Poems

How does this book fit in with your development as a poet?

I think its’s fundamentally different. The House of Vitriol (a late first book, I was thirty-five when it appeared) was largely the work of about seven or eight years, but the earliest poem in it was written when I was sixteen, so it’s a big sprawling thing covering a lot of subjects and quite a lot of techniques – some of them really inchoate. And it was an unusually long book. This new book, which was written over about three years, has a kind of unity. But I don’t approach any book of poems globally. I’m a lazy reader of poetry. I never sit down with a book and read it right through. It may take me six months to a year to get to know a book even when I’m fond of the poet. Unlike some poets who will shape a book, and have that unity in mind, I don’t. I’m not deliberately setting out to achieve a harmony between poems.

No Collars No Cuffs, plenty of fisticuffs, and you’ll probably get K.O.’d by all this, after a round or two of three or four poems each. You may need someone in your corner to bolster you, for as Geoff Good­fellow writes in ‘Skin Deep’, a women’s prison poem: