In Praise of Cats: The Book of Cat Poems

‘The smallest feline is a masterpiece’, said Leonardo da Vinci – a man who knew a thing or two about masterpieces. From the leaping kitten, sporting with leaves or twitching in gorgeous sleep, to the elegant elderly feline reposing severely before the fire in your favourite – now claw-raked – chair, we can never be said to ‘own’ a cat. They merely consent to share our lives, always archly aware that they are doing us a terrific favour.

This is not to say that our cats do not return our affection. Far from it. People who have never lived with a cat often criticise them for being cold or aloof. Only the cat lover can understand the deep, quiet pleasures of this relationship. “What greater gift,” asked Charles Dickens, “than the love of a cat?” Cats are capricious. Cats are choosy. Your interactions with them will be, always and exclusively, on their terms. So when your lap is full of stretched and purring peace – when cats relax, they show us all how it should be done – you are sensible of the great honour. And woe betide you if you wriggle.

Cats talk to us. There are commands, like the urgent bleat informing you, their reluctant butler, that their stately progress has been impeded by a door. Every cat I have ever known has been excellent at expressing disapproval. An irritable twitch of the tail leaves you in no doubt when you have affronted them, and if cats had eyebrows (do cats have eyebrows?) it’s easy to imagine that one would be perpetually arched. But there are also love songs, eloquent in purr and nuzzle. There is the beseeching pat and the satisfied exhalation as, having been round and about and arranged you to their satisfaction, they sink down onto a friendly lap.

As I edited The Book of Cat Poems, I met cats of every stripe (and striped cats too!) Here are hymns to the malevolent bruising Tom who haunts the city alleys, swishing and wailing and mauling his wicked way through the dark hours. A cat is only ever a half-tame thing, a whisker away from the tiger. The cat who basks and dozes on the rug all day might live quite another life at night, tripping the light fantastic over the rooftops of town or prowling for prey along country lanes.

No wonder the cat is so often seen as an uncanny creature, ‘strange, so strange’, as W H Davies has it. From the sphinx of Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde to the well-worn image of the witch’s familiar, any cat lover knows full well that a little magic lives in their pet.

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods,” wrote Terry Pratchett.

“They have not forgotten this.”

While kittens delight us with their frisking, grown cats can be gracefulness incarnate. Whorled into a perfect circle to sleep, stalking along high fences or simply delicately washing their ears, they move with the kind of languid poise we lumpen humans can only admire. Even hunting – eyes enormous, tail thrashing, bottom wiggling – they are ruthlessly elegant.

Poets have devoted many verses to expressing the particular balletic charms of a cat’s movements. Amy Lowell’s ‘Winky’ – such an undignified name! – immortalises her cat’s ‘glossiness of beautiful curves’ as well as articulating its maddening, demanding but adored personality. Christopher Smart, incarcerated in an asylum with only his cat Jeoffrey for company, conjured the animal’s movements evocatively: the rolling and washing, the claw sharpening, the stretching and the rubbing against things.

Some of the world’s greatest writers have dedicated themselves to the conundrum of describing a cat’s eyes. Swinburne writes of ‘Glorious eyes that smile and burn’, and Yeats of Minnaloushe, dancing in the night with his moon-filled eyes always changing. Harold Monro’s little black cat gives a hard stare to request a saucer of milk. Anyone who has been glowered at by a cat will recognise this stern and disapproving glare, an accusatory reminder that the bowl is empty and the hour late.

I love the poems I found about the contrary nature of cats. I have never met one that didn’t find itself, like the Rum Tum Tugger, on the wrong side of every door. Your knitting will be shredded, your newspaper sprawled upon as you attempt to read it, your slumber disturbed at a ridiculous hour by an enquiring, patting paw and your dinner stolen, quite brazenly and without compunction. Cats are exasperating. Nobody who loves them could pretend otherwise. We wouldn’t have them any other way.

Happiness is a warm cat, purring in your lap, warming your feet, and – of course – nipping your toes if you have the temerity to move. Cats love to be admired, accepting all devotion – including that of some of history’s finest poets – as no more than they deserve. I guarantee that your cat will be positively delighted if you settle down to read these poems in praise of felines on a long, dark evening – as long as you don’t get up again in a hurry.

The Book of Cat Poems was obviously a joy to edit and is beautifully illustrated by Sarah Maycock.

Voyages in Verse: Editing She Will Soar

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is about to take flight in a beautiful neon green paperback. It was the second anthology I edited that gathers work by women from the ancient world to the present day. The previous volume – She is Fierce – had been a general collection, designed to be both broad and friendly, and with no particular thematic focus. She Will Soar concentrates on poems about wanderlust, freedom and escape – all subjects that have preoccupied female writers, who have always operated under more constraints than their male counterparts. And, of course, the verses I gathered took on an extra resonance during the strange, locked-down months of spring 2020.

It starts – of course – with reading.

There were poems I already knew and wanted to include. To add to these, I plundered my own shelves and those in libraries, from the small but much-loved library in my home village to the British Library and brilliant National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre (although they were closed during lockdown, they have some wonderful poetry available to browse online.) I bought second hand books, gratefully accepted bags of delights from my editor, devoured poetry publications and spent hours online. I lapped up recommendations wherever they were offered.

As the kitchen table and living room floor disappeared under the stacks of paper and books, and my apologetic intimacy with the postman deepened, I began to construct a longlist. I’m enormously grateful for technological advances that allowed me to avoid carrying a houseful of books to the nearest photocopier. An app called Tiny Scanner turns pages into printable PDFs when you photograph them on your phone. I turned my houseful of post-it noted books into towering stacks of paper, and closeted myself with them.

I always find the process of whittling down a longlist for an anthology completely agonising. It was important to me to include voices from different eras, points of view and places, so that each reader would find something that struck a chord with them, and so the anthology would have a varied music to it. So when I had two poems that expressed similar feelings, or were very like one another in tone and style, I tried to lose one of them to keep the reading experience broad and interesting. She Will Soar includes, as a result, poems from today’s spoken word superstars (Hollie McNish, Sophia Thakur), canonical big hitters (Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), forgotten pioneers (Charlotte Forten Grimké, Edith Södergran), suffragettes (Emily Wilding Davison herself, no less), talented students (Ellie Steel, Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith), eighteenth century Bluestockings (Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), a scandalous Victorian celebrity (L.E.L.), a ninth century courtesan-nun (Yü Hsüan-Chi) and a few national Laureates (Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay) among many others. It’s fascinating to find the same themes addressed in far flung places and distant eras by women leading such dramatically different lives.

Victorian celebrity poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon or L.E.L.

Since the anthology took freedom, travel and escape as its theme, some chapters suggested themselves readily. There were poems about journeys over land and by sea that travelled happily together. A chapter gathering poems in which birds and beasts appeared as emblems of freedom was eventually dropped, with my favourites from that section flying elsewhere in the volume to roost. I had also originally planned a chapter which looked at some of the ties that bound writers – constraints of society, gender and even dress – which became, as my wise editor pointed out, rather heavy reading. Some of these poems were cut and others placed elsewhere.

Once the whittling had been done, and the poems were divided into thematic chapters including ‘Words can set you free’, ‘Flights of fancy’ and ‘Taking flight’, I closeted myself with print outs of each chapter. I read the poems – silently and out loud, as I hope readers will do – and shuffled the order until it felt… right. I aim for variety but also a sense of flow even though I think anthologies are as often dipped into as read in sequence.

My final task was to write the chapter openings. In these and the book’s introduction I tried very briefly to say something about the particular circumstances of female writers: how limited their social, political, literary, economic and educational freedoms had been through many of the centuries covered. I researched and wrote brief biographies of each of them, and found some of the stories of women from earlier eras immensely moving. Many defied disapproving husbands and fathers, dismissive editors, enormous families, vicious critics or society’s censure. Some faced mental or physical illness, and even fled repressive regimes. At times it was considered so disgraceful for women to publish, they wrote under male names, as the Brontës and George Eliot did. We will never know how many more didn’t feel they could write, or wrote and didn’t publish. But these women wrote. Lots of them have fallen out of fashion, some of them were ignored or didn’t dare publish during their lifetimes. Now, though, I hope they will be read alongside some of the most talented and inspired writers of today.

This article first appeared on the Poetry by Heart website.

She Will Soar is still available in hardback or to pre-order in paperback. Please consider ordering from your local bookshop!

A Historic Post Box Odyssey

When I discovered that my home village boasts a post box from the reign of every monarch since Queen Victoria – an unusual claim to fame for such a modestly sized place – I was intrigued. We all walk past these pieces of historic street furniture every day and, like most people, I had never taken much notice of them. Now, though, I always give them a closer look, and take a glance at the royal cypher. This monogram tells us who was on the throne when the box was first installed, and can help bring the history of the places we live and the people who lived there before us to life.

For centuries the postal service, established by Charles II, has connected people, bringing birthday cards and less welcome bills, good and tragic news, festive greetings, love letters, gifts and gossip. Before letter boxes, correspondents could catch a passing uniformed postman or ‘Bellman’ – so called because they would ring a bell or blow a horn to announce their presence as they approached on foot or horseback.

Alternatively, correspondents could visit a receiving office, the precursor of the modern Post Office.

Ashtead Post Office Staff, October 1911 (courtesy Mrs G. Mooring / Leatherhead & District Local History Society). Mary Stewart, Postmistress 1908 – 1911 in in the centre.

In 1852 the first British post boxes appeared in Jersey, at the suggestion of Post Office employee Anthony Trollope who had seen them in use in Europe. Trollope is best remembered now for his novels including Barchester Towers, though fewer people are familiar with his literary legacy than the one he has left on our pavements. For a while the boxes were painted a rather murky green, but from 1874 the iconic red became standard and after some design metamorphoses – including the hexagonal Penfolds, now very rare – the pillar box took its now familiar cylindrical shape.

I embarked on a mission to ‘collect the set’ of monarchs and discovered to my delight that my nearest box is the village’s oldest, an elegant Victorian. I was puzzled to find it surrounded by houses that date from the 1960s, but it was apparently moved from its original home. It was curiously moving to think of the generations who had deposited Christmas wishes, invitations and eccentrically spelled children’s thank-you letters here. I was hooked.

Victorian post box

I began to interrupt walks, bike rides and school runs to examine the cyphers on every box we passed. My children eventually stopped rolling their eyes. A passer-by found it hilarious when my five year old hurtled past an Edward VII on her bike bellowing, “Was he the one that ran off with Mrs Simpson, Mummy?”

I’ve found two Edward VIIs so far, both bearing his rather sinuous cypher.

The cypher on an Edward VII post box

Around 15% of letter boxes in the UK date from George V’s reign, making them the most common after the Elizabethans. In his rather austere insignia, the flourishes of his predecessors are replaced with an authoritative GR. I learnt that the King himself had visited the village in 1914 to inspect the Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, based here during wartime, and couldn’t help wondering whether he might have passed any of his post boxes en route. Our Lockdown walks were cheered when a neighbourhood knitter crocheted one of the George Vs a rather natty hat… I wonder whether he would have approved? It was a lovely way to open our eyes to these heritage street furnishings (and we took our entertainment where we could during those dreary early months of 2021!)

George V post box with additional natty hat

The rarest boxes date from the reign of Edward VIII, who was on the throne for only 326 days before he abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. The brevity of Edward’s reign meant that only 161 pillar boxes were ever struck with his royal cypher, and not all of those are still in use.  Letter boxes from his era are therefore the geek’s holy grail, and lovers of letter box history take delight in tracking them down around the British Isles. Surrey seems to offer rich pickings, since I have found references to Edward VIII boxes situated in Claygate, Esher, Guildford and West Byfleet.

An Edward VIII box — one of two originally installed in the village — still stands proudly on a handsome mid-century estate. It must have predated some of the nearby houses since building on the surrounding streets was interrupted by World War II, during which pigs were reared on its vacant plots as part of ‘Dig for Victory’ efforts. This drive also saw crops being grown on the nearby Common and war allotments being established nearby. The Women’s Land Army who tended these became a familiar sight in their distinctive hats and corduroy breeches. I wonder whether they might have posted letters home or to soldiers overseas here.

A rare Edward VIII post box

George VI succeeded his brother, and reigned from the end of 1936 to 1952. There are at least two post boxes from his time on the throne in the village, but although more than 60% of current British post boxes date from our current Queen’s reign, accidents of geography (and the school run!) meant it look me longest to track down an Elizabeth.

I’ll never again pass one of these everyday but iconic objects without checking the monarch’s crest, feeling connected to the people who walked these streets before us, wondering how different the village – and life – would have looked then. It’s inspired me, too, to pick up a pen and generate some proper paper post – so fun to write, and so wonderful to receive – in this digital age. Which kings and queens have left their legacy in your neighbourhood?

I have written about historic post boxes for Surrey Life and The Countryman Magazine.

Introducing Primary School children to Poetry

Here’s the headline: you don’t have to. They’re already steeped in the stuff!

I’m writing some school events based around Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book at the moment. It’s so exciting choosing poems to share with children about the solar system, whales and dinosaurs. Questions to be debated include: what planets might taste of, how it might feel to meet a Kronosaurus while swimming and whether or not we’d like to be a whale. Children, you see, aren’t scared of poetry.

If you buy Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book from an independent bookshop during November 2021, email me the receipt and your address and I’ll send you a Natural History Museum postcard with personalised message and a signed bookplate.

By the time we leave school, some of us have been rather put off poetry. Actually – confession time, now – I was. Picking it apart and poring over the meanings and structure throughout my education had sucked some of the simple joy out of poetry. I became paralysed by the thought that I must understand every element, rather than just enjoying it. I had to learn to love poetry again.

Primary school children, however, don’t have any of those associations. The earliest things we hear and learn are usually songs and nursery rhymes: from the sun putting his hat on to the little piggies of our toes. We often read rhyming books with our children: my five year old is word perfect on everything from There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly to Room on the Broom, and woe betide me if I try to skip a verse to get to bedtime quicker! Children are at home in rhyme and verse before they learn to talk, so they don’t have any of the associations some adults have of poetry being fancy, or intimidating, or difficult.

So, my advice on sharing poetry with young children is just to get started! I love Lewis Carroll’s inventive and whimsical poems and I’ve read both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, illustrated beautifully by Chris Riddell, to my five and eight year olds this year. Even though today’s children won’t be familiar with the Victorian rhymes many of them parody (though they might enjoy Mary Howitt’s ‘The Spider and the Fly’, which is one of them) the nonsense and fun of ‘The Lobster Quadrille’ or ‘You Are Old, Father William’ will tickle them. Who can walk anywhere with dawdling children without invoking the lines:

“Will you walk a little faster”, said a whiting to a snail?

There’s a porpoise close behind me and he’s treading on my tail…

Edward Lear’s poems are wonderful too. Ask them to draw the Jumblies in their sea-faring sieve or the Pobble who has no toes, and watch their imaginations soar. For a modern dose of balderdash, Michael Rosen’s Book of Nonsense is great fun.

Poems can help little people tackle big feelings, too. ‘Grandma and the Sea’ in Kate Wakeling’s excellent new collection Cloud Soup will help children to process grief and loss. (It moved me to tears too, so I guess not just children!) Encouraging children to write themselves is a fantastic way to help them express themselves and examine their own emotions. They might be inspired by reading the work of other children, like Take Off Your Brave, a lovely collection of impressive and expressive poems by 4 year old Nadim.

Reading poems aloud, in as dramatic and over the top a way as possible, is a brilliant way to bring them to life to children. My daughter loves A A Milne’s ‘Disobedience’ with its rapid, building rhythm and repetition of ‘James James Morrison Morrison William George Dupree’. If you feel they’ll respond well to a touch of goriness, Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children will appeal – try Jim, who was eaten by a lion. Poet Matt Goodfellow – a former Primary School teacher himself – has a wonderful collection of poems to read aloud called Caterpillar Cake (yum!). If you’re not confident about your own performances, you can find poets reading their own work out loud online to bring it to life for children. I love Laura Mucha’s readings from Dear Ugly Sisters here.

Researching She Is Fierce I came across some wonderful, lesser known poems by women that even young children will – I hope – enjoy as much as I did. Liz Lochhead’s ‘A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly’, and Katherine Mansfield’s playful ‘When I Was A Bird’ are bound to delight younger readers. For slightly older children, the chatty, encouraging tone of ‘God Says Yes to Me’ by Kaylin Haught will appeal. Jan Dean’s ‘Three Good Things’ could inspire a discussion about the three best things to choose from their day. Jean Little’s ‘Today’ – like the poems in Allan Ahlberg’s much-loved Please Mrs Butler – speaks directly to the experience of school-children, and they will be delighted to find themselves reflected there – and with the poem’s rebelliousness.

And Wonder has opened the door to a world of nature poems on every subject from volcanoes to otters, dinosaurs to dodos, meteorites to trees. I’m very excited to introduce this book to children and am planning to schedule both live and online events throughout 2022. If you know a Primary School who would welcome one, do email me.

Poetry to inspire future planet-champions

One of the great pleasures of poetry is that the poets’ dazzling feats of imagination can whisk the reader under the sea, to another planet or to view the world from another perspective in the space of just a few lines. When I was choosing poems for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, I looked for verses that would help me see the natural world in a new way, as many of the museum’s amazing exhibits do. I hoped this shift in viewpoint would encourage children to connect more deeply with the natural world, and encourage a passion for protecting it.

The narrator of a poem can be anyone – or anything: a child, an astronaut, Charles Darwin’s wife, a duck, a dinosaur, a dodo. Children are used to suspending disbelief for the space of a poem, since we have all gorged on a diet of talking animals and magical happenings, often in rhyme, since the days when we were first read to. A poem is a portal the poet asks us to walk through, and on the other side, nothing looks quite the same.

One of the poems I’m most looking forward to sharing with young readers is Gita Ralleigh’s ‘Solar System Candy’.

If I ate the solar system,

the moon would taste

strange and dusty

as Turkish Delight.

Planets would be

giant gobstoppers,

except Saturn and Jupiter –

those gas giants

fizz like sherbert,

or melt like candy floss

in your mouth.

The meteor belt

pops and crackles

like space dust.

Comets leave a minty sting

on your tongue.

Black holes taste of cola bottles.

Or memories

you once had

and lost.

Gita’s poem is full of sensory delights that help readers of all ages to see these distant astral bodies with fresh eyes as they recall familiar tastes and sensations. I had never managed to remember which planets were made of gas, but now they taste like candy floss on my tongue, I’ll never forget! The image of Turkish Delight is perfectly chosen, reminding us of the fact that the moon’s surface is dusty enough for us to leave boot prints in it if we could walk around on it.

John Clare’s poem ‘The Ants’ starts with a human-sized perspective. We see the ants’ procession from our usual lofty height. But with the suggestion of a whispered language among the workers, suddenly the reader is urged to swoop down to eavesdrop, and to imagine the customs and commands that govern the intricately-ordered community.

What wonder strikes the curious, while he views

The black ant’s city, by a rotten tree,

Or woodland bank! In ignorance we muse:

Pausing, annoy’d, – we know not what we see,

Such government and thought there seem to be;

Some looking on, and urging some to toil,

Dragging their loads of bent-stalks slavishly:

And what’s more wonderful, when big loads foil

One ant or two to carry, quickly then

A swarm flock round to help their fellow-men.

Surely they speak a language whisperingly,

Too fine for us to hear; and sure their ways

Prove they have kings and laws, and that they be

Deformed remnants of the Fairy-days.

Some of the poems explicitly ask the reader to think themselves into the mind of a seal, or a tree, or a lizard. It’s a wonderful way to ignite children’s imaginations: who hasn’t wondered where the cat goes at night, or what an elephant might dream about? Geoffrey Dearmer’s poem ‘Whale’ – with its lovely lulling ‘rise and sink and rise and sink’ putting the reader right there in the waves – is a great example. (It will strike a chord with any parent who’s had to negotiate a child into the bath and then coax them out, too!)

Wouldn’t you like to be a whale

And sail serenely by—

An eighty-foot whale from your tip to your tail

And a tiny, briny eye?

Wouldn’t you like to wallow

Where nobody says ‘Come out!’?

Wouldn’t you love to swallow

And blow all the brine about?

Wouldn’t you like to be always clean

But never have to wash, I mean,

And wouldn’t you love to spout—

O yes, just think—

A feather of spray as you sail away,

And rise and sink and rise and sink,

And blow all the brine about?

Asking children to fire up their imaginations by reading – and writing – their way into fresh ways of seeing the natural world can foster a connection with the wonders of our planet. Hopefully, it will also inspire the next generation develop a lifelong interest in protecting it.

I’m looking forward to going into Primary Schools with an interactive talk about poetry of the natural world, asking children to imagine what planets would taste of and how it feels to be a whale, or meet a dinosaur. If you know a school that might welcome a visit, either in person or online, please do get in touch.

A version of this blog first appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit website.

Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book is out now, available from your local bookshop and Bookshop.org among other outlets.

Pregnancy Poems: 'Who will we be when we come back?'

When I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, I asked to include a few short pieces on aspects of motherhood. I did rather regret insisting on this when I found myself combining work - both on the book and in my job as a publicist - with homeschooling my children solo. Perhaps it wasn’t the best vantage point from which to survey parenthood: I was deeply in the trenches of it. But it was still a pleasure - once I finally secured a place at Holiday Club and could hear myself think / go to the loo uninterrupted - to think back to the earliest days of my children’s lives. Here’s what I wrote about pregnancy, and some of the poems from that section I love.

We met early on. There’s an initial, thrilling tick and whirr, a flutter on a hitherto unsuspected inside edge of me. There were moments when I was going about my life – it was still mine then – and nobody but I would know that my attention was far from the meeting room or train carriage. I was straining secretly, inner ear cocked, like a dog vibrating with anticipation, for a wave or a wriggle. The second semester saw my daughter rolling and tumbling and, a scan revealed, even playing with her toes. In the last weeks there was indignant heaving, when a fist or foot could be seen – to the horror of my child-free colleagues – threatening to burst out of my bulk.

I still have ghost kicks now. Gas, obviously, but there’ll be a moment as I’m bellowing about shoes to my five year old when I’ll suddenly feel the echo of tiny her, flickering in my belly. I can’t explain to her why I’m pausing in my shrill school-run tirade but there she is, suddenly, as she was, and I’m transported. Before I thud back down into the now of book bags and morning chaos, there’s a glimpse into that time of magical possibility, when you’re first madly in love with someone you don’t yet know.

From the flood of relief when I saw a tiny ticking bean on an early scan to studying the distances between high street bins in case I had to be sick into them, I found pregnancy a peculiar time. How could it not be? Someone is having hiccups inside you! (Was I the only one who thought anxiously of those world record holders, hiccupping for twelve years straight, every time this happened?) There was the debilitating but oddly luxurious bone tiredness at the start and the end that had me sinking into unconsciousness by 9pm, and the feeling that you’ve got one foot in a new life that is still – with a first child – unimaginable.

Heartsong, by Jeni Couzyn

I heard your heartbeat.

It flew out into the room, a startled bird

whirring high and wild.

I stopped breathing to listen

so high and fast it would surely race itself

down and fall

but it held strong, light

vibrant beside the slow deep booming

my old heart suddenly audible.

Out of the union that holds us separate

you’ve sent me a sound like a name.

Now I know you’ll be born.

We began researching a slightly terrifying world of arcane equipment – from buggies to bedding, and from sterilisers to swaddling blankets. My urge towards thrifty nesting did battle with the anxiety about plunging into parenthood without some essential piece of kit, though in the event my babies seemed unperturbed by the relative cheapness of their pram. (The two things I have done in my life that made me feel most ‘mum’ were folding up a buggy and chucking it into a car boot, and putting in earrings while briefing a babysitter. Peak mum.)

The mysteries of the state of pregnancy have captured the imagination of generations of writers, from Anna Laetitia Barbauld addressing ‘a little invisible being who is expected soon to become visible’ at the dawn of the nineteenth century to Jeni Couzyn, holding her breath to hear her baby’s heartbeat. It’s time for last trips as a couple – Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi being kicked at the Colosseum, and Katharine Perry navigating the cobbles of Lille – before you need an extra suitcase for the baby gubbins and have to snatch baby-free time together during naps.

Singing Lando Lullabies, by Katharine Perry

Singing Lando lullabies to you,

Orlando, Orlando,

your eyelids soft while I dream

of the last holiday

two days in Lille, holding hands and

sleeping all night in ironed, white sheets, undisrupted.

He kissed my hair going out to dinner,

dark green dress against the dark blue night air,

with heels tripping over the cobbles of the old town.

Seven courses and marble stairs and glistening glass.

They made a special effort not to serve blue cheese,

so that you were safe.

And on the train, through the streets,

eating chips at lunch,

and delicate meats at dinner,

we talked about your name.

Felix Lexington;

Too many ‘xs’.

Orlando Lexington;

too many American places.

Lexington after the pub in Kings Cross

where we met on the dance floor.

I wanted Leonard,

He wanted Ulysses.

I mentioned how handsome he would look

if his name was Orlando.

And I think about handsome you are now;

my little Lando.

We look, half shyly, at children of all ages and wonder: what will she be like then? And then? What will it feel like to hold his hand crossing a road, to tuck her into bed, to carry them on my hip instead of within? And, as Liz Berry asks in ‘The Steps’: ‘Who will we be when we come back?’ Parents are newborn, too, when their children arrive.

Already looking into an invisible distance, already handing in our resignations from our child-free existence, my fellow parenting class students and I lumbered increasingly slowly around the neighbourhood. We lowered ourselves like hippos into the water of the local lido, chuckling at the panic on the skinny lifeguard’s face as he calculated which of our massive frames he would be able to heave out of the water if necessary. We awaited dispatches from the ones who had rudely interrupted these last hazy days by doing the thing we each, privately, thought wouldn’t really happen to us – giving birth. We obediently ate our pineapple and sipped our raspberry leaf tea. And we waited.

Taken from Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, published by Trapeze.

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: review

The first half of this book is a scalding critique of life online. I have lived there, in what the narrator calls ‘the portal’, and I recognise its memes and mores in ways that flushed my face with a combination of hilarity and humiliation as I read.

Twitter, in particular, has been a crutch to me in lonely times: freelancing, baby-wrangling, lockdown, homeschooling. It was a raucous and mildly edgy pub, with a table of people ready to bang their digital fists on the table as we enthused or railed about the same things, be they medieval manuscripts, cats, the government or Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

In the novel, the narrator bonds passionately with a fellow panel guest purely because they are – and I thought this sentence so clever, so telling – ‘exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online’.

The book is written in bite-sized chunks reminiscent of Instagram captions, a structure that cleverly mirrors its content. Patricia Lockwood is searingly incisive about the dopamine hit of going viral, and about the stranglehold over her attention and time that the portal wields. We feel – as the narrator does – the emptiness of the arch barbs, the hot takes and the fake new ways of laughing, the tickling shame of the hours frittered on ephemera. However, this blistering novel also understands the heady rush of connection in a lonely time and the glee with which we gorge ourselves on the ever-scrolling fountain of content.

I’ve stepped back from Twitter. I pop my head round the door now and again in case anyone’s talking to me, and share things I’ve worked on or written. I feel relieved to have stopped scrolling for – my iPhone told me with pursed lips and clutched pearls – up to two hours a day, usually in increments of a few minutes here and there. I don’t miss the unedifying wormholes I descended, idly following an off-colour comment on a thread until I turned a corner in the labyrinth and came face to face with the digital equivalent of a ravenous minotaur: a nest of people who all agreed wholeheartedly that Donald Trump was a decent man.

Twitter made me friends, it kept me company in my loneliest times, it helped me forge countless professional connections and even once indirectly landed me a book deal, but the cost in time and concentration was too high. I fired it up in every spare second, and often – I’m ashamed to admit – even in unspare seconds when someone – usually one of my children, since I’ve spent much of the pandemic confined with them – was trying to get my attention in what Charlie Brooker memorably called ‘the meat space’.

Lockwood’s narrator is eventually dragged back from the portal into her real life by a family tragedy, one based on the author’s own experience. I don’t want to write too explicitly about the plot since I read this book knowing nothing about it, and I think this magnified its impact. This book spins on a sixpence from being a scalpel-sharp satire of social media to a devastating portrait of grief and love in a way that gives the reader whiplash, but it absolutely worked for me. I ended up ugly crying so dramatically I had to lock myself in the bathroom so I didn’t alarm the kids (though to be honest the little sociopaths probably wouldn’t have noticed, and they’ve witnessed me trying to read the Ladybird Classics Happy Prince before, so I have form.)

I feel you could read No One Is Talking About This over and over again and find new nuggets of brilliance each time. Terrible things happen to sardonically humorous people. None of us can hide from life, not even online, behind a blithe or facile or #blessed mask. I found this a wise, witty and ultimately devastating book, refreshingly unlike anything else I’ve read, and look forward to reading more from this very talented writer.

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Booker. It’s out now.

Please note that this article includes affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you buy through them. I only link to books I really love.

Travels in Time: Best Historical Fiction

I’m a great big history geek and I love reading historical fiction. I’ve found myself pulled into the past more and more over this past year and a half, looking for escapist reads to transport me from the present. Here are a handful of my favourite historical novels. (I have so many, this will probably spill over into at least another blog post… I haven’t even mentioned my boy Thomas Cromwell or Rose Nicolson here!)

The Illumination of Ursula Flight by Anna-Marie Crowhurst

I loved this stylish and energetic novel: the magnificent Restoration settings, the clever way the writing has a period feel, and the lively, formidable Ursula herself. Born under an ill-fated comet, Ursula yearns for a glittering career as a playwright but the seventeenth century is a tough time for a woman to forge a literary life. Nothing daunted, Ursula embarks on her artistic adventures and it’s a pure pleasure for the reader to follow her.

Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth MacNeal

I loved both this book and Elizabeth’s debut, The Doll Factory – it’s hard for me to choose a favourite between them. She’s excellent on obsession and the setting – in this case a Victorian travelling circus that pitches up in Vauxhall’s gaudy pleasure gardens – is transporting, atmospheric and colourful. The tension ratchets up brilliantly and I absolutely gobbled the second half.

Ophelia Swam by Kelley Swain

Ophelia Swam is dreamlike, poetic and beautiful, threaded through with the music of the turning seasons, rooted in sixteenth century Oxfordshire and perfumed by Sister Grace’s herbs and healing plants. Kelley asks: what if Ophelia swam? What if she washed up at an English nunnery, and had time to mend and rest and forge a new path? I love anything that peers around the corners of Hamlet, I love a Tudor setting, I love English pastoral, I love books about religious houses and women forging their own paths through a world that wants to clip their wings. So I loved this!

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

Handsome, headstrong Sebastian is heir to a vast and beautiful English country estate, but he wrestles with his fate as a feature in the eternal round of lavish parties, intrigues and traditions at the cold, decadent heart of Edwardian high society. This book, like Virginia Woolf’s glorious Orlando, holds a special place in my heart for being based on Knole, Vita’s childhood home, which is near where I grew up. As a woman, Vita couldn’t inherit Knole and she pours her feelings about its loss into this sparky novel that satirises the empty glamour and high society scandals of the turn-of-the-century aristocracy.

Cecily by Annie Garthwaite

I loved this novel, in which the formidable Cecily Neville steers her house of York through the turbulent reign of god-besotted Henry VI. The female characters were brilliant, from smug, slippery Jacquetta to icy warrior queen Marguerite and of course Cecily herself. Henry – weak and vacillating, easy manipulated by his magnates with his rheumy eyes trained dreamily on God – is also fantastically well drawn. A hugely satisfying slice of historical fiction, and although I’m excellent on the Tudors I’m hazier on this period so I felt like I learned a lot, too.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

Half of this excellent novel is historical, and the other half set in a dystopian near-future New York, with a mad time-travel plot zipping the reader between the two. It sounds and is quite bonkers but it works spectacularly well. In the sixteenth century sections, poet Emilia Lanyer (a real and fascinating historical figure) embarks on a love affair with up and coming playwright Sad Will Shakespeare. The writing is utterly luminous. This was one of my favourite reads of recent years.

Little by Edward Carey

I really enjoyed this strange, beautifully written fictionalised history of Madam Tussaud, following her from the eerie workshop of lonely Doctor Curtius to the Monkey House in Revolutionary Paris and even a cupboard at Versailles. It’s fascinating, often gruesome (the horrifying heft of a head!), frequently moving and always intriguing.

Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry

This is a book I publicised and fell so hard for! Elizabeth is a sensational writer, with whole paragraphs I had to reread just to properly savour them. Set partly on board a ship in 1833 and partly in the asylum the ship’s doctor runs in Boston after that ill-fated voyage, it is freighted with gothic atmosphere, simmering tensions and unfolding mysteries. Anyone who loved Francis Spufford’s equally excellent Golden Hill will adore this. Elizabeth has a new novel out next year so it’s a brilliant time to join her fan club.

Want more…?

If you’re hungry for more recommendations for historical fiction, I have also blogged about my some of my favourite World War Two books here.

Please note that this article includes affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you buy through them. I only link to books I really love.

Books about art and artists

I’m absolutely loving Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from French by Jessica Moore. The writing - about art-making but also about being in your early twenties and pinging around Europe (sob!) - is sumptuous and sensuous, with whole paragraphs so beautiful I have to read them a few times. (Plus utter kudos to my colleagues at MacLehose Press for creating an artwork of a goldie-looking book - honestly, she’s a stunner.) So I thought I’d gather some other writing about art and artists I have loved for my newsletter (sign up here if you like that sort of thing) and put it here too.

The Naked Muse by Kelley Swain

I worked on the publicity for this beautiful little book from indie publisher Valley Press in 2016. It’s an elegant, thought-provoking memoir of Kelley’s time as an artists’ model. She’s a poet, and the writing is delicious. She talks about how it feels to disrobe in a room full of clothed strangers, and to see yourself as others portray you. I learned so much from this book about art, the act of looking and being looked at, and our relationship with our bodies.

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth MacNeal

Set among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Victorian London, this wonderful novel is drenched with great period detail. Elizabeth is brilliantly eloquent on artistic ambition and the weight of male expectation and attention - and obsession - on women, and there are fun cameos from Millais, Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal and a suffocatingly tense and gripping denouement.

The Bellini Madonna by Elizabeth Lowry

A lost Old Master, a stifling heatwave, a crumbling English country pile, its innocent - or is she? - young custodian and a corrupt art sleuth. All this AND Robert Browning in Italy. I had the pleasure of working on Elizabeth’s Mantel-approved gothic masterpiece Dark Water, and I’ll read everything she ever writes. Get into her - you won’t regret it.

Desperate Romantics by Franny Moyle

This was the book that kick-started my interest in the Pre-Raphaelites. For a while I was a book reviewer for BBC Radio Oxford, and this was one of the books that was sent to me for consideration. I just fell in love. It’s non-fiction (so doesn’t take all the liberties with the history that the entertaining BBC series based on it did) but it’s deeply researched, lively and fascinating.

Fake Like Me by Barbara Bourland

A book I loved working on, Fake Like Me is a dark, sharp, feminist art-world satire boasting a gang of infamous, crazily talented young artists, legendary parties, a no-name artist desperately re-making her most triumphant works and an eerie but opulent house designed by her dead artistic hero. But… a lot still needs to be explained about Carey Logan’s tragic death. And, just in case you’re not already sold, the book is a sly modern take on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Delicious.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

It moves so slowly! How did she keep me so completely entranced? This Pulitzer Prize winning novel about Theo Decker’s life after he is orphanned in the bombing of a museum is a many-splendoured thing. It’s adorned with fantastic writing and intriguing plotting and at its heart lies a tiny painted masterpiece.

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

I recommend this book A LOT but it deserves it! It’s darkly funny but agonisingly acute on humiliation, loneliness and need. Tom is a spectacular writer. He asks what makes a great artist, and what damage might they be permitted to wreak due to their talent. It’s a delicious satire on connoisseurship, too. The sections with larger-than-life artist Bear painting and partying in glamorous bohemian 1950s Rome are especially wonderful.

Effie by Suzanne Fagence Cooper

I loved this lively biography of Effie Gray, who married John Ruskin - the foremost art critic of the Victorian age. The marriage was never consummated and was eventually scandalously annulled, freeing Effie to marry wunderkind painter John Everett Millais, with whom she had fallen in love during a peculiar Scottish trip during which he painted her husband’s portrait. It’s a fascinating look at Victorian high society and the art world. I loved it so much I was quite starstruck when I worked on Suzanne’s book on Ruskin’s writings, To See Clearly - a brilliant introduction to this incredibly prescient thinker who was interested in conservation, the value of work, the natural world, responsible travel and so many other issues that resonate today. She is now working on a book about Jane and William Morris that I cannot wait to get my paws on.

‘Not My Best Side’ by U A Fanthorpe

I love poems about art and artists (and perhaps that’s another blog) but here’s one that always tickles me: ‘Not My Best Side’. It’s inspired by Paolo Uccello’s eerily beautiful painting George and the Dragon, which can be seen in the National Gallery. I love the knight’s assertion that

‘I have diplomas in Dragon

Management and Virgin Reclamation’.

So… what did I miss?

I’ll get kicked out of the booklovers’ club for saying this, but I wasn’t blown away by Ali Smith’s How To Be Both, which boasted some lovely writing but somehow it didn’t quite hang together for me.

Please note that this article includes affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you buy through them. I only link to books I really love.

The Poetry Exhange

I first became aware of The Poetry Exchange after meeting John Prebble at the 2019 Chiddingstone Literary Festival. It was a wonderful day full of treats: a fantastically lively event, a surprise appearance from one of my former English teachers and Joanne Harris making friends with my mum in the Green Room, making her the envy of her book club. Meeting John and learning about The Poetry Exchange was another gift. I so hope we can have those experiences again soon.

The Poetry Exchange invite people to talk about a poem that has been a friend to them. They have an excellent podcast - I’ve recently enjoyed interviews with actor Brian Cox and about Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’ - but they also give people the chance to explore their relationship with a poem in depth, with the Exchange’s poetry gurus. I was beyond thrilled to be asked to participate, and the poem that first sprung to mind was Liz Berry’s sensational ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ - which you can read in full here - so I asked to bring that to the discussion.

I read a LOT of poetry. I’m currently completing edits on my eleventh anthology, and I must have read many thousands of poems over the past decade, many of which have become cherished talismans. But to have the opportunity to dive deep into a poem I love, to pore over what it meant to me for an hour or so, was a novel luxury and a completely wonderful experience. It felt medicinal. I recalled the first time I met ‘The Republic of Motherhood’, stumbling across it online when my youngest daughter was one and we were still in the grip of baby madness. I was electrified. I had never seen a poem that spoke like this or about this.

The image of the totalitarian state of motherhood - the uniform, the ritual, the red book bureaucracy, the prescribed choruses - is perfect.

‘As required, I stood beneath the flag of Motherhood
and opened my mouth although I did not know the anthem.’

I know Liz is saying something deep and true about the expectations placed on mothers not to deviate from the sanctioned hymn sheet of baby-wrangling bliss, but she also managed to remind me of my bafflement at parachuting into this strange territory without having learned the language. Where did the five little ducks go swimming one day? How did everyone else know when to Zoom Zoom Zoom their nonplussed babies? What actually was weaning, or mastitis, or cluster feeding?

Liz captured so vividly how the neighbourhood through which I had previously hustled in heels to work was transfigured by crossing that border, the mundane made strange. I was now one of the daytime denizens, bundled in puked-on cardigans ‘soft as a creature’ against the cold, blearily pounding the pavements. My suddenly small world was landmarked by draughty church halls, weighing clinics, libraries offering Rhyme Time and coffee shops with enough space between the tables for me to bump and shamble my buggy through. On the outskirts of one of the world’s most exciting cities, I pottered between municipal amenities in an exhausted daze.

I had been so avowedly urban, such an indoors cat, that I hadn’t owned a waterproof coat until I had my first baby. I always figured that if it rained I would use an umbrella (impossible to hold while pushing a pram) or just, I breezily told my husband, “go in a shop.” With a baby who was frequently incensed in company but tranquil when I pushed her for miles, I became an outdoor creature. When Liz writes of pushing her pram through freeze and blossom and, later, daffodils, I was reminded - by the sensitively incisive questions from John and Andrea - how that year plugged me back into the seasons’ rhythms for the first time since my own childhood. I don’t think it was just that I spent so many hours tramping the Common, although my daughter’s urban world was bounded by duck ponds and dandelion clocks, snowdrops and squirrels. There’s something about parenthood that links us to the turning world again: a growing baby is a yardstick against which to measure the years.

What Andrea and John helped me to understand was something I already knew on an intellectual level: that we bring our own emotions and memories to every piece of art we encounter. When speaking about poetry, I often point out that nobody expects two people to listen to the same record and have the same response - there might be a sticky-floored nightclub in my mind’s eye and a sun-soaked beach in yours - but school has left most of us with the idea that there’s only one way to understand a poem. Discussing the poem in such detail made realise just how deeply, vividly personal my response to Liz Berry’s Republic had been. It looks like Tooting to me, but everyone who reads it will map their own psychic geography onto the poem, and it will belong to them.

Liz also talks about the physical toll of childbearing, in a way I hadn’t previously seen literature of any kind do: the fistfuls of moulting hair, the aching, exhausted ‘spindled bones’. If you’re lucky, a first pregnancy can be a deliciously cosseted time: take my seat! Don’t lift that! Build yourself up with nourishing meals! The poem brilliantly evokes the shock of being plunged into an unfamiliar, manual job with round-the-clock demands - the tender drudgery of ‘Feedingcleaninglovingfeeding’ - while feeling like you’ve been run over. There never seemed to be time to get going on that vegetable garden I had so naively planned for my maternity leave. There was barely time to prepare any food for myself that required more than one hand. By four months in, I was about 95% biscuit. I have a shoulder and a bladder that will never be the same again, and Liz told me I wasn’t alone.

The image of the doctors in the poem - ‘slender and efficient’ - is quietly devastating in opposition to how the new mother feels. And the three of us talked for some time about the searing phrase ‘its unbearable skinless beauty’. There’s a poem called ‘Vixen’ by Glenda Beagan, also in Night Feeds and Morning Songs, which opens with the line: ‘motherhood peels me bare’. With John and Andrea, I probed these phrases. Why had they struck me so emphatically? There was much to unpack about the vulnerability I had felt in early motherhood, poised to panic when my baby erupted and, later on, the heartache of your children’s fragility when they are out in the world, out of your arms, blithely oblivious to your agony that they could be scalded or trampled or sneered at by the world.

It feels, to me, as though ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ builds to a climax that is a shout of sisterhood. Fervently, devoutly, the narrator asserts her citizenship of this wild queendom and her solidarity with its denizens - especially the traumatised, especially the haunted. The poem underlined the sense I had all through editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs of these verses forming a literary community during a locked-down time when we couldn’t access a physical one. Poetry of all kinds has been important to me this past year, and I don’t think I’m the only one. It can be gobbled even when time is short or attention is scattered to feed us by reminding us of our fellow travellers and our shared feelings.

Talking to John and Andrea about this poem felt intimate, emotional and deeply therapeutic. I discovered new personal reference points in a poem I love and savoured each beautifully constructed line and striking image with new relish. The sheer indulgent pleasure of being asked to examine the chords it struck in my memories and mind shouldn’t have been a surprise for someone who has been working with poetry for over a decade, but somehow it was.

There are now many people, publications and organisations who bang the drum for poetry’s mental health benefits: William Sieghart, whom I was lucky enough to interview about his Poetry Pharmacy books and Deborah Alma who edited The Emergency Poet anthology and runs the Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire among them. I’ve often written on the subject myself for publications including The Daily Express and Red Online. But being given time and permission to spend this long with a poem that has been a friend to me was an extraordinary and unexpected gift that gave me a deeper understanding of how poetry works on us as well as a greater love for this poem in particular. I resolve to make time to sit with a poem in this way more often, to suck out its marrow and let it work its magic on me. The Poetry Exchange is a wonderful thing and I’m so grateful to have encountered it.

You can find out more about The Poetry Exchange here and listen to their award-winning podcasts here.

You can buy Liz Berry’s wonderful pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood here or from your local bookshop.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs, an anthology of poems about motherhood, can be bought here or from your local bookshop.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)

Pick of the Spring crop of Paperbacks

As a publicist and a reader, it’s brilliant to see publications like Stylist and The Guardian beginning to carry more coverage of paperback releases. Surely that’s how most of us get our literary fix? I know they’re covetable (and I’m a sucker for a fancy finish of any kind) but some of those hardbacks would drown a person in the bath. Here are the new paperbacks I either loved or am looking forward to.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

With grim predictability, I will probably end up buying the whole Cromwell trilogy in paperback because my set are so mismatched. Upsetting. I’m a swivel-eyed loon for her writing and this series in particular.

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

I so loved this wry, breezy yet heart-squeezing novel about a journalist investigating a purported virgin birth. The suburban 1950s setting, the characterisation and the writing style were all absolutely perfect. This is one I’ve given as a gift because I’m such a huge fan and the paperback is as stunning as the hardback.

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

This poetic and beautiful novel achieves such a lot despite its slimness, telling a multi-generational story with nuanced characters in a series of vignettes.

The Revolt by Clara Dupont-Monod

This vivid retelling of the story of Richard the Lionheart and his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine is beautifully translated from the French by Ruth Diver. It’s thoughtful, poetic and a useful primer on a period of history I’m a bit hazy on. I was thirteen in 1991 though, so it did make me hanker after a rewatch of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

I loved The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and was curious to see how Stuart could follow such a dazzling, original debut, but by god he delivered with this. Another intricate, atmospheric, ambitious trickster novel, this time set on board the Saardam, a ship apparently under attack from a vicious demon called Old Tom.

Our Fathers by Rebecca Wait

I worked on the publicity for this book and Rebecca is an exceptional writer - one of those whose books I will always read. Tommy - the only survivor when his abusive father kills his family - and his uncle Malcolm speak haltingly to each other through grief, guilt, fear and love. The landscape of the Hebridean island of Litta - weather-buffeted, hostile, remote yet claustrophobic - is brilliantly evoked.

And a few more buzzy books that are out in paperback this spring…

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After the Silence by Louise O'Neill

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Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

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Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes

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The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting

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The Cat and The City by Nick Bradley

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The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Please note there are affiliate links on my website and I will earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only link to books I have loved.

Book Review: After the Storm, by Emma Jane Unsworth

I was sent an early proof for this honest and brilliantly written memoir. I came to it with no expectation, really. I haven’t read Emma’s novels - Animals and Adults - though I’ll certainly seek them out now. Also, I didn’t suffer from Post-Natal Depression. Oddly, I didn’t even experience the dreaded ‘third day blues’ on which, I was warned by other women and our NCT teacher, our milk would flood in and we’d cry all day. I suspect that this was partly because I simply didn’t have the energy to process anything at the time.

I had what I now consider to be an averagely traumatic first birth. There was a worry about my daughter’s heartbeat and after some toing and froing I was given an emergency c-section during which I lost two and a half litres of blood. Almost half of it, apparently. I’m forever grateful to the serene and efficient theatre team and the fact that my spinal anaesthetic meant I couldn’t see the gory floor. The loss wasn’t quite enough to need a transfusion - though I was dimly aware through my opiate high of someone ‘getting the blood guy on the phone’ - but more than enough to leave me wraith-like for some time afterwards. Often, when I first woke, I couldn’t move my legs. A day or so in, after a fierce battle to swim up from unconsciousness, I was so weak I convinced myself I was dying and calmly instructed my husband to call an ambulance because someone would need to feed the baby. Fortunately, it turned out I just needed to be fortified with some apple juice and a piece of toast, but those early days weren’t a breeze.

Despite escaping PND, though, so much of this extraordinary book rang true with me. The subtitle is Post-Natal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood, and I don’t think there’s any mother who won’t relate to at least some of what Emma so eloquently articulates. She vividly recalled to me how my daughter’s screaming induced pure animal panic in me, how once it started - and there were months during which it seemed it barely paused - I could think of nothing but stopping it. I remembered the well-meaning people who kindly reassured me they didn’t mind the anguished howling while I strained out a smile, inwardly screaming, “I MIND! SHE BLOODY MINDS! JUST LISTEN TO HER!” Every moment my baby was quiet I felt equal to the alien new blue-collar job of motherhood. And every moment she was screaming - so many moments, they smeared into weeks - I knew that what was being asked of me all day, every day, half the night, every night was impossible.

Photo credit Alex Lake / TWO SHORT DAYS

The section where Emma tries to join friends for afternoon tea and the civilised world literally does not fit her anymore will stay with me forever. I vividly remember those occasions: bumping a laden buggy through squeezed-together tables, muttering apologies, praying for the nap to continue, with my seeping, sweating, unfamiliar new body squeezed into weird new clothes with extra holes in. The divorce between my work, my life, my mind and what I had previously considered my self was jarring. It felt permanent, although it proved not to be. I had been prepared on some level for the fug of exhaustion and the vomit-spiked hair, but not to feel incapable of finishing a sentence even in my head.

Emma writes with humour as well as with brilliant clarity. (I, too, resented the shrill and jumped-up Upsy Daisy for having her own bed on wheels to trundle around the Night Garden.) And she expresses things here that I have rarely seen written down about disappointment, boredom, shame and rage. I’ve read and written a lot since editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs about mothers’ stories being routinely undervalued and dismissed, and about the difficulties mothers face in carving out time for their own careers and creativity. This piercing, fierce, raw and beautiful book will help go some way towards redressing that balance. It will change and perhaps even save lives.

I actually hadn’t expected to enjoy the newborn days as much as I did - I figured they’d be brutal and boring, and those low expectations were my friends whenever they were just that. But we are bombarded by images of ecstatic, subtly but impeccably groomed women, suffused with love, enjoying tranquil moments of deep connection with their beaming infants in beautifully appointed, airy, pastel-hued rooms. It’s easy to believe that hype, and the jarring shock when reality falls short - as it must do - is so, so damaging to women. It feels like ingratitude, weakness or self-indulgence to confess that we’re struggling. The scorching guilt of admitting that the deeply desired state of motherhood sometimes makes us feel stifled or furious or despairing prevents so many women from accessing the help and support they need.

There has been a change, I think, in the way we talk about these things. The excellent essay collection The Best Most Awful Job, edited by Katherine May, struck a chord with many women with its truthful takes on the madness of child-wrangling, and I especially loved Saima Mir’s essay on maternal rage. This recent advertising campaign for Portal - showing a woman struggling with breastfeeding - had me in tears and time-travelling back to my daughter’s earliest days with its accuracy.

And After the Storm - this truthful, visceral, dazzlingly well-written memoir in which Emma shares her experiences of vulnerability, fury and desperation - experiences that I believe will resonate with many mothers - is an essential contribution to this discussion. I cannot thank her enough for writing it.

After the Storm: Postnatal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood by Emma Jane Unsworth is published by Profile Books.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)

Today was the first day I missed them.

I wrote this last term. It feels shameful, ungrateful… sacrilegious, even. Perhaps I’ll regret sharing this. But today - the second day of the third week since we finished a two month long stint of solo homeschooling - I felt an unfamiliar flutter. Excitement, that I would be collecting my children soon. Anticipation, of seeing their faces, hearing them shouting and squeaking over each other as they jostle to tell me about the tiny triumphs and tribulations of their day. I was flooded with what I can only describe as a sense of relief. We weren’t broken. I wasn’t broken. We were going to be ok.

Even with the many advantages we enjoyed - adequate technology and living space, good health, kids without additional needs who don’t mind learning too much, the relative flexibility of some of my work, enough sleep - combining my jobs with homeschooling was horribly challenging. I felt I had completely lost my sense of myself, because I was never alone - though, not having seen an adult other than my husband socially in a quarter of a year - I was always lonely. Even while on the loo I was assailed by demands to referee sibling battles, unanswerable questions (“Why is it a called a house?”) and unceasing demands for snacks. It was impossible to finish an email, a sentence, a thought.

I couldn’t leave the house alone before my husband came home, and by that point it was dark. So the walks we were being encouraged to take to keep us on a mental even keel involved forty-five minutes of negotiation and hectoring (why are my children so fundamentally opposed to wearing socks when the mere thought of being unslippered for a moment gives me the heebie jeebies?) followed by a snail’s pace trudge round the same walk, often with someone wailing throughout. Uplifting! Rejuvenating! A balm to the locked down soul!

The children were expected to do at least three hours of schooling a day, and at four and seven, couldn’t work independently. Work required at least six core hours each day. We were up to twelve hours before anyone had cleaned their teeth. (Did anyone clean their teeth?) On my in-house days I started work at 6am, never finished before 9pm, and scrambled and failed to get through lessons and presentations, meetings and meals between, doing constant battle with the maelstrom of toys and drawing and Lego (bloody OUCH!) that swirled in their wake and engulfed us if left unchecked. If I’d worked in-house four or five days a week, I couldn’t have coped. Trying to do everything at once, I was always exasperated, impatient and snappy. I lost my temper often. I shouted, I screamed - and then I cried because I felt so furiously guilty.

Last summer, at the tail-end of a previous five month stint with both children at home, I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood. The poems helped me remember the tender madness of the newborn days, and the sticky, beaming toddlers my kids were relatively recently. They reminded me of the privilege and pleasure of parenting when it felt like I was a mass caterer, a hostage negotiator, a kitchen maid and a referee - as well as a terrible teacher and an exhausted employee - and not really a mother anymore. They reminded me that my children are funny and bonkers and magic and that I love spending time with them.

But not all my time. It feels selfish to admit that I cannot be ‘mother’ with every last scrap of my time, my life, my mind, my heart - but it’s true. This week, I delivered the children to school - they are so happy to be back, so buoyant now with the dramas and delights of their days - and returned to the tranquil house and relieved cats to work. I recorded online events, attended meetings, crafted pitches and press releases, wrote chapter openers for a new anthology and book reviews, drafted blog posts and newsletters, answered emails. I could hear myself think. I could hear myself. And when I realised I missed my children, I cried with gratitude.

The Spirit of Sisterhood

When I delved into my diaries last year to write about those blearily-remembered first few months of parenthood for Night Feeds and Morning Songs, the faces that stood out were mostly female. Among them my wonderful mother and much-missed mother-in-law, and my sister, who eyed the new, raw, mad me with baffled compassion and took the baby for a walk. But also: the colleague who gathered up my baby so I could drink a whole cup of coffee during my office visit and the stranger who wordlessly packed away my buggy on the bus as I wrestled with a squalling infant. A friend – who had her own tiny children to deal with – brought me quiche: food I could put straight into my face from the box. That was worth more to me in those bewildering early days than anything else money could buy.

We are so often told that women are catty and competitive, that we judge each other and backbite or that successful women pull the ladder up behind them. But nothing about this narrative rings true in my experience. It has been women who have given me much of my strength; women who have tossed me a life-belt when I’ve been slipping under; women who have picked up the pieces of me when scattered, or given me a cheerful leg-up. The offices we perform for each other are sometimes small – the sympathetic cup of tea, the tip-off about something in our teeth, the emergency plaster – but they are, I believe, sacred.

The publishing industry in which I work is largely staffed by women, so it isn’t surprising that it is from female bosses and colleagues that I have absorbed most wisdom and confidence. (My workmates have also made me laugh until launch-party wine came out of my nose, which is equally welcome.) And it has always been women who have stuck up their hands to help with the meeting prep or the envelope stuffing. Our male counterparts, we’re told, won’t slow their own progress by helping wrap gifts for the Christmas party, but these small kindnesses forge friendships that can be lifelong, and I wouldn’t be without them for any corner office.

This instinct to bond and cheer each other on can be seen in action far from the professional sphere, too. It’s been a while since any of us were in a nightclub loo, but the fervent compliments and passionate pep talks – and believe me, he’s not worth it – dished out after a few drinks by strangers are some of my fondest memories of nights out. Somehow I can’t imagine these scenes being replicated in the malodourous Gents.

Female friends have always been there for me, whether we’re watching bad films under blankets after a break-up or toasting each other’s career wins. Their interventions might seem trivial but acts of kindness like lending me a towel after swimming, saving me from having to dry my cold and furious daughter with my coat, or sending fancy cocktails to lubricate a locked down birthday have so often saved the day. Their confessions have also given me permission to turn off the endless, pointless guilt tap: everyone had toast for tea yesterday, they have remained firmly planted on the couch without racking up 5k and, actually, they can’t face that hard-hitting experimental new drama series either.

During this past, mad year, complete strangers on social media have helped me feel sane(r) when I felt I was drowning under the demands of homeschool and work, when I fretted about letting down my children and hated being unable to take on more freelance work. Their humour and solidarity was a light in dark days and I’ll always be grateful for it.

We are all juggling a hundred balls at any moment. We are all subject to a tsunami of life admin that can feel overwhelming, without even taking into account the big things when they come: birth, bereavement, hardship and illness won’t leave any of us untouched. But the women who pour the gin, pass the good biscuits, call to listen to us chew things over or who just leave a quiche on the doorstep, won’t let you go through any of that alone. Here’s to the women who have given me strength, and to counting ourselves among their happy number.

A version of this article originally appeared in Red Magazine’s May 2021 issue.

Books for city breaks

Since we’re going nowhere for at least a little while yet, I’ve been pining for strange cities. Trying (and invariably failing) not to look like a tourist while you explore an unfamiliar city seems wildly exotic at the moment. Here are some of my favourite books for a literary city break in the absence of the real thing though - be warned - many of these trips may contain more drama that you’d seek in the average weekend away.

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

This brilliant book has a few locations including London and the French countryside, but it was the scenes set in the arts world of 1950s Rome that really stole my heart, as larger-than-life painter Bear paints and parties with the city’s bohemian artists. Also, this is one of my favourite ever book jackets. Would absolutely wear this print. Tom’s book The Imperfectionists, a series of interlinked vignettes about the staff of a floundering English-language newspaper in Rome, is also excellent.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

A great lockdown book in a way, since the main character spends almost the whole book confined to his hotel! This beautifully written, humane book looks at dark times with such a light touch. It’s clever, charming and an effortless crash course in the first part of the twentieth century in Russia. (Also shown, A Roasting Tin recipe with pancetta and artichokes I cannot recommend highly enough!)

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

This sumptuous book, set in Prague, glitters with beauty and menace and horror and sorrow. The legend of Melmoth the Wanderer - who roams in lonely torment, witnessing the commission of sins - is fascinatingly employed. Drab, haunted Helen and her motley assortment of almost-friends are mesmerised by a collection of manuscripts from around the world and throughout history. In their tattered pages, as well as in their own histories, they come guiltily face to face with the banality of human evil.

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

I’m not sure Revolutionary Paris would be a very relaxing place for a city break, but if you want to be completely transported, this whopper of a novel will do the job. Hilary Mantel brings all her mastery of character and place to this bloody and turbulent era: there’s terror, corruption, pathos and drama in spades.

NW by Zadie Smith

Yes, even London feels a long way away to me at the moment. I’ve been once in the last year. But here’s a way to walk the capital’s streets without leaving the sofa. She’s just an absolute genius. Set, as the name suggests, in Northwest London. this novel plunges you so deeply into the lives of her characters as they navigate life. I loved the variety of storytelling styles.

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

I loved everything about this wildly energetic, funny, entertaining novel and feel that I now know my way around every street of Old New York. Its sights, sounds and smells rise from the pages so vividly.

Milkman by Anna Burns

Full disclosure: it took me months to read this book. The use of language is so playful and funny and clever but the book creates such a sense of absurdity and claustrophobia, I could only absorb it in small chunks. Middle sister attempts to negotiate the personal and the political - and they are never wholly separate - during the Troubles in Belfast and I felt her being stifled, frustrated, terrified, menaced and isolated absolutely viscerally. It’s dense but also darkly comic. I’d read another whole book about the wee sisters.

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Books for Snow Days

It’s not the fun kind of snow happening outside my windows today: a bit bleak, nothing fluffy, coming down in stinging sideways splinters. It is, however, the perfect day to stay in with a book, so here are a few of my favourite snowy reads.

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

I’m a broken record about this book, I know, but it’s so atmospheric and brilliant. It begins on Midwinter evening and the snow scenes are amazing. Written for children but with much for adults to enjoy, it’s a nostalgic treat if you loved it as a kid but a series worth discovering if you didn’t. The Backlisted podcast about it is fantastic.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

It’s not all snowy, but it’s all brilliant - and the frost fair scenes at the beginning are some of my favourite pages in the whole of literature. It’s a romp through five hundred years, with the main character swapping gender, and so playful and fun. I think Woolf has a reputation for being difficult that means this book doesn’t get the love it should from readers, but I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying it.

Frost Fair by Carol Ann Duffy

And then of course I have to add in this beautiful little book, which is everything you want it to be, with clever, evocative verse and beautiful illustrations.

Wintering by Katherine May

This excellent non-fiction book looks at periods of our lives when we need to hunker down and hibernate, to repair and rest. It feels so relevant to a locked down pandemic world, though it was written pre-Covid. With thought-provoking interviews and meditations on the art and literature of winter, there’s so much to ponder and be nourished by. I found it extraordinarily comforting and helpful. (I’ve nicked Katherine’s lovely photograph as I listened to the audiobook.)

Tiger by Polly Clark

This book was a thrill to work on. With narratives centred on traumatised zookeeper Frieda, hardy Russian conservationist Tomas, wild mother Edit who raises her daughter in the forest and a magnificent tigress, it will transport you to the snow-smothered Siberian taiga in one of the most immersive reading experiences I’ve ever enjoyed.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C S Lewis

Yes, another childhood comfort read - but in a season where it’s always winter and never Christmas I feel like we deserve it, no? Sod it, I’m going to order The Wolves of Willoughby Chase too.

The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting

Finally, here’s one from my TBR pile. I worked on Lars’ surprise bestseller Norwegian Wood which was about… well… wood. The beautiful way he wrote about wood and about the strange and ancient magic of wood fires - the smell, the sound, the flames - knocked me out. His fiction comes very highly recommended and this has a centuries-old stave church carved with pagan deities so - obviously - I’m in.

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What poetry does (even if you don't like poetry)

Amanda Gorman’s reading of her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris saw my timelines light up with people who found that this young woman was saying exactly what they needed to hear at that moment. If I had asked those people an hour earlier whether they liked poetry, most would have demurred: too difficult, too clever, too fancy-pants, too niche. “Don’t you have to have a degree in English to get anything out of that stuff? It all goes over my head.”

And yet.

Poetry has this ability to emotionally ambush us. It cuts to the heart of things, so it cuts to the heart. Novels have moved me to huge, ugly, wracking sobs countless times, but there is a long slow process of immersing ourselves into their world first. By the time you’re weeping, you’ve often spent hours if not days or weeks in the company of the characters. Not so with poetry. Wham! Bang! Poets go straight in without any polite preamble and take your breath away. It’s the reason we turn to poetry at weddings and funerals and other times fraught with feeling. Poets are professionals. They can say the things we can’t, without a four chapter warm up.

When I edited a collection of poems about motherhood, I got this feeling a lot. In the early days of parenthood we’re peeled raw with exhaustion and shock and wonder. Our skin is paper thin. We’re exposed and there are so many chinks in our armour through which emotion can suddenly pierce us. (Yes, I’ve cried in a supermarket. Yes, I’ve bawled at a mawkish television advert. Yes, I sobbed for twenty minutes at a story in the local newspaper about a man being reunited with his lost tortoise.) So poetry does its thing. Poets are able to say something that rings so sharply true in those moments that we suddenly feel we are not alone but part of a great, eternal, generations-old community of raw, mad, knackered women.

The world is raw, mad and knackered at the moment. Amanda Gorman knocked us all out because we are all so thirsty to feel something hopeful and bright. Her poem wasn’t difficult to understand. It wasn’t pretentious. It didn’t require any background reading. It spoke to millions in that moment, whether they like poetry or not. That’s what poetry does.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood is published on 4th March 2001 and available to pre-order from your local bookshop.

The Best Feminist Audiobooks

I really enjoyed looking back on some of my favourite fiction audiobooks, so I thought I’d also pull together a list of audiobooks with a feminist flavour that I recommend.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

This was riveting and frankly horrifying. Criado Perez shows how our cities, medicine and societies are built around a model that only takes account of a default male participant and how the staggering gender data gap impacts on women all around the world. From toilets to transport, it left me enlightened and enraged and - oddly - relieved in some ways to understand to what an extent this world is not designed for me. Gobsmacking and essential.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

This is a spectacularly good audiobook, narrated by Elisabeth Moss. I read The Handmaid’s Tale when I was around fourteen but it is infinitely more chilling, on every possible level, to me now. Because: life and also: the world. I now picture the scenes of the book in a way that’s entirely informed by the excellent television series - and hearing Elisabeth’s narration reinforced that - but it was so brilliantly done I can live with that. Compelling, astute and terrifying.

The Witches by Stacy Schiff

I am absolutely fascinated by witch trials and Stacy’s masterful non-fiction study of the events in Salem is a great deep dive (although it is long, be warned!) It’s read well by Eliza Foss and really delves into the complex power balances of the story. In a puritan society in which women were restricted and impotent on so many levels, a group mostly composed of teenage girls managed to send Salem spinning - with the majority of the trials’ victims also being women.

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

The chapter about feminism in this seminal book was a wake-up call for me on intersectionality. Reni offers a concise history of how women of colour have often found themselves excluded from feminist movements and underlines why feminists cannot ignore other structural inequalities, including that of race, when campaigning for equality.

More than A Woman by Caitlin Moran

Aimed squarely at middle aged mums, this hit the mark so acutely for me. There’s lighthearted stuff - I have switched to knee socks at her recommendation and it’s a game changer - but also plenty of moving and serious material about ageing and parenting, particularly about her daughter’s difficult teenage years. The acknowledgement of unseen work done by women felt both buoying and somewhat (yes, still!) revolutionary. I loved it. Sign me up for Hag Club, I say.

Difficult Women by Helen Lewis

This was a really interesting listen, which filled me in on some formidable women and campaigns I hadn’t been aware of. I also found myself gasping often at how recently various shockingly oppressive laws had been repealed. Difficult Women covers marriage, sex, work and politics and it’s lively as well as informative.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

I was inspired to listen to this seminal 1963 book by watching the excellent Mrs America on iPlayer. The ‘feminine mystique’ was the idea sold to American women of the 1950s that their ultimate fulfilment would come from devoting themselves entirely to their homes and families. Women were actively discouraged - by legislation, social pressures, advertisers, educators and the male-dominated media - from taking up careers themselves. Some of her conclusions feel dated (the chapters on sex, especially) but it remains shocking, acute and deeply researched. It’s a very interesting piece of feminist history with elements that still feel shockingly relevant over half a century later.

She is Fierce

Finally and cheekily, there is a splendid audiobook of She is Fierce, which I edited, read by Adjoa Andoh (who appears in my current obsession Bridgerton as Lady Danvers) utterly beautifully. Although many of the women from previous centuries wouldn’t recognise our idea of feminism, collecting these verses and those in She Will Soar felt like a feminist project to me - especially when I researched the poets and found out how much was stacked against women writers of the past, which explains what a wall to wall sausage-fest the literary canon is.

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Poems for Christmas

For me, the greatest gift of the Christmas season is time to read. The offices and schools are closed. This year, pubs, restaurants, shops and cinemas will be off the menu for many, too. The weather is often appalling. The nights are long and dark and seem designed expressly for the purpose of snuggling under a blanket on the sofa with the tree lights twinkling, a glass of something tempting within easy reach and a great big pile of delicious-smelling, beautiful new books. Here are some of my poetic festive favourites – all would make great gifts, too.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Frost Fair is completely wonderful, and makes me hanker after a re-read of Woolf’s Orlando. It’s so beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, it would make a lovely stocking filler.

Never has the exhilaration of whirling about on ice-skates been better captured than by Wordsworth, in a breathless and beautiful section of ‘The Prelude’ which I included in my second anthology, Tyger Tyger Burning Bright. I speak as a clumsy person, whose few attempts at skating have resulted in the kind of falls that elicit audible gasps from witnesses and some truly spectacular bruising. If Wordsworth can fill me with the desire to sail across frozen lakes under a wide wintry night sky, he can inspire anyone.

‘The Journey of the Magi’ by T S Eliot has an eerie, cold magic to it, perfect for reading and chewing over on a bitter winter’s night.

I love Betjeman’s ‘Christmas’ - hear the man himself read it here, with its evocation of the pull of family even more poignant this oddest of years (‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, / And oafish louts remember Mum’) and the seasonal cheer infecting everyone everywhere – from ‘provincial public houses’ to ‘many-steepled London’. I want to be in that country pub and on those glittering city streets for Christmas 2021.

Thomas Hardy’s gorgeous ‘The Fallow Deer at the Empty House’ is a favourite.

And Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ perfectly captures how some scrap of childhood magic can cling to Christmas Eve and the vision of the nativity no matter what age and how agnostic I am.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

A contemporary poem I love is one for the festive refuseniks: ‘Bah… Humbug’ by Gregory Woods. This year, there will be lots of people perhaps missing the jolly chaos of a family Christmas, but this poems is a hymn to the allure of a solitary, batteries-not-included celebration with ‘books to the left of you, / gin to the right’. This poem was included in Christmas Crackers, one of Candlestick Press’s lovely pamphlets designed to be sent instead of a greetings card – perfect if you’d like to say something more substantial than ‘Season’s greetings’.

I bought a beautiful edition of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ a few years ago with Niroot Puttapipat’s beautiful silhouette illustrations and am frankly delighted that the kids insist on hearing it all year round. Due to our – frequently unseasonal – repeated readings, I am now word perfect. This confers an additional advantage: I can name all the reindeer (and, no, Rudolf doesn’t feature) and am therefore a splendid addition to any Christmas pub quiz team. Moore was a slightly unlikely Christmas poet, being an academic whose other works were heavy tomes on Hebrew. Legend has it that he composed this, his only famous poem, to entertain his children during a sleigh ride through Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve 1822, basing jolly St Nicholas on their coachman. I hope it’s true.

Also for children (though not only for children), I recommend the excellent selection of Christmas Poems edited by Gaby Morgan (who I’m lucky enough to have as editor for my Macmillan anthologies) and illustrated by Axel Scheffler of Gruffalo fame. And The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland by Carys Bexington, beautifully illustrated by Kate Hindley, was a new favourite last year with great verse, glorious pictures and clever homages to both beloved texts.

It’s not poetry, but I have to mention A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, which I try and read every year. And this year I have put Carol Ann Duffy’s new collection of Christmas poems on my wishlist.

Whatever you do at Christmas and wherever you are, I wish you happy reading. May your stocking be full of books and your cheeseboard always groaning.

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I can finally reveal my next book...!

I am absolutely delighted to share news of my next poetry anthology: Night Feeds and Morning Songs gathers poems about motherhood, and will be published by Trapeze in March 2021. I’ve been squirrelling away poems about motherhood since my eldest daughter was born, so it’s the realisation of a long-held ambition to gather some of my favourites in this new collection. These amazing poems take us from pregnancy, through the tempest of the labour ward and the mad, sleepless baby days, right through to the moments our children start to stand alone and grow up, and even to the empty nest. I hope there’s something here for every mother, no matter where you are in this journey.

I have long been open about the fact that I’m a massive poetry cry-baby but I have to be honest, I was a husk at the end of some of the days editing this collection, particularly since I completed most of it with both my children at home during lockdown. (“Please go and do something else, somewhere else, so I can read poems about how much I love spending time with you, while weeping, for heaven’s sake!”) Motherhood is so MUCH at times, it’s hard to express the ways in which we are changed by it. These poets are magicians. They said things that made me laugh and cry. They said things that enabled me to time travel both backwards and forwards in my children’s lives. They said things I hadn’t ever dared to say, and could never say with such eloquence and beauty.

There’s going to be foil and this beautiful design stamped into the hardback, fans of finishes!

I am tremendously grateful to Editor Extraordinaire Sam Eades at Trapeze, who approached me partly, I feel, in sympathy for my impassioned tweets about the behaviour of my four year old. She also gave me the opportunity to write a few short pieces about my own experiences to include in the book, so this has become a deeply personal project. Everyone’s experience of the madness and mayhem of parenting is so different, but I hope I’ve been able to say something that will strike a chord with readers, and complement the incredible range of poets whose work I’ve felt privileged to read and honoured to include.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs will be published in March 2021. If you fancy pre-ordering (which is music to any author’s ears!), your local bookshop will be able to order for you, or it’s available from Waterstones and Hive.co.uk.