Poetry Landscapes

I grew up in Cambridge during the war. After graduating from Wye College, I lived with my husband  for four years in Canada and the US, where two of our three children were born. Chugging round the University campus in Ames, Iowa, I sold Avon cosmetics, before taking a part-time post as a secretary to a professor of Civil Engineering that gave me plenty of time to read.

             Wells-next-the-Sea

Postcards III


The river floods her days with blue wrinkled water,
quilts on which mallards for ever
jostle their advantage, I want to feed the ducks.
Here she first comes in a pram, wheeled onto
the wide stone bridge that spans the glazed eye
of the millpool, its flux reflecting who she is
against the roar. Drinkers spill from the pub.
Punts necklace the river's shine.
Did she make up the war; riding the weir on a raft
in a Micky Mouse gas mask, rubber snout snorkelling
the blackout? Tomcats slunk the garden wall,
their howls enter her dream, Mummy I'm going to drown.
Hour after hour the anglers, like sculptures on squat
canvas thrones, ask only to be one with water,
willows, not blue depths but green. Upstream, 
iron bridges make clattery noises.
Shouts from bathers, paddling-pool cacophony,
moor in her mind. Each year she sees the aconites.
Their yellow, also, stays inside her.
 

Published in The Wolf

Back in the UK, I took LAMDA examinations in Speaking Prose & Poetry up to their Silver Medal before coaching school children for the same examinations. Subsequently I taught science in secondary schools and  started sending out material for publication. About ten years of widespread journalism preceded my first book, Fishermen.

Some 6 or 7 years ago I completed an MA in Creative Writing.

Since childhood I’ve spent time on the North Norfolk coast,  this seems to have fueled an interest in the links between man, art and landscape.  After creating a plant- intensive garden in South London, I embarked on an essentially design-conscious one in a village on the borders of Leicestershire and Rutland.
 

The Garden at Hallaton

Landscape behind the garden

Since the end of March 2007, Michael, I and Domino, the  cat, have lived in a converted malthouse in Manningtree, on the Essex/Suffolk border.