Palestine – alice hiller

‘Life felt like a terminal illness until I accepted my queerness as a ‘gift’. Derek Jarman helped me do the same with HIV’: Celebrating the publication of ‘lamping wild rabbits’, Simon Maddrell reflects on why ‘giving life is part of the human condition’, and how his poems green the page.

A smiling person with spiky gray hair and glasses stands in front of a red brick wall, holding an open book in one hand and gesturing with the other. They are wearing a patterned shirt and several necklaces, with sunlight casting shadows on the wall. — SAT 14TH SEPT 2024, BRIGHTON, EAST SUSSEX, UK.
A selection of photographs of local poet Simon Maddrell. PHOTOGRAPHY BY DIENSEN PAMBEN.

Two or three years ago, on a warm, late summer afternoon, Simon Maddrell and I met on the South Coast of England, just along from Brighton. The sea was a flat lustre of gold and blues, barely moving, the tide beginning its slide out towards France. With the air tickled by the faintest breeze, we drank at a beach cafe, sitting on the shingle among barbecuing families, then set out with my dog Ithaca on a long, slow meander along Worthing’s gritty sand, skirting between tide pools, looking for hag stones and beach treasures for Simon’s Brighton garden, and flints and sea-shaped chalk for my desk in London. As we scanned and walked together, comparing finds, pointing things out to each other, the sea always beyond us, the sky huge and wide, we felt an ease of familiarity growing, recognising the mutuality our shared of experiences of London in the early 1980s, when HIV and AIDS were visited upon the queer communities in which we moved, and comparing notes on coming to write poetry in our fifties, and why each of us had needed time to arrive at voices that would hold our complex subjects. That conversation is still flowing. It is the greatest pleasure to bring some of our words to the page — as Simon publishes a long awaited debut collection, after a string of stirring pamphlets, on both sides of the Atlantic. The photos which flower between our words were taken by Simon Maddrell in their salvaged, cherished Brighton garden — from which many of the poems grow.

A decorative hanging made of various stones, suspended from a branch, surrounded by lush green foliage in a garden.

ah: Let’s start with the big news. Your debut collection, lamping wild rabbits, is published by Out-Spoken Press in February 2026, edited by the legendary Anthony Anaxagorou. Tracing the rainbow arc of your life, you begin by exploring being born queer and Manx at a time when homosexuality was still illegal on the Isle of Man (IOM). The poems ask how a person can be, and grow, if their deepest self not only is prohibited, but also punished in law? It’s still a live, and lethal, issue in many countries around the world. Is the personal inherently political for you?

sm: lamping wild rabbits with Out-Spoken Press is my best poetry dream-come-true. Anthony was the first poet/teacher to encourage me, even as he gently demolished six of my earliest poems at a Poetry School one-on-one session! (I looked it up; it was March 2nd, 2019). He has been a mentor and teacher of mine at various times ever since, so it was wonderful for him to be so effusive about my collection manuscript, and then to work with him to craft the final book. It’s such a privilege to be part of the Out-Spoken stable, and I hope its reception does them justice.

Talking of justice and the ‘personal as political’ –– our mere existence is political, and for too many of us, who we are personally is an existential threat. Of course, my personal existential threat is not what it was 40 years ago, but lamping wild rabbits shares some of that experience, and some who didn’t make it. Even if childhood traumas are personal, they soon become political e.g. how the social service system fails to support victims of child abuse.

It must be said that whatever existential threats I have endured, they don’t compare to the fears many trans women have walking down the street today; the ten miles that women in Africa walk for water daily to sustain their families; the 24/7 drones in Gaza that are even felt by deaf children, never mind the horrors that are inflicted upon Palestinians. The collection does reflect on these more collective threats, and I firmly believe that the ‘personal and collective’ are allowed to sit alongside each other, rather than in competition, or even comparison, with each other. There is neither competition nor comparison in these things.

When I think of the times of my youth, they are deeply affected by the Greater Manchester Police GMP) Chief Constable James Anderton and his assistant Robin Oake, who exported their homophobic policies to the IOM in 1986 –– harassment, entrapment, and inequitable law enforcement that cost lives. My youth was shadowed by these direct & indirect threats, like The Bolton Seven who were arrested & convicted for consensual sex, Anderton buying a cruise boat with a spotlight to catch men kissing under bridges on Canal Street, Manchester, him epitomising people with AIDS as ‘swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making’, and Oake’s illegal entrapment and forced confessions of gay & bi men in the IOM in the late 80s/early 90s (Brilliantly portrayed in the short film No Man Is An Island). I think when a serving Chief Constable says, as late as 1987, that “sodomy between males…ought to be against the law” it is difficult to not see the personal as political.

Book cover for 'Lamping Wild Rabbits' by Simon Maddrell featuring a stylized illustration of a rabbit on a blue background.

ah: Your opening poem strikes a sombre note, while simultaneously upholding a movement of hope and transformation. It begins

it’s as though
we have to climb
out of our damage
up an invisible rope
and apologise.
a rope we’ve been carrying
all our life

That determination to give witness, alongside a refusal to be defeated, appears central to your creative impetus. Is that how you experience it?

sm: I believe that ‘bearing witness and a refusal to be defeated’ are central to my life’s impetus, but only a part of my creative one, if I am understanding the question correctly. As will hopefully be apparent in discussing my pamphlets and the collection, I feel the central impetus to what I write is varied. Of course, as with most early-stage writers, I began with the autobiographical in the way your question describes. Queerfella was “my journey from shame to unashamed” and hence central to the creative impetus. One might say section one of lamping wild rabbits, ‘caged rabbits’, is just a better version of Queerfella, but I hope people experience it as more than that. I think at other times, the creative impetus is more subject-driven, whether that be queer history, queer biography, the ambivalence of an exile, or the Isle of Man as a place (even if, like Penny Lane, it ‘is in my ears and in my eyes’). Whether that does or doesn’t include my direct experience is just a consequence of how to best explore the subject, rather than it being central to it, or even necessary to it.

ah: Going back to you beginnings as a poet – your first publications were the pamphlets Throatbone and Queerfella in 2020. I believe they found their way into print along two very different pathways?

sm: Throatbone did have an unusual birth. The Raw Art Review, a Massachusetts magazine, published a couple of Manx poems in Summer 2019. In December 2019, I was shortlisted for their Poet-in-Residence. The editor, Hank Stanton, loved the Manx poems I had submitted, so I asked if I could pitch the pamphlet draft, Throatbone, in January, which he accepted (thanks also to the mentoring support of Anthony Anaxagorou). The Manx heritage organisation, Culture Vannin, funded 300 copies for me to sell over here –– I just sent the last copy to the British Library!

Joelle Taylor mentored me to improve Queerfella, but it was rejected by four publishers before eventually jointly winning The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2020 alongside Selima Hill’s Fridge –– the latter being a particularly surreal fact.

A person with short, light hair wearing a plaid blazer holds a microphone and stands on stage. In the background, there is text displaying the name 'JOELLE TAYLOR' and social media handles aligning with an event or performance.

ah: Since then, you’ve published The Whole Island and Isle of Sin, which grow out of the intersections of your Manx heritage and out and proud queer identity, and the history informing both. Tell us about these two books.

sm: Even though Isle of Sin was published first, in Feb 2023, it came as an overspill from The Whole Island, which I wanted to be an exploration of what I later realised was an ambivalence about the IOM, albeit an ambivalence of joy & sadness rather than love & hate. The central titular (but in Manx Gaelic) poem was inspired by Virgilio Piñera’s long poem La Isla en Peso, 1968. Whilst this is usually translated as The Whole Island, literally it means “the weight of the island”, which to me, more poetically encapsulates both poems. The Whole Island explores the ambivalence of a returning exile, rather than someone ‘stuck there’ but also explores the place, the island as a body, the body as an island. The Whole Island was funded by the Manx sister to the IOM Arts Council –– Culture Vannin, and published by Valley Press.

In embarking on this, I found myself also reflecting more on the dark days of the police harassment and entrapment of gay & bi men in the late 1980s. I’d done this in a poem sequence in Throatbone, but was now driven to transform that anger into activism and, to be frank, mockery. Consequently, I was involved in lobbying the IOM Police for an apology (they became the first police force in the British & Irish Isles to apologise for the way they treated people like me). This also coincided with It’s A Sin when I became aware of Manx actor Dursley McLinden –– who was one of the inspirations for Olly Alexander’s character, Richie Tozer –– and how he had been mostly erased from history (I performed at the launch of the first-ever queer exhibition at the Manx Museum and he didn’t even appear anywhere). After all of these diversions, I ended up with too much for a pamphlet, and as I didn’t want to do a first collection yet, I developed a manuscript for Isle of Sin –– including improved versions of the Throatbone sequence –– and approached Peter Collins at Polari Press who I knew was keen to tell queer stories.

ah: A more recent publication, on the thirtieth anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, is the wonderful, intensely moving, a finger in derek jarman’s mouth, with Polari Press. How did this project come together?

A person taking a photograph of a small black house with yellow window frames, surrounded by a colorful garden filled with flowers, under a partly cloudy sky.

sm: Derek Jarman is an overwhelming inspiration, not in the least because of his response to being diagnosed HIV+ and his ‘return’ to the coast and creating a garden out of nothing, which inspires mine. I re-immersed myself in Jarman, in particular his time (and garden) at Prospect Cottage, along with the Protest! exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, plus the ones at The Garden Museum, London and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. I found myself writing voraciously about him –– or perhaps more accurately –– about HIV, mortality and connection to nature.

a finger in derek jarman’s mouth was turned down by nine publishers (longlisted by only one) so I approached Polari Press about the idea of a series of three pamphlets over three years, with the third being Patient L1 in Feb 2025 (more of that later). I also knew that Peter liked the idea of doing a boarded-cover limited edition at some point, so I pitched that too –– we sold out the 130-copy limited edition before publication date, and Peter deservedly won the Michael Marks Award for Best Illustrated Pamphlet in 2024 –– for the cyanotypes that feature in both editions.

ah: If we ever needed someone to defend the values of persevering, and always trying another route if the obvious path is blocked, you would be that person Simon! Ideas of continuing, and persisting, and creating things which will resonate beyond our lifetimes are at the heart of your relationship to Derek Jarman as you have told us. In the last but one poem, ‘dear derek jarman’, you write

you refused to die without the sun
rising without stones threaded
and hung in a garden that grew out
of nothing, without going quietly
smiling in slow motion like an iceberg
sinking from the sky, the ripples still
licking shingle in a one-way tide.

These lines hold for me the coalescence of life in death, and life despite death, which contribute powerfully to the book’s magic. Could you say something about them?

sm: As I mentioned, engaging with Jarman is an exploration of mortality, and while you capture it, I’d perhaps say ‘life despite impending death’ and the reckoning with the truth that ‘impending’ is true for us all, not just those with a terminal illness. I think for me, life felt like a terminal illness until I accepted my queerness as a ‘gift’ (if that doesn’t sound too glib). Jarman helped me do the same with HIV –– “as if being banned and disliked is a pinnacle after all” (‘dear derek jarman’). I think ‘giving life’ is part of the human condition, and for queers of my generation, ‘offspring’ wasn’t an (easy) option, but gardens are! Perhaps, the older we get, the more we see life, like Dennis Potter’s whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be.

A wooden lounge chair in a garden surrounded by various plants and flowers, with a stone path in the background.

ah: That’s a wonderful way of seeing things Simon. I concur, wholeheartedly, in full blossom! Thinking more into the connections between you and Jarman, refracted dualities are at the heart of a finger in derek jarman’s mouth, which adapts its title from Jarman’s collection a finger in the fishes mouth. You are, and Jarman was, both out and HIV positive with all the difference that three decades make in terms of effective treatment protocols. In speaking queerly with him, through blurred and echoed reflections and transmissions of his artworks across multiple media, was part of your intention to explore how, without invoking biological intergenerationality, we all live through and beyond time, through our enduring vibrations within the lives of others?

sm: I’m not sure I am capable of intentions that grand –– or that well-thought through, but now you say it, I do think that’s what the book does. I guess I’m primarily a practical man –– so decide to ‘do things’ wholeheartedly, and it is through that whole-heartedness that something deeper emerges, something you can arguably only realise or discover in hindsight, rather than plan for in advance. Also, if Jarman creates ‘enduring vibrations within the lives of others’, as I feel he does, then those vibrations are there anyway –– rather than requiring exploration, they need expression.

ah: By working so strongly through multi-gendered transitory experiences – flowers, gardens, weather, sex – the poems give off this heady summer heat, and with that the sense of being a memorial to a whole generation of people of both genders dying in the prime of life from HIV/AIDs before treatment became available. While Europe and North America saw a predominance of male deaths in the first wave, in Africa and beyond, gender was not a factor in transmission and infection. Was that an interest of yours?

An engraved signature on a dark stone surface with green foliage in the foreground.

sm: With a finger in derek jarman’s mouth being a tribute to Jarman then to me the focus of the book was to reflect his UK experience of HIV/AIDS, as you say “the sense of being a memorial to a whole generation”. But also, what he said and role-modelled in terms of confronting HIV stigma, and how that is even more important today.

But worldwide HIV/AIDS is absolutely an interest of mine. I get frustrated when queer people and organisations talk about HIV/AIDS as though it is a thing of the past. (For heaven’s sake even The Guardian refer to it as “Aids” for that very reason). It is still a global epidemic. Not only is HIV/AIDS a real, and growing, problem here, but it is even more of a problem in the USA due to lack of blanket access to medication, and even more of a problem overseas, especially in Africa. Africa has 50% of new infections, and the latest Trump attempts to block US-funded medication for Africa would be catastrophic.

630K people died of HIV-related causes in 2024. WHO is only targeting this to decrease to 400K by 2030. Can you imagine if WHO had said that about Covid?

An ornate metal cross mounted on a dark wooden surface.

ah: The physicality of Prospect Cottage, and the shoreline at Dungeness, moves like a blessing through the poems. They are good places where the reader can seek imaginative refuge, as Jarman did. At the time of writing you had yet to visit. How did you make the site feel so real?

sm: I am an island boy, and had also moved to Brighton in early 2020 with its shingle beaches. Like Jarman I collected hundreds of hag stones from the beach and hung threaded ones from trees, or on spikes, in the garden. A garden I was creating inspired by Jarman, albeit mine had four walls rather than none, and some of the jetsam is from the street not the beach! I also immersed myself in his books and the amazing derek jarman’s garden (Thames & Hudson, 1995). There was also a wonderful exhibition, replicating the cottage at The Garden Museum in London. The gateway technique, of course, is to focus on capturing the emotions of it all. The technical facts are easy in comparison, but still crucial as we are reminded in William Blake’s “holiness of minute particulars“.

ah: The photos you gave given us from your garden, which blossom through our conversation as moments of ecstatic, transient, green beauty enact what you say, Simon. More soberly, since COVID, the whole world has discovered what it’s like to become vulnerable to a new virus. You and I both remember the onset of HIV/AIDs at first hand, and its early ravaging of queer communities in the UK.

Like COVID, HIV/AIDS offers us the chance to look at natural evolution in the raw, with all its extraordinary potential for mutation. In ‘powered by HIV’ you write of

an overactive fuel
energy from atomic
cell destruction

Did this terrifying energy also run through these poems as a paradoxical creative source?

sm: I saw radioactive destruction as a metaphor for HIV and saw, as Jarman did, HIV as a creative energetic force –– driving the imperative to explore and accept mortality. Radioactivity is of course a paradox in itself –– giving energy, curing cancer and giving us a toxic legacy for generations, and in that it is not alone. In many ways, there are other ‘terrifying energies’ we face as human beings, especially the ‘others’ and ‘less powerful’ amongst us, and that certainly fuels what I want to say and explore. It is probably fair to say that the toxic energy and impacts of shame are very predominant in the collection, as is the power of redemption.

A black wooden house with yellow windows and a chimney, surrounded by a landscaped garden with gravel and various plants.

ah: Both energies pulse through the poems. You have mentioned that in Europe and North America the most deadly aspect of HIV/AIDS is the stigma that is still attached to it, and the consequent reluctance of people to come forward even when they suspect they may have symptoms, or have simply had an unprotected sexual encounter which should logically point to the need for testing. Could you say more about this perceived stigma, as the statistics, and their consequences, are something people need to be more aware of.

sm: I don’t think stigma is perceived, but there are two types– the stigma attributed and directed by others, and the stigma we impose on ourselves, HIV stigma, both of which negatively impact male suicide rates (and also female suicide rates in Scandinavia). According to a study published in The Lancet, the male suicide rate is five times higher than average in the first year after diagnosis and twice as high overall. Of course, we know how high male suicide rates are for men already (especially for those 18-30 and 45-60). The reason that the study concluded that the prime cause was stigma was that the rates were unchanged between 1996 and 2012.

I would argue it is the prime cause of the fact that more people are now diagnosed with HIV in the UK through heterosexual sex than ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM), and even more crucially, why late diagnosis is significantly higher for straight men and women, compared to MSM (70%, 50%, 30% respectively). Of course, late diagnosis means that it is highly likely that more people have been infected per diagnosis, and that the risk of suffering life-long or life-threatening illness such as PCP is much greater. Someone died of HIV-related illness in Brighton last week.

Stigma was something that Jarman recognised, which is why he was the first ‘famous’ person to declare his status in late 1986. Greater openness is a key to breaking down stigma, but so are public attitudes –– hopefully helped by HIV no longer being a “lethal weapon” carried by those successfully managed on medication. In my own case, I realised in the 2-3 years after diagnosis that I risked being locked into another closet, and more so reinvigorating that ‘voice of shame ‘ telling me I was worthless and ‘being what I deserved’. To counter the championing of openness, it is important to acknowledge that English Protestant culture, and many of the other cultures here, don’t really approve of talking about sex, and the fear of being considered queer is more prominent than one might expect.

A garden scene featuring a wooden planter filled with natural material and green plants, accompanied by two decorative gnome statues on either side.

ah: In the ‘feral rabbits’ section, a short sequence of sexy, razor-sharp, poems rush the reader into a space from which safety abruptly exits. We get to feel-along with what it might be like to find yourself with an HIV positive diagnosis. How did these poems come together? They feel brave, intimate, and honest, but also deeply crafted and deliberately made – acts of beauty that refuse shame.

sm: I’m really pleased that is how you read and saw the poems. The three poems, ‘Private Members’ Club, ‘The first sex party…’ and ‘Did he…?’ were originally written as a triptych (I honestly can’t remember why they now aren’t!). I wrote them over a relatively short time period, but ten years after my diagnosis (and after a finger in derek jarman’s mouth, which may be relevant or significant). For years, I’d found it impossible to write about the specifics of my HIV contraction or diagnosis, or about navigating the trauma. There are so many pitfalls, and at least three mineshafts to fall down — and I know you’ll forgive me, but I won’t name them as they do not warrant being ‘invited in’ for scrutiny. Those three poems were definitely the hardest poems to write in the whole collection, so it makes me very proud when you, and especially you, say they are “deeply crafted and deliberately made”. They were poems I knew I had to write, there would have been an elephant-sized hole in the collection without them, whether anyone else would notice or not.

ah: More practically, would you be able to share a few words about your experience of being supported by healthcare providers on this journey, in the event that someone who reads our conversation is fearful of being judged if they come forward for testing?

sm: HIV doesn’t discriminate, and neither, almost without exception, do healthcare professionals, who are also bound by professional confidentiality. Self-test kits are now available, albeit I would recommend going to a clinic if you feel there is a high chance of diagnosis so that you get the excellent support they offer. I have taken PrEP twice, which you usually get via A&E rather than the specialist health workers –– on both occasions, I was thanked by the doctor for coming in and taking it. My dentist didn’t bat an eyelid and I am unaware of any actions they take which make me feel stigmatised (e.g. the ‘end of day appointments’ of yesteryear). I had my ear pierced the other week and I told them. The response? “Oh, that’s fine! I don’t think we are even allowed to ask you that nowadays! It makes no difference, but thank you for thinking about it.”

A close-up view of a tree branch adorned with small stones, surrounded by lush green foliage and a background featuring a black structure and a bicycle.

ah: Life lived alongside HIV is also a theme within the poems that you have co-created through conversations with actor, activist, artist and tailor Jonathan Blake. They have so far been published in your Polari Pamplet, Patient LI, which you and Jonathan have performed from together, but this is just the beginning.

sm: In 2019, I approached Jonathan Blake (who was played by Dominic West in the film, Pride) about writing his life story in poetry. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1982 ––known as ‘Patient L1’ at London Middlesex Hospital. He is now 76 years old. I have done over 50 hours of interviews with Jonathan and I also have access to 4.25 hours of interviews done by the British Library in 1991.

Thanks to Arts Council England, Polari Press published a pamphlet version of Jonathan’s story, Patient L1, in February 2025. Jonathan read poems at the launches, which included found poems from a journal Jonathan’s partner of 39 years, Nigel Young, wrote on a holiday in April 1985. The poems went down so well, we published, under Nigel’s Septum Press, Jo & Ni Go Cruising in July 2025 –– thanks to Andrew Lumsden’s Grand Camp Maisie Fund.

Work continues on the full book, which is a mixture of prose in the writer’s voice and verse in Jonathan’s voice, provisionally entitled, The Life of Jonathan Blake in Twelve Acts –– with a Prologue, Interlude & Epilogue. Its length and complicated categorisation will make finding a publisher difficult, but sure we’ll get there.

ah: I have both books, and cherish them. I also really valued hearing you and Jonathan Blake reading the poems together. His story, through your and his words, in both of your voices, is a compelling and miraculous enactment of what co-creating can engender. That’s a pleasure to come, but let’s close for now with lamping wild rabbits. Having had the privilege of reading a press proof, I know that ‘dead rabbits’ is the last section, albeit that these poems are uncompromisingly full of life. Tell us a little more about them, and also what leads into this final act.

sm: Death, and hence mortality, is such a taboo, but I find exploring it strangely reassuring. For me, I can’t have lived through the last two years without meditations on mortality broadening to what it is to be human, broadening into considering the deaths that we are seeing every day –– especially those under the shadows of war crimes & genocide.

lamping wild rabbits hinges or pivots around the central ‘dungeness rabbits’ –– a tribute to Derek Jarman’s responses to his HIV diagnosis, with nine poems from the pamphlet. The book begins with ‘caged rabbits’ –– arguably a better version of Queerfella escaping shame and embracing freedom while ‘feral rabbits’ confronts the trials and tribulations of escaping the ‘domestication’ of sexual oppression. ‘wild rabbits’ is my response to HIV, inspired by Jarman connecting gardens & nature.

I’m excited about it. Outside of the Jarman section there are only seven poems from my pamphlets leaving over 50 poems –– half of which have never been published anywhere else.

ah: I know that readers will be as blown away by them as I have been, Simon. For people who want to order a copy, or attend a reading, the links are here.

Website:

Order from Out-Spoken: www.outspokenldn.com/shop/rabbits

Signed Copies: simonmaddrell.sumupstore.com/product/lamping-wild-rabbits

Launches & Readings

(Up-to-date events and ticket links at linkin.bio/simonmaddrell/)

Launches

London
Thurs 12 Feb Betsey Trotwood, EC1R 7pm
with Kostya Tsolakis

Brighton
Thurs 19 Feb The Walrus, Ship Street 7pm
with Naomi Foyle & Robert Hamberger

Manchester George House Trust Fundraiser
April Queer Lit Bookshop 7pm

Readings

Common Press Bookshop
Sun 22 Feb Bethnal Green Road, E2 7pm
with Nathan Evans

Milton Keynes Lit Fest
Tues 24 Feb Online 7pm
with Julia Bell & Len Lukowski

Yer Bard Poetry
Wed 18 March Dash The Henge, SE5 7pm
with Jake Wild Hall

Kemptown Bookshop
Thurs 26 March Kemptown, Brighton 7pm
with Ken Evans & Luke Kennard

The Elephant in the Room
Tues 31 March Online 7pm

Cork International Poetry Festival
Fri 15 May Cork Arts Theatre 7pm

‘The HIV Readings’ Fundraisers

Brighton: Lunch Positive
Thurs 12 March The Queery Bookshop & Café, 7pm
with Jonathan Blake & Robert Hamberger

London: UK AIDS Memorial Quilt
Fri 13 March, 7pm
The Devereux, Temple WC2R
hosted by Jonathan Blake, Patient L1
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-hiv-readings-in-aid-of-uk-aids-memorial-quilt-tickets-1981421186106

Simon Maddrell Social Media
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Facebook Page: @SimonMaddrellPoetry
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Instagram: @simonmaddrell
Bluesky: @simonmaddrell
Threads: @simonmaddrell

‘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.

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.

[‘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.