow shorter and darker, child ghosts walk again for me.  They remember and re-live my father’s death in hospital when I was eight, in 1972. These ghost-selves also re-experience the beginning of the penetrative sexual abuse to which I was subjected, very shortly after, when my mother, who was my abuser, and I moved from Brussels to Wiltshire.

Impacting both my physical and mental health, these hauntings can lead me to feel as if I am sinking down through waves of old sadness. Like heavy black sump oil, they seep into my thoughts and bodily movements. When things get really bad, they can make it hard to move – or even think.  Because this has happened every November and December since I was a teenager, over the years, I’ve developed resources to keep myself going.  I work beside my SAD light.  I try to be kinder to myself and organise my working life so that I am not too pressured.   I meditate, swim and walk my dog Ithaca, noticing the natural world around us.  I connect with people who love me. 

But all these strategies only ever mitigate the after-effects of the dreams which rise up at night.   In my sleep, I become again a scared, hurt child, taken back to a place between life and death by my mother. This was the case – very brutally – in November and December of 2021, as it had been in 2020, and all the years before that. 

None of us likes to speak of what we perceive as our vulnerabilities, for fear people will think less of us, or feel we are ‘seeking attention’ in some way. But in 2020, working on bird of winter‘s final manuscript alone with my dog Ithaca in lockdown, I decided to make an artwork that could enact being haunted by a traumatic past, and reaching beyond this towards a form of resolution. At the time, I was following an online workshop with Nina Mingya Powles around multiple language heritages with the Poetry School, which my fellow Forwards Shortlistee, Cynthia Miller, was also part of. I was also experiencing difficult dreams. They shaped what I wrote.

What emerged is called ‘je suis son petit chat il est mon papa 1972/ I am his little cat he is my daddy 2020’.  It’s a multi-form piece which exists simultaneously as a conventional poem, a visual work, a sound experience and a performance. It was published this January 22 in bath magg no 8, as you’ll be able to see and hear by following this link.

When I performed it at bath magg’s online launch, I began by saying a few words about the poem. The response I received made me feel there would be a value in expanding them into this blog, however inelegantly. Opening up the deliberately smudgy, troubled layers of the poem up in this way also gives me the opportunity to separate the two overlaid texts, and look at each one in isolation.  In the final print they are blurred across each other to play out how traumatic stories repeat and recur, as you’ll have seen from the fragment above, and the link to the full work at bath magg.

‘je suis son petit chat/ I am his little cat’ begins in French and English, the two languages of my childhood. They refract and translate each other, but the work also makes complete sense in either language. In the first two lines, I’m waking up from a nightmare in 2020, aged fifty-six.  I’m also myself  in bed, aged eight, in 1972,  as my father lies dying in intensive care. From there it is back to 1972 and my eight year old self returning home to our flat: 

Underlay text of ‘je suis son petit chat’

Describing my life before my father died as if it was still simultaneously present, including my grandmother taking me to the hospital, and my father sending me drawings home, the narrative enacts how, in dissolving the boundaries of time, these dark hauntings also open opportunities for healing, by re-accessing a fuller range of memory. Next in the underlay text comes the nightmare at the heart of the poem, which invaded my sleep in the early hours of 22 November, replaying  the sexual abuse to which I was subjected as a child by my mother. As the poem reports, the terror of the dream induced vomiting and diarrhoea in my fifty-something year old self:  

Tough though it was to experience in reality, this act of voiding is also a release, which opens up ‘je suis son petit chat/ I am his little cat’ to new energies – whereby the recurrence of the trauma becomes an opportunity to reset my relationship to the original events. Resetting happens through a short poem in both French and then English, which is overlaid on the looping narrative beneath it in larger font and bolder text, as the extract at the top of the blog shows. 

Within its overlaid phrases, my adult self summarises the impacts of my childhood sexual abuse, including how it continues to haunt me.  Speaking directly to my abuser, I refuse the silence which she imposed on me throughout my childhood and adolescence, and for long years beyond that. This frees the underlying narrative to begin to move towards the light of a different ending, where the recurrences of physical voiding can finally come to a stop: 

The account of the nightmare, and falling “down a black tunnel” is repeated below the overlaid text, as when in nursery rhymes like ‘Oranges and lemons’, or ‘Frère Jacques’ in French, the verses come round again.  Following the earlier shift, the act of voiding is once again purgative, letting go of some of the blackness and shame held inside me, and allowing gentler and more nurturing memories of my loving engagement with my father to continue to surface in the segment which follows: 

Like many others with my history, for long years the trauma of the penetrative abuse in childhood separated me from being able to feel my own feelings, or know my own wants. Here, they begin to return to the child who lives within and alongside the adult.  She can say once again “I want my daddy” and by expressing this longing re-form a more authentic connection with herself.  My grandmother’s phrase translated means “let her through, let her through, she’s his daughter”.  She was trying to get me allowed into the intensive care unit, but the phrase also acts out the way I am asking for my child self to be allowed back through, to speak and know herself, and how she was once loved. 

‘Je suis son petit chat/I am his little cat’ ends in a place of quietness, with the possibility of integrating my separated selves more fully. Translating the “petit chat” nickname my father gave me into the English “little cat”, and laying it down on the page, the poem performs an act of witness to the co-presence of my child and adult selves. It also documents how, by reconnecting more fully with child-alice, adult-alice is able to begin to make a new relationship what made us who we now: 

Walking in Shotover County Park near Oxford in the last days of 2021, after some very tough weeks, I saw trees and misty light that reminded me of Wiltshire, and felt unkind old ghosts crowd around me.  But breath by breath, I drew the damp, cold air of the present into my body, and with it new energy.  With each out-breath, I tried to let what I no longer needed pass from me.  As I did this, the pearlescence of the fields and clouds became a wilderness of beauty, and the black branches of the trees uplifted themselves into acts of elemental resistance.  With my dog Ithaca scenting the damp leaves, and pulling us forwards, and the landscape saying that life would return, I felt how this difficult annual recurrence was also a gateway to transformation – that each year I must find the way through.

The link to ‘je suis son petit chat’ at bath magg is here if you would like to hear or see the work again in its entirety. 

If you would like to buy bird of winter, please follow this link.  Poems from the collection are also available on the blog. 

If you need support after reading this blog, https://www.mind.org.uk/ has valuable links and helplines.

Further exploration: four books and StAnza Festival

I often set a creative prompt after exploring one of my own poems for people to explore in their own practice. In this case the subject material is too dangerous.  Instead, for anyone wanting to work creatively with complex materials, or look at other examples of this practice, I would recommend four books which open pathways to new understandings, and new creative forms of expression, from the breakages and fractures of trauma.  I would also recommend the other brilliant poems in bath magg no 8, many which respond to complex subject matters – and make from them acts of beauty and reclamation. 

In terms of books, Bloodroot, by Annemarie Ní Churreáin creates provisional, shifting structures to hold the lives and reposition the representations of Irish women whose lives were appropriated by the Irish State and Church.  Documenting how the State invaded every corner of life in Romania under Romania, under Ceausescu and the Romanian Communist Party, for Buried Gods Metal Prophets Maria Stadnicka and Antonia Glűcksman assemble a living memorial that incorporates diary entries, photos, erasures, quotes from statutes, and building plans, as well as more conventional ‘poems’.  In Things I have Forgotten Before Tanatsei Gambura speaks through radical formal innovation of what it can mean to have grown up as a “Black Girl” in Zimbabwe during the 1980s – and how losing a country can form you as much as having one. Sasha Dugdale’s extraordinary collection Deformations explores trauma and PTSD, through fragments composed around Homer’s Odyssey. A separate long sequence responds to the sculptor Eric Gill’s work and life, within the framework of his recorded sexual abuse of his daughters. Sasha and I spoke about our work in Volume 48 of PN Review. Sasha has a hugely impactful new poem in bath magg 8 which you can read here.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Maria Stadnicka and I will be appearing at the StAnza festival on 12 March both live and online with many other brilliant poets in St Andrews. You can find more details here. Prices start from £3.00. Booking opens on 21 January. For people not able to travel to Scotland, many of the events are online and very reasonably priced. As well as performing, I’m going to be sure to pack out my schedule with hearing other poets and it’s a great way to check in with a huge range of voices and perspectives.

 

Letting new light in – setting your creative compass for 2022 and beyond with the help of a ‘Basque Whaler’

Letting new light in to set your creative compass: photo alice hiller

How can we resource our work in lean times? Where does inspiration come from when travel and and a wide range of live experiences are significantly curtailed, whether for financial, health or other restrictions? My steadfast belief is that we hold our own deepest and richest reserves within ourselves, accumulated through our lived experiences and interactions with the world at multiple levels. When more expansive possibilities are denied to us, to keep working, and generating new material, we therefore need to find ways to tune into this, both by nurturing ourselves, and also by finding new sources of ‘strangeness’ and intellectual and creative adventures to act as stimuli.

Basque poet Julie Irigaray Voicing Our Silences 15.12.21

Working with my fellow poet and cherished friend, Julie Irigaray, I set out to devise a solstice workshop, performance and conversation for the Voicing Our Silences collective that I founded. We wanted to deliver both these aims – of self-nurture and adventure. Core to the process were the two prompts we developed, which were designed to complement each other. Mine is a two-part process for setting your creative compass, which begins with a gentle breathing exercise, to clear your creative space, and then builds up your individual compass on the page – through a five stage guided prompt, which I lead participants through. There’s then a follow-up to be completed two or more days later. People who did it on the night we recorded the event have said how valuable they found it to be. This compass process can be used for a specific piece of work such as a poem or prose work you are developing, or would like to start. It works equally well for people looking to explore a new project, or simply to check in with themselves. Julie’s explores ways to expand your work dynamically through different forms of research and I found it gave me a breakthrough into a poem which had been hovering half-realised since the summer, so I warmly recommend trying it for yourself.

Frame for Setting Your Creative Compass to draw in central third of A4 page.

In addition to these prompts, we both performed two short sets of poems, and spoke to each other between them about how they came into being, going deep with where we resourced our work – whether from online resources including YouTube, books, museum catalogues, or other starting points. My poems came from my collection, bird of winter, and Julie’s from her pamphlet, Whalers, Witches and Gauchos. Because we were recording in the run up to the winter solstice, we structured our sets to rise from darkness into light, and both kept lit candles burning beside us as symbols of inspiration and resilience. The aim was also to share how although our poems appear to journey huge distances through time and space on the page, much of this travel is in fact realised without ever leaving home, whether we’re writing about Pompeii and Herculaneum in my case, or in Julie’s about the Basque heritage she explores in Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, which she published this year with Nine Pens.

pistil by alice hiller from bird of winter

Julie also asked me about my practice of working with my childhood and adolescent medical notes, which have been crucial to my collection bird of winter, as with the poem ‘pistil’, given above. The poem is named for the female reproductive parts of the flower. It juxtaposes a quote from my medical notes when I was two, with a direct memory, which reflects how the grooming to which my abuser was subjecting me was already impacting my behaviour, and a photo I recall of myself at that age which my grandmother loved. I was very glad to have the opportunity speak about both the risk, and benefit, of working with documentary evidence such as medical notes if you have a complex history, as I do, arising from my experience of being groomed and then sexually abused as a child, and finding my way towards healing beyond this.

As you will be able to hear if you check in with the video, I said how valuable, and painful it was in equal measure, to have factual corroboration of events that lived inside my memory. I explained how I had felt very apprehensive about engaging with my medical notes, for what I might find there, but was very grateful to see that events which my abuser had tried to deny, were in fact recorded in sober black and white. I also told Julie that reading these same notes had in fact provided a core source of motivation for my ongoing activism around changing awareness with regard to childhood sexual abuse. Driving this was how harshly the medical profession had judged my troubled teenage behaviours once the abuse had stopped. I wanted people to understand this adolescent acting out of harm done differently and more compassionately. In the questions which followed, Chaucer Cameron raised the query about notes being redacted, that is having sections blanked out, which has been her experience.

alice hiller Voicing Our Silences 15.12.21

Normally, when I record a Voicing Our Silences performance and workshop, I pause the recording at the prompt stops, and cut the audience participation, to keep the event around an hour. This time, however, we wanted to create an immersive experience for everyone who was joining us, and give the feeling of how the Voicing our Silences collective operates as a place of mutual creative nurture and adventure. Given that it’s a longer watch, I’ve therefore noted the minute timings of the different elements within the YouTube video, (which is captioned for accessibility), for ease of location. While they are managed safely, and there are no explicit references, this video includes discussion of grooming and childhood sexual abuse. If you need support with anything raised the Mind website is very helpful.

Youtube video: resourcing your work in lean times: setting your creative compass with Julie Irigaray and alice hiller

Please note, you will need a piece of paper and something to write with for each prompt.

0.00 alice hiller introduces
4.00 Julie Irigaray set 1: ‘The Basque Whaler’, ‘Six War Letters’, ‘Kreig’
12.00 alice hiller set 1 ‘bains de mer’, ‘pistil’, ‘three small shrines’, ‘in the vineyard’, ‘circular’, ‘joujou’, ‘libation’
21.20 Julie & alice discussion 1 including use of medical notes in poems
39.32 alice hiller prompt : setting your creative compass
1.00 audience feedback.
1.05.50 julie irigaray set 2 : ‘Red Card’, ‘Divine Seraphine’, ‘Via Domitia’
1.12.30 alice hiller set 2 : ‘the holly tree’, ‘vesuvius’, ‘benediction’, ‘o goddess isis’
1.20 Julie & alice discussion
1.35 Julie Irigaray prompt turbocharging your creative explorations
final questions from Voicing Our Silences collective

Julie’s poems include references to her Basque heritage, which is at the heart of her debut Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, published by Nine Pens earlier in 2021. In the spirit of expanding our horizons, Julie was kind enough to answer a few questions about Basque culture and history, which you can read below.

Photo of the Pyrenees in the Basque region of France by Julie Irigaray.

AH: Whalers, Witches and Gauchos opens with an epigraph from Thomas Jefferson about Basque fishing in the Atlantic. From what he said, Basque sailors and whalers were clearly active off Newfoundland and further south from the 1400s onwards.  Could you (briefly) tell us something of the history of Basque involvement in whaling? It is partly the subject of the poem ‘The Basque Whaler’, which you perform on the video, but it clearly has deep roots.

JI: The Basques started hunting whales in the 11th century because whales were used to create a wide range of products: candles, soap, cosmetics, to fuel lamps. In the early modern period, Basque whalers spent between six and nine months per year fishing cod and hunting whales near the coasts of Canada and Iceland, in dreary living conditions.

AH: I know the Basque territory is currently ‘divided’ between France and Spain, and there has been political and other forms of activism, including formerly armed conflict, to reclaim and redefine this cultural, geographical and linguistic identity.  Would you be able to outline this for us?

JI: The Basque Country is divided between seven provinces: four of them are in Spain, three in France. It has never been a unified country because it was always split up between the kingdoms of France, Navarre and Spain. The Basque language is not related to any other existing language, so some academics theorised the Basques were part of the first wave of human migration in Europe. The pronunciation and dialects of Basque are different from one province to another, although a unified Basque has been created by scholars. The armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization ETA emerged in the Spanish Basque Country in the late 1950s, mainly as a reaction to Franco’s dictatorship. But they kept on carrying out terrorist attacks well after Franco’s death, especially in the 1980s. I think it was particularly difficult to be young in the Basque Country at that time. But this is my parents’ story, not mine. I’ll probably write about it one day after doing more research. When I went on holiday to England fifteen years ago, there were still some people telling me “Oh! You come from the terrorists’ place!”

AH: Am I right in thinking that both your parents’ families are of Basque heritage?  Your surname, Irigaray, has a sound which stands outside what I know of both French and Spanish, and I know the final poem ‘Exte’, in Whalers, Witches and Gauchos addresses this? Note – you can read ‘Exte’ at the end of this interview.

JI: You’re absolutely right – and that’s why nobody outside the Basque Country apart from you knows how to pronounce my name! Three of my grandparents are Basque, and the final one comes from les Landes, which is still in the south-west of France. My maternal grandmother comes from the coast and a different province from my father’s family, so there are differences of pronunciation and vocabulary between their Basque. My paternal grandparents used to speak Basque to each other or with their neighbours, and my father has a good grasp of it as well. 

AH: One of the ideas that our Voicing Our Silences collective works with is how our difficult histories and experiences can be creatively fruitful, because asking us to find new forms of language to respond to them. ‘Krieg’ in an incredibly vivid, and subtle poem, imagining two former combatants from World War I meeting high in a Basque mountain pass, and reaching a form of understanding which hinges on the title word, which only the German officer understands initially.  Could you say something about this poem and the idea of how poetry can open spaces for things we might not otherwise be able to say and also comprehend?

JI: I always knew I was going to write about this family anecdote one day, but I wanted to avoid certain pitfalls, like making it too overly emotional, or depicting my French great-grandfather as the good guy and the German soldier as the villain. These two men cannot communicate because they do not speak the same language, but also because they were conditioned to think of themselves as enemies for seventy years, and fought against each other during World War I. The memory of World War II in occupied countries like France is still sensitive since so many unspeakable things happened. My family did not suffer more than average, but a variety of things happened to them which are difficult to talk about or even taboo, like a great-aunt who fell in love with a German soldier, or a great-grandfather sent to Czechoslovakia to work as forced labour for the German war effort – which was seen as treason by some. During lockdown, I have written a few poems about World War II from the point of view of several family members. I hate black and white pictures of a character, or moralistic views, so what I try to achieve with my poems is a sense of balance. I want to give a voice to both sides of the story without judging, as I did in ‘Krieg’. 

AH: ‘Their Common language’ addresses your great-grandparents’ migration to Argentina, and subsequent return to France.  Could you say something about the Basque relationship to South America and how that came about?

JI: On my father’s side of the family, several great-grandparents emigrated to Argentina with their parents or siblings because they came from a rural area with little prospects. As I explain in ‘Etxe’, in the Basque tradition, the eldest child (either girl or boy) inherited the family house while the other siblings were left with nothing. One of my great-grandfathers who emigrated to Argentina had thirteen siblings: three sisters ended up nuns, one brother a missionary in Madagascar. Back then, there were not many opportunities to earn a living apart from entering the Church or emigrating to America… In the late nineteenth-century, many Basques moved to Uruguay or Argentina to work as gauchos, others chose the USA to become shepherds in Nevada, California or Florida. The great-grandmother from “Their Common Language” worked in an hotel in Buenos Aires, like the great-grand-uncle who inspired the poem ‘Amerikanoa’. Some of them stayed in Argentina, but many Basques have a sense of nostalgia and preferred moving back to the Basque Country after a few years. 

AH: A number of your other poems also lean into this Basque restlessness, and sense of not-belonging to any single place, which I know you and I both share for different reasons, as do millions of people around the world, who have left their places of birth to migrate for economic, political or other reasons.  Would you like to say something about this experience of becoming un-rooted, but also of carrying your roots with you?

JI: Since I was a teenager, I dreamed of living abroad. Either for my studies or for professional reasons, I moved back and forth between the Basque Country, Paris, Ireland, Britain and Italy seven times in seven years, which had its toll on my mental and physical health. When I moved back to the UK for my first job, I felt terribly homesick, and for the first time. I started a series of Basque poems that made up the greater part of Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, probably because I felt completely unrooted. I found it more difficult than the first time I lived in England to study to fit in.  I think it was because I had lived in so many countries, and picked up some bits of each of their cultures, that I didn’t belong anywhere anymore. I’m still processing this. My poems interrogate cultural differences because it is a subject that I constantly think of. 

AH: I know you have been back in the Basque region of France during the lockdown, able to travel both to the Atlantic and the Pyrenees, when free of restrictions. How has it impacted your work being back in these landscapes?

JI: Unfortunately, few good poems came out of my lockdown writing, precisely because of the anxiety generated by the closing of all borders. The border between France and Spain remained shut for almost four months, and I have spent a day in Spain since Christmas 2019 because things are still not back to normal. Even during World War II or under Francoism, the border could be crossed, albeit illegally. I wrote a poem about a friend being in lockdown in San Sebastian (where the lockdown was extremely restrictive) and my panic at the idea that I could not see him for months because the border was shut. I wanted to capture this claustrophobic feeling. It’s difficult to explain this to people who live on an island, but sharing a border with another country is for us a natural right and a source of enrichment. I have also written a poem from the point of view of the border, and all the historical events it witnessed through millennia. But in the end, I did not write much about the Basque Country. I write better about a place when I see it from a distance, ideally when I live in another country. I wrote almost all my Basque poems while living in the UK, and during lockdown I wrote many poems about Italy because I felt extremely upset about not being allowed to travel back there.

AH:  Some of your newest poems are following your interest in military history, addressed in a number of the poems in WWG, including the ways in which countries who have denied citizens their rights nonetheless require them to die in their wars. This was the the case for many soldiers brought in from Britain’s colonised countries during the first and second world wars, as Sathnam Sanghera has explored in Empireland.  It was also the case for Basque citizens resident in France.  Could you say something about these poems, and the new ones which are forthcoming?

JI: I was looking for books on this subject, so thank you for recommending Sanghera’s! I would like to address the subject of the soldiers who fought for the French and British colonies one day as they were completely written out of history, but I need to find the right approach. 
I normally write a lot about women, but these days I am interested in the values conveyed by the army, especially with regard to masculinity. France is still a very militarised country. With the rise of the right and the French presidential elections taking place in five months’ time, some politicians have suggested the return of the military service for both men and women, and I don’t see it in a good light. There was also the bicentenary of Napoléon’s death this year, and I’m not fond of the idea of promoting the legacy of a man who invaded and subjected a whole continent and killed around three million European soldiers (and God knows how many civilians) for his campaigns. 
I am writing a couple of poems about these themes and the toxic myths surrounding masculinity. My poem ‘Six War Letters’ tells the story of an underaged young man who is enrolled in World War I in spite of all and stops idealising war as a way to prove his manhood. One English teacher told me she’d taught this poem to her boys-only class and that one pupil said it made him reconsider masculinity. I couldn’t be prouder! 
I also recently talked to my parents about my father’s and uncle’s experiences of military service or hazing when they entered their engineering school, and I found these testimonies deeply disturbing. As someone who was bullied in school, I can imagine the psychological impact of hazing in elite schools and universities, and I am outraged by the mechanisms used by the bullies to make their victims believe this is perfectly normal, and even desirable.

AH: Finally, I know you are also working on a PhD about Sylvia Plath and her relationship with England and Europe at Huddersfield.  What does 2022 hold for you Julie Irigaray, in so much as it is possible for any of us to answer this question?

JI: A lot of travelling, I hope! If Covid does not come on the way, I should attend several conferences in France and the UK. I am co-organising an online conference on Sylvia Plath (https://bit.ly/3yHGIW0) on 11th and 12th March 2022, and I will be a volunteer for The Sylvia Plath Literary Festival that should take place in Hebden Bridge at the end of October. I also need to write a couple of academic articles, so 2022 will be more PhD-oriented. But I will try to assemble a poetry collection as I have enough poems that satisfy me to create one now. 

from Whalers, Witches and Gauchos by Julie Irigaray.

If you would like to read more of Julie Irigaray’s work please visit her brilliant website.

‘Just because there’s a fence, the garden don’t stop growing’: poems as pathways beyond trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh.

On Saturday 6 November, I was asked to read and speak at an event on Poetry and Trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh 2021 with brilliant, radical poets Chaucer Cameron, Day Mattar and Tessay Foley, introduced by poet and academic Patricia Debney.  We have in common a background of having been subjected to predation and sexual abuse, in childhood or afterwards.  Our shared experience, and the fact that we have all made artworks which begin in this harsh place, set the stakes very high in terms of creating an event which could speak collectively to people with similar experience in their own histories. The link to the podcast follows further down.

Sixty-five people tuned in to join us mid-afternoon.  I don’t think anyone who was there will ever forget what was said and read. Both Chaucer and Day touched on their experiences of sex work or prostitution. Chaucer’s pamphlet In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered is part memoir/part fiction. It explores the impact of sex work on body, mind and spirit – through the voices of characters speaking to and with each other, while also questioning what it takes to leave this profession. Speaking of one of the female characters, who in real life was murdered, Chaucer said : “In my version she has her own voice, she sings her own song…and this is what it looks like.”  The same could be true of her performance of those extraordinary poems on 6 November. 

With real poignancy, and an ability to enter a child’s perspective, Day’s debut Springing from the Pews, with Broken Sleep Books, documents a six year old boy being groomed and then abused.  Interweaving confessions, journal entries, and multiple voices into a verse play, the poems follow this little boy into adult life, asking how we may live with, and beyond, this very difficult legacy. He explained “I struggled for a long time to write these poems… I had multiple voices in my head…responding each as loud as each other… contradictory, loving, manipulative.”  The results are astonishing.

Tessa Foley’s poems live in rooms where shadows rise up from the corners, even when the lights are on, and follow people down the streets at high noon.  Drawing both on family history, and her own experience of volunteering for three years at Portsmouth Rape and Abuse Counselling Centre, the poems of What Sort of Bird Are You? witness the greatest difficulties, but also document moving beyond them into a more hopeful and resilient spaces, engendered in part through acts of mutual solidarity and community. Her line “Just because there’s a fence, the garden don’t stop growing” could speak for us all. 

My own text is given in full below, exploring the idea of trauma as a wound, and how we may heal beyond it. I chose poems relating to water, to honour Aldeburgh’s seaside setting. To hear Chaucer’s, Day’s and Tessa’s voices testifying to experiences which I felt in my own body and spirit, had my heart rushing before I ever got to my own set. I was hugely honoured to perform with them. Inevitably, I needed to rebalance myself afterwards. Walking by the Thames later that afternoon, allowing the present world back into me as dusk deepened, I saw a footbridge lit up over the dark water. Watching it, I felt as if I had been given a visual representation of how we had, through our works, lit safe passages over places where we had once known great suffering.

You can hear the podcast of Chaucer Cameron, Day Matar, Tessa Foley and I reading together here which Poetry in Aldeburgh have just released.

If anything is difficult for you, the Mind website has helpful links.

As the set was an hour long, and very intense, I decided to record the audio of my poems and words separately as well – for people who wanted a shorter listen, or who might be hesitant around exposing themselves to the longer experience of the full set. The performance and comments from the audience set twitter alight for hours and days afterwards. My individual recording is 15 minutes long. I have put the linking text I wrote below it as a guide to what to expect.

audio link to alice hiller’s Poetry in Aldeburgh ‘healing beyond trauma’ set of poems.

To give a flavour of my approach, the words I wrote to link the poems are reproduced below in italics, interspersed by the poem titles. ‘phare d’ailly’ is reproduced as a sample of my work, because it has appeared in PN Review, along with a description of discovering ancient Herculaneum by Scipio Maffei. You can hear all the poems in full on the recording. If you face hearing challenges please contact me through the blog and I can send you a full text of words and poems.

If you would like to buy bird of winter, it’s available here.

alice hiller words and water poems on healing beyond trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh:

As many of you know, trauma means wound in ancient Greek. My own collection, bird of winter, is partly about the childhood wound of being groomed and sexually abused by my mother.   But it’s also about healing, and opening our wings into wider, freer skies.  I’ll alternate poems which explore my difficult early years with others honouring experiences that helped me reclaim life.  Celebrating Aldeburgh, many of the poems include water.  First up is ‘bains de mer’ or ‘sea swimming’, remembering my beloved French bonne maman or grandmother.

bains de mer [performed]

Bonne maman represented a space of safety and unconditional love.  Because my mother was my abuser, danger remained omnipresent. Normandie is the backdrop to a photo taken by my father in ‘pistil’. Named for the female reproductive parts of a flower, the poem combines words from my childhood medical notes with direct memories. 

pistil [performed]

In addition to my medical notes,  bird of winter is framed by Pompeii and Herculaneum. Both were harbour towns, but water is not a place of refuge or safety in the abuse poems.  ‘let none of this enter you’ is spoken to my four or five year old self – with extra lines by Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius, which shapes bird of winter. 

let none of this enter you [performed]

Even though he worked long hours, my diplomat father had been my protector.  Once he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when I was six, power shifted.  I was eight when he died and my mother and I moved from Brussels, to England.  I saw my father as the lighthouse whose beams lit my bedroom in Normandie. 

phare d’ailly

papa the tide at vasterival was going out 
when you were carried from our flat as I slept

your jaw swung
open like a latchless door

the sea is now 1km from the site of pompeii 

The penetrative abuse began in England.  My erasure ‘and now came the ashes’ is from  Pliny the Younger’s account of Vesuvius : 

and now came the ashes [performed]

Traumatic events such as rape fracture our consciousness.   Scipio Maffei’s 1747 account of excavating Herculaneum offered a way of suggesting the injuries arising from raping a child, along with the difficulties of voicing this. The reader gets to puzzle out the imagery.  They can determine how far to engage. 

proceeding blindly through
tunnels and through narrow
passages much will be broken
much will be destroyed
nor will it ever be possible
to see the noble buildings
in their entirety

Scipio Maffei 1747

Even in very difficult times, the memory of my father, and my bonne maman’s love, gave my spirit a space of nurture.  This is critical for all of us who are subjected to wounding experiences.  ‘Rue de l’aurore’ was my grandmother’s address in Brussels. It means street of the dawn.

rue de l’aurore [performed]

I escaped the physical element of the abuse when I was thirteen by  stopping eating.   I was admitted to hospital – but this was 1977.  Eating disorders were not recognised as a possible indicators of childhood sexual abuse.  I wasn’t asked about, or able to speak directly of, what my mother had done.  The psychiatrist who saw me understood something terrible had happened.  Writing ‘tesselation’,  I instinctively sited myself between worlds, like water becoming vapour. 

tessellation [performed]

My mother ended all contact with this psychiatrist when I was released from hospital.  I was left very vulnerable.  With time, I reconnected with life and love again and began to reclaim my body. My final poem  moves between capture and release, remembering when I was seventeen. 

becoming your channel of pearl [performed]

I dedicate it to all of us who turn our faces to the light, no matter what darkness we have come through [end of set].

The Festival brought together a rainbow of poets from Andrew McMillan, Sean Hewitt, Kim Moore, Victoria Kenneflick, Dom Bury, Colette Bryce, Rachel Long, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Momtaza Mehri and Sarah Westcott, to name but a few. The podcasts will be up on the Poetry in Aldeburgh website over the next days. I really recommend checking in with them.

If you live in or near London, I’ll be performing live for Outspoken at the Southbank with Nick Mahona and Wayne Holloway-Smith on Thursday 25 November at 7.45 pm. I’ll be sharing poems about the bumpy teenage years that follow grooming and childhood sexual abuse, but also how these are the freedom trail that leads to reclamation and healing.

Tickets are here for Outspoken on 25/11/21 at 19.45 at the Southbank.