Tell me about your collection, What Remains the Same. It’s a selection of poems that touch on grief, family estrangement, and the aftermath of growing up in an abusive environment. The book as a whole reaches for wonder and some of the ways we can find solace in the world.
Does poetry help you speak about things you’ve been silent about before, a form of truth-telling like your mother’s unpublished poems, turning something broken into something beautiful, using a gift for finding unsolicited meaning in everything? Truth is impossible, and silence is inescapable. I like the Annie Ernaux quote: “Then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognised at last, while underneath other silences start to form.” READ MORE In pictures: Summer solstice celebrations at the Hill of Tara Harbour Kitchen review: This is a cracking coastal restaurant Gabor Maté: I began to notice that the people who got chronically ill had trouble saying ‘no’ The most complicated, haunting experiences seem to lose all sense of accuracy in memory and can become lost in the structure of a story.
Poetry seems to pull out and piece together the heart of the matter. The collection is in four parts. How did you structure it and decide on the running order? Intuition.
How does it differ from your previous collections The men I keep under my bed (2021) and Falling in love with broken things (2016) in theme and style? They’re all pretty different books. My .
