FRANCES WILSON
A Golden Touch
Genuine warmth and an affecting humility quickly enabled Frances Wilson to draw an appreciative audience into her instantly recognizable world of haunting family memories, evocative places and chance human encounters – a birthday celebration, a manor house hung with memories of war, a passing word or two with a neighbour working in the garden, a boy on a bicycle. But it was soon apparent that there is nothing ordinary in her way of looking or in the execution of her craft. Throughout the poems there is a toughness about life, often a wry humour, and a capacity to enjoy what it offers. The subject matter of her poetry may well be the stuff of ordinary living but it is brought strikingly alive in fresh language that startles and lifts the poems from the page, the ‘glossy lacquered daughter’, the gravel ‘exploding’, ‘the little firm buttocks’ of greengages. The apparently ordinary becomes transmuted into something that lives in the memory. The poems about her deceased husband illustrate her charactersitic way of looking at life and a relish for the apparently mundane. Determined to write about what made Harry the man he was, these poems focus strikingly on the behaviour which were the essence of the man and not on her response to his passing. Novelist, Penelope Lively has a fiction writing premise of ‘taking the immediate and particular and giving it a universal resonance’ and this also sums up well the nature of Frances Wilson’s poetry.
The first part of the evening consisted of Frances reading and talking about her work, taken mostly from the first published collection, ‘Close to Home’ [Rockingham Press 1993] and her most recently published work, ‘Rearranging the Sky’ [Rockingham Press 2004]. During the evening she referred generously to various people, such as Michael Laski, who had helped to nurture her talent, and it is clearly a gift that she also possesses and generously shares. It was manifest in her readiness to engage with her audience on matters relating to the craft of writing and, in the second part of the evening, the encouragement she showed to the creditable number of members eager to share their own poems on family and friends. These poems ran the full gamut from laughter to tears. A very satisfying close to a fulfilling evening.
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JOHN MOLE
John has read for us before, more than once, but never his children's poetry, I only discovered afterwards that John had read from it till then only to specialist audiences of teachers or pupils. It was a first for both him and us. So he was at first uncertain of his reception, but the audience warmed to him, he to us, and it was an excellent evening, in turns funny, eerie and moving.
John, as is only decent for such an experienced teacher, lecturer and critic, is a technically resourceful and accomplished poet. (Compare Michae1 Rosen, the current childen's laureate when you've a spare moment.) He uses a wide variety of styles, jokes and limericks, riddles, counting songs, variations on nursery rhymes, stories and soliloquys, matched with a similar variety of forms, couplets and ballad metre, blank verse, free verse, even prose with internal rhyme, (see "The Big Top" in 'Boo To A Goose').
For subject matter he does draw on his own childhood, but much more on his experience as a father and teacher, even examples of his pupils' homework, ("Taking The Plunge" in 'Boo To A Goose'). He often used to do the creative writing tasks he set for them himself, but he doesn't forget that children care about serious matters, though more about that later. All is illuminated by his ability, not to see inside a child's mind just, but to live inside it, "The First Day" for example, or "The Box" which he wrote for his son.
John is mostly, not always, an unobtrusive, understated poet, who uses his technical skill, empathy and imagination to transmute tiny details of everyday life into always interesting, at best moving, small pieces, (e,g, "The Shoes"). But that is what most poems are. Poets write very few masterpieces; some very good poets write none at all. Anyway, children don't want epics very often, not epic poems anyway.
In my youth, we were introduced to poetry via nursery rhymes and lullabies, though they were more like "Golden slumbers kiss your eyes .. ," than John's "A Cradle Song". I spurned the uggy Patience Strong type pieces in Golden Wonder Books. In my first year at primary school we had a singing class once a week and graduated to carefully expurgated folk song, though we were never told that they were poetry, so they didn't count. Later, at 8 or 9, we were introduced to Silver Bells Book Two, carefully selected, very simple poems for adults which were very improving and sentimental. It was as though children's poets had never been invented. Well they had, but only just. These days it is an industry.
But serious poems for children? Who is there? To write serious poems for children is seriously difficult. John reckons he can count those that can on his fingers, but Charles Causeley is certainly one. Both Charles Causeley and John have told me that when compiling collections of both their adult and children's poetry at the same time, they found themselves including the same poems in both.
"The Shoes", which John read, is typical Mole, a heart rending poem about a pair of shoes. The boy's father had left them behind when he left home, "Variations on an Old Rhyme", ("This is the house that Jack built"), is about politics and war. "The Mad Parrot's Countdown", which he didn't read, is a counting song about the annihalation of humanity in a nuclear war. It first appeared in an adult collection.
The big lesson, I believe, is that there is only one good reason for writing a poem, that you have something of importance to say which is so difficult and complicated that it can be communicated in no other way. To set out to write for say, ten year olds is likely to result in something second rate. How old is 'a child'? Anyway children differ. Our job, both as writers and parents surely, is to help children to explore both their own imaginations, and ours.
Writing anything well is difficult. What John showed us was that writing for children is not a lesser art; that the best children's poetry is just as rewarding for adults, as long as we are prepared to listen, and believe that what is inside children's minds is important. After all, they are human too.
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ALLISON MCVETY
Allison's poems have appeared in numerous journals as well as in the Times and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. She was the winner of the Poetry and Business Book and Pamphlet Competition in 2006. The poem, ‘Portrait,’ was also highly commended in the Forward Prize 2007. After a career in IT as both Networking Engineer and IT Service Manager, Allison took an MA in Poetry at Royal Holloway, The University of London where she was awarded the PFD Poetry Prize in 2006.
Allison soon demonstrated why she has attracted the attention of the poetry reading public. Acute observations, together with a strong and strenuous use of language, and a bold and confident poetic voice were distinctive features of her readings of poems from her first collection, ‘The Night Trotsky Came to Stay’ [Smith/Doorstep Books 2007]. The wartime experiences of Allison’s parents – both were active participants – powerfully haunt her poems and make for strong abiding images in the reader’s mind. Further subjects included the tender, yet ambiguous, nature of human relationships depicted in the apparently simple activities of parents learning to dance, being taught to swim, and the knitting of an arran sweater. Never far away was the vibrant, but unvarnished life, of the wider community of her Manchester girlhood, particularly the resilience of its women, and their domestic triumphs over adversity, or the day to day tragedies such as drownings in the Ship Canal, all providing strong roots for her poems. In this respect the roots of her work bring to mind the lines of Yeats from ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’:
I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Economy of language, precision of observation are never absent, as these lines from ‘Kippers’ demonstrate:
She slits fish, slides guts into the slop bucket splays them wide to news print slaps on salt, drops each fillet into brine.
Other poems stemmed from her own wry observations associated with the painful process of growing up, such as the affecting ‘Boy on the Bus’ which with its powerful recall of adolescent yearning, the reader astutely judged worthy of a reprise as this very enjoyable evening came towards its close:
I never learned your name or saw you, beyond your walk to an empty seat, was never brave enough to look behind or smile, but I felt you all the same.
In many ways, this affecting poems bears the hallmarks of much of Allison’s work – the readiness to face strong feelings head on, a clarity of language and a sure grasp of form. An attractive personality, with an open eagerness to talk about the origins of her poems and to provide a clear commentary on them, Allison McVety is already shining in the contemporary poetic firmament. Further appealing characteristics included a generous tribute to her tutors on the MA course at Holloway College and her respect for those of her contemporaries also making a name for themselves on the poetry scene. More recent poems show her extending her range and that the sources of inspiration remain fresh, vivid and increasingly varied. Further information about Allison, including her reading itinerary, can be found on her website.
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