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.
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.”
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.
