Featured Book: The Lost Poems
This month, my Featured Book is my new poetry collection, The Lost Poems.
The main focus of these poems is on memory, grief and the redeeming power of love. That said, there are also a few poems about art which I find very inspirational. Many of the poems included are old ones which had been lost somewhere in my computer system for many years, but I was lucky enough to find them again earlier this year. Rediscovering them has been a real boost and a surprising insight into my past poetry writing self. So, it’s been interesting to revisit these poems and I’ve enjoyed working on the updates, particularly as I wanted them to make sense of who I am now, as well as who I was then.
Memory is one of the strongest forces in our lives and it shapes how we see things now and also who we are. It’s fascinating how my memory of any particular event may be very different to the memory of someone else who was there. I think this is part of how we carve out our own stories and the stories of our lives. It’s how we create – and recreate – ourselves. Some of the memories in this collection are very personal and therefore some of them have been very hard to write. I struggled with them when I first started to write them and I’ve struggled with them now. Then again, neither poetry nor memory have ever been easy. On a more positive side, it’s been very uplifting to look back at the things I found challenging many years ago, and to see how far I’ve travelled now. We are always, after all, moving onward.
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The darkest of my three themes in this collection is of course the subject of grief and its close companion, death. It’s not something I write about directly that often, but it’s always there at the edges of my experience. I worry about death quite a lot, if I’m honest, though perhaps we all do, if we are open enough to admit it. Naturally, as a woman in my early sixties, I’ve experienced the death of loved ones, and I don’t think grief is anything you ever truly get over. Loss and grief have truly shaped me at the heart and, in the end, you simply learn to live with it. In addition, the older I get, the more aware I become of my own death one day. When I was younger, I didn’t think of it at all. But the older I become, the more I realise that none of us lasts forever. And, yes, it terrifies me in many ways, but it’s something we all have to face. I suppose, when I really look at it properly, it’s nothing more than a fact of life. And one I do keep coming back to.
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The third and last main theme here is love and its ability to change everything. Whilst I still have breath, I always come back to the astonishing power of love, in all its many forms. It’s at the very heart of what we do and at the very centre of the universe, in my view. Some of the poems here are about lost love and love gone wrong, but others are about marriage, and how love is the basis for every single good relationship we can have. Whether friends, family or life partners. When I’m overpowered by memories, devastated by loss or terrified of the future, I always take comfort in the knowledge that love is also part of who we are and who we can become. It’s there in every aspect of our lives and we only have to open our eyes and look for it.
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So, these then are the themes in The Lost Poems. I hope you enjoy the collection and that you find yourself in some way changed by it. Finally, it’s good to remember the essential truth that being lost in any part of our lives doesn’t mean to say that we can’t be found. There is always – always – hope.
