Welcome to Tuesday Poetics with me, Kim from writinginnorthnorfolk. It’s been a while since Sarah Connor last hosted or posted at dVerse, but I remember with fondness the first time I read her poetry, and her first Poets Pub prompt.

Newcomers have missed the chance to write to her creative prompts and receive her attentive comments, while regulars may be wondering why she hasn’t been around. The answers are in the following recent interview between Sarah and me, put together especially for the dVerse Poets Pub. It includes links to Sarah’s poetry collections, followed by some of her past prompts, as well as a challenge for today’s Poetics.

Kim

For regulars to the dVerse Poets Pub, who know your poems, and/or have written to your prompts, and for newcomers who haven’t read your poems yet, in addition to two pamphlets/chapbooks published in 2023, The Crow Gods and The Poet Spells Her Name , you have just published another with Sĺdhe Press, entitled Always Fire (all available on Amazon).

In the acknowledgements, you explain that you have stopped active cancer treatment and are now being managed by the Palliative Care Team. You haven’t hosted at dVerse for some time and we have missed you. Apart from writing, how has life changed for you?

Sarah

When I made the decision to stop active treatment, I was so unwell. I was spending most of my time in bed, I’d got into the grip of an intractable vomiting cycle, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t even read. I lost a huge amount of weight. I really had no quality of life. It was hard to know what was disease process and what was side effects of the medication.

Stopping treatment was not an easy decision. We aren’t islands, are we? I wanted to be sure I was making the right decision for me, but also for my family. But once I stopped, and started emerging from that awful state, I knew that decision was the right one. I have a lot more energy now, though I have to pace myself. I’m on some quite strong painkillers, which make me a bit sleepy, and make life a bit haphazard sometimes. I can’t walk very far – I get breathless, and I get bone pain – so we’ve acquired a wheelchair. I’m not allowed to drive because I’ve had treatment for brain metastases, so I’m very dependent on my husband. Luckily, he’s amazing, but this is a hard journey.

Kim

How did you select the poems for Always Fire?

Sarah

I didn’t! When I made the decision to stop treatment and transfer to the hospice team I let the very lovely Annick Meyer know. Annick is both a friend, and the editor of The Crow Gods, my first collection. Annick offered to pull together a collection as a fundraiser for North Devon Hospice. In the UK, hospices don’t receive any government funding, they’re dependent on charitable donations. I was really pleased for her to do it, but at the time I didn’t have enough energy to make any kind of contribution. Annick pulled together poems from my blog, from the Sidhe Press anthologies that I’ve been part of, and from a personal project that we’d been working on together. It’s entirely down to her that it hangs together so well.

Kim

How does your latest collection of poems differ from The Crow Gods (Sĺdhe Press) and The Poet Spells Her Name (Black Bough Poetry)?

Sarah

It was very strange to see the poems somebody else chose to share. In fact, I think this is a more personal collection than either of my other books. These are poems that have come out of me over a number of years, there’s a lot about my family in there. Seeing them gathered together was really quite moving. The only poem I asked to be included was the last one, ‘The Day of Saying Yes’. It’s a love poem, a poem about my husband, who has been the kindest, strongest, most loving man I could possibly have found.

Kim

The first poem in the book is ‘The Start’, which begins with the line “So let’s be magpies”. Birds, and corvids in particular, are a motif that runs through all your books. What is their significance?

Sarah

Poets love birds! I’m drawn to corvids for several reasons. We have a big rook colony near our house, so their calls are a constant backdrop to our family life. We sit and watch them in the evenings – at a certain point they rise up and circle around, and then settle again, and it feels like all is right with the world. I love their intelligence, and I love the fact that there are so many myths about corvids – Odin’s ravens, the Tower of London, King Arthur’s chough, all those magpie rhymes. We’ve projected a lot of power onto birds who are just getting on with doing their thing. My hackles rise whenever I hear someone saying they hate magpies.

And flight, of course. Who doesn’t want to fly? To experience the world with that extra dimension.

Kim

I’m hard pressed to pick out favourites, but two poems that moved me to tears are ‘I went to the sea’ and ‘My daughter is getting ready to go out’, and another that really resonated with me is ‘The Art of Cutting Back’. Do you have any that are special to you, and why?

Sarah

Apart from ‘The Day of Saying Yes’, I’m very fond of ‘Names on a Map’, and ‘Barmbrack’.  They’re quite different poems, but for me, they are both about building family and memories and celebrating shared experiences.

Kim

Do you have a message or words of wisdom for your fellow poets at the dVerse Poets Pub?

Sarah

I should mention that dVerse gets a mention in Annick’s introduction to the book. It’s been a huge part of my poetry life and development. I’m not sure I have any great wisdom to share. Certainly nothing that’s not a cliché. I guess that’s why things ARE clichés – they’re truths, and there’s only so many ways of saying them.

Love as hard as you can. Write the stuff that matters to you, but also, maybe stuff that doesn’t matter too much – just have fun. Life is going to throw all sorts of things at you – remember that the small, beautiful moments can carry as much weight as the big terrible ones. And you can’t avoid bad things, but you can make a point of treasuring the good things.

***

Sarah gave us so many inspirational prompts at the dVerse Poets Pub, I thought I’d share a few of them. You can find more in the dVerse archives.

Sarah’s first prompt at dVerse: https://dversepoets.com/2018/03/06/poetics-threads-of-feelings/ 
One from March 2022: https://dversepoets.com/2022/03/22/colour-me-poetry/ 
One from April 2023: https://dversepoets.com/2023/04/11/everything-yellow/

***

And now for our prompt, which is based on the following lines taken from poems in Sarah’s collection, Always Fire.

The challenge is to pick lines from one poem and EITHER deconstruct the lines and use the words or phrases in a new order in a new poem, similar to Laura’s MTB prompt from June: Elaborating Lacunae in the Fragment or Keeping Things Whole, OR let the words inspire a new poem without actually using the words.

From ‘Apple’:

“There is a wholesomeness to apples:
the white flesh crisp, fine-grained,
the sweet, sharp scent. The skin.”

From ‘Cliff-Dweller’:

“Some days I can set myself adrift in space. In time.”

From ‘No mail – no post’:

“No words.
No rhymes, no poeming tonight,
just this blank space,
this white page,
stretching endlessly”

and

“Find me a space here,
tucked into the silence.”

From ‘The Art of Cutting Back’:

“We write our poems, verses clear as gin,
and cool as ice, compact as cherry stones:
This is our craft; we cut, we prune, we thin.”

‘This Doesn’t Feel Like Home Yet’:

“A bird sings,
but you don’t know the notes,
this window opens
onto streets you cannot name
and words you can’t decipher.”

When Sarah asked me to let the dVerse Poets Pub know about her current situation, we did not know that I would be interviewing her or writing a tribute prompt for her – that came later. We ask you kindly not to contact her at her blog or on social media, as she needs the precious time she has to spend with her family. Instead, please send her your love in the poems you write for this prompt, which she will read with her family.

As always:

• Write a poem in response to the challenge.
• Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below.
• There you will find links to other poets, and more will join, so check back for their poems.
• Read and comment on other poets’ work – we all come here to have our poems appreciated.
• Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.
• Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like. We are a friendly bunch of poets.
• Share the love.