Rishi to Gita: It’s funny that this book is perceived as lighter than previous ones. I’ve always had gags, though I appreciate that setting poems in war zones, and talking about the end of the world might not scream levity. The earliest poem emerged around 2016/17, so this book is a gathering around a set of moods. I thought the poems were more despairing than a first read might suggest, but through editing with Jane Commane at Nine Arches Press, I was persuaded that the book is more optimistic than I initially imagined. I dodged the question. I’m always having fun when writing poems, even the bleak ones!

GR: Yes, writing about the climate crisis (Neptune’s Projects) or colonialism (Saffron Jack) makes it difficult for some to appreciate your excellent gags! I find it hard to keep joy on the page through the graft of rewriting – how do you do it?

RD: I don’t think of writing and redrafting poems as ‘graft’, in the sense of what grafting is, a.k.a. the day job. However frustrating the process of wrestling poems into shape might feel, it’s nothing compared to rewriting a slide deck for a board presentation the next morning. When you have that experience, mucking around with a stanza break or moving a bit of punctuation around is gravy. I know as a writer that if a poem is going through 17 to a gazillion drafts, I’ve probably killed it. Move on, attack the next poem. This stuff should be play. If it’s not fun at some level, why bother?

GR: Your opening poem, ‘Whiteboard’, as well as the book’s title, makes me wonder if there is joy in embracing transience?

RD: I’ve always leaned into the idea of trying to write into posterity, to leave a little dent in the face of the world. Turns out, letting that go means you get somewhere more interesting. Transience is an essential feature of our times as well. How much can you worry about the permanent in the age of the infinite scroll? To an extent, everything is writ in water.

GR: Does copywriting allow you to approach poems without an overly precious attitude? Are you lightly tethered to your idea – a balloon, bobbing at the string?

RD: I’ll quote Steve Stretton, the most inspirational creative director I ever had the pleasure to work for: “Take the work seriously; don’t take yourselves seriously,” was his mantra, and if I have anything close to an artistic credo, it’s that. I take my role as a fool in poetry seriously, which means holding things lightly. But I am a child of capitalism. Don’t like this ware I have to offer? Another one will be along in a minute! Once you’re trained to come up with new ideas, it gets addictive. Magpie eyes are suited to poetry, let’s embrace that.

To those eyes, a number of poems in empirical have a slyly political bent – in the Churchill poem, stronger than sly. How important is it that politics comes through in your poems?

GR: To misquote Terry Eagleton, ideology is most effective when invisible. All poems are political in their own way, including personal/ domestic poems. I think of Solmaz Sharif’s essay, ‘The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure’:

A lover, once: You can’t say every action is political. Then the word political loses all meaning.

He added: What is political about this moment?

I was washing his dishes. I had left the water running.

The Churchill poem began as an erasure of Hansard. I like the poem as a container to place what troubles us, including history, giving it shape or form. Can we talk about form? Ghazals, reverse ghazals, an abecedarian, triolets – what do they add to your poetics? Is there a form you’ve yet to master?

RD: Last one first: loads! I’ve only done one standalone sestina, and I struggle to make villanelles come to life. If you have a form, you aren’t faced with a completely blank page – you know to get from A to B. The magic is to be diverted via Z, an umlaut and five semi-colons. By using something that’s been around ‘forever’ what new thing can I make? Can it be both of now and timeless? There are practical considerations too. I’m lazy, but with five lines, thanks to the magic of a triolet, I have an eight-line poem. Who doesn’t enjoy that sleight of hand?

Can I throw the form one back? There’s many delicious ghazals in empirical. What do they do that free verse doesn’t?

GR: The Hindi/Urdu ghazal is a poetic form I heard often growing up, both spoken and sung. When I discovered the English ghazal, it felt familiar, in its songlike refrain and expansiveness. A ghazal’s couplets wander, like the Japanese zuhitsu, or list poem. I loved your poignant ‘Reverse Ghazal Daguerreotype’ and want to steal it.

RD: Absolutely, go ahead! Relatedly, in a number of your poems a striking form of ‘blockiness’ recurs, say in ‘Manhattan’ and the title poem? What are you showing us with these arrangements?

GR: You’ve said that poets are list-makers. ‘Manhattan (2001)’ is made up of fragmented memories of 9/11, when I lived in New York. ‘empirical’ is inspired by the film Dahomey , on repatriation of historic artefacts. Perhaps the blocks are Post-it notes, another form of list-making?

RD: The magic of Post-its strikes again. Another observation I had was that your poems have a warmth and tenderness towards the culture of ‘inbetweenness’ we both grew up within. Was it a conscious process to access that?

GR: ‘Inbetweenness’ is definitely a thread in my work. I’m conscious that the intergenerational moments I archive may become relics of the past, given prevailing political currents.

Also on the archive, I note that digital afterlives, ghosts and selfhood, recur in Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak. Is there a contradiction in that the digital world feels ephemeral, and yet ghosts of digital presence persist beyond our real lives? Are we all immortal now?

RD: Ha! Not yet, despite tech bro fever dreams. That contradiction is more a truth we’re beginning to collectively grasp. Things that seem throwaway are not; platforms meant to be insignificant and trivial are not; metaphors that suggest lightness (clouds are heavy, all that water vapour!) are not. So, it’s unsurprising that the digital ‘others’ we’ve been building for the last 25 years or so might come back to, bluntly, bite us.

That is not to lose sight of the fact that the internet has been a liberating place, where you can shed the limitations of the physical world. But making that demarcation now feels passé. The internet used to be a separate space, then a layer on top of reality. We shouldn’t be surprised that it would become reality. And yet here we are.

& Gita Ralleigh

The Observer’s Poetry Book of the Month, Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak is available from Nine Arches Press.
You can find Gita’s “rich and rousing” empirical at The Braag Press.

And there, moving gracefully through the crowd, was the Goddess of the Wye. A giant puppet, who carries a lot of meaning for people here. I first ‘met’ her two years ago, and have come across her at a number of community events here ever since. I always watch her with a lump in my throat. There’s something deeply moving about her gentle face, and the way her keeper (art activist Kim Kaos) moves with her. It’s particularly because of what she represents: our beautiful river, which we humans have failed to look after.

A timely moment – creating our stories

It felt especially meaningful this year. Just days earlier, the Goddess had stood outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, alongside more than 4,500 campaigners, as the UK’s largest environmental pollution claim began its first hearing.

I live in Monmouth, where the River Wye meets the rivers Monnow and Trothy. In the early hours of one morning last November, Storm Claudia caused the Monnow to swell to 18 times its normal level, and floodwater coursed down our high street. Shops, businesses, homes and our community centre were filled with fast-moving floodwater, and the situation was declared a major incident. You may have seen the distressing scenes on the national news. Monmouth still hasn’t recovered: many shops remain closed, and some people still haven’t returned to their homes.

What has this got to do with my writing work?

I’ve been thinking about all of this since reading Ben Edge’s book. Ben writes about folk traditions as a way for communities to reclaim their stories – their creativity, rituals, and sense of who they are – especially in the face of more powerful forces. I’ve realised that what folk traditions do for communities, perhaps we, as 26 members, do for organisations – finding the words for who they are and who they’re becoming.

All of this has been timely, as I’ve been working on a rebrand for one of my longest-standing clients: an international development agency working in water and sanitation, and beyond. There’s about to be a new name, and a new language to go with it. A new way of saying who they are and what they stand for, at a moment when the world feels turbulent and the stakes incredibly high. And not surprisingly, water runs through it.

The writing itself has involved developing key messages, drafting sample stories, biographies, and boilerplate copy; providing storytelling and writing guidance; and working with the brand book.

If you’ve done rebrand work, you’ll know the challenges and the thrills: writing for people who know their work far better than you ever will; retaining an authentic voice while pushing the tone of voice to reflect the aspiration; and making decisions alone at your desk about which word, sentence, or phrase will spark the reader the most. It’s intensely collaborative, and at times pretty lonely too.

This project has pushed me as a writer. John Simmons talks about how every writer operates somewhere on a spectrum of ‘We, Me, Them, It’. With this rebrand, I’ve needed to inhabit the ‘It’ – the organisation, the brand, the vision – and silence the ‘Me’ far more than I have before.

I’m writing for leaders across Africa and Asia – from scientists to policy-makers – and attempting to do justice to their expertise and authority while making the language more human. I’m learning about practices that are as much about global politics as they are about science. And I’ve spent hours searching for words to express an organisational future that’s aspirational, not yet real.

What about my own creativity?

Aspirational and not yet real seems true of my own creativity too. In April I told you about the tab I hadn’t managed to open very often – the free-range imagination and creativity with no deadline, client or brief. I was hoping that by the time I reached May’s column, I’d have more to tell you about this. But I guess I’m still circling it. Most of what I’ve described in this column has been purposeful. Even this column is purposeful. I wanted to explore my creative self, yet I’ve been spending five months writing about wanting to write for myself!

But what this column has done is to help me think about and pay more attention to my own creativity. It’s encouraged me to continue seeking out opportunities to test it, express it, and find joy in it. It’ll come. I guess a river doesn’t know where it’s going either, it just keeps moving.

The book feels heavy and light at the same time – heavy from the weight of stories it carries, light from the relief of writers who have finally, finally put their dilemmas into words. ’s silver plait on the cover says everything before you’ve read a word: something braided, something handed down, something that holds its shape even under pressure.

It opens, fittingly, with a haiku. Lucy Beevor’s three lines about soup found in a grandmother’s freezer after her death say more about love and loss than most poets manage in a page.

Inside, the rest of the poems do the same. ’s Man and Boy moves between Dartmoor and a café bench with such ease you feel you’ve been on both walks yourself. Jonathan Holt’s That warmth understands that maternal love travels through soup, through hot compresses, through the muscle memory of childhood earaches – and that this is not small. It is enormous. Thérèse Kieran’s poems carry the specific texture of things: silverware, a Donegal shoreline, the particular silence of a winter drive. Stuart Delves’ Wavelength reaches across loss with the urgency of a radio dial being turned in the dark. Tim Rich writes about fathers and strangers with a tenderness that sneaks up on you. And , who has spent decades helping others find their voice, turns here to the loss of his own mother – perhaps for the first time on the page.

Then there is Galen O’Hanlon, the collection’s featured poet, whose ten poems form a life entire. He moves from the first dazed nights of new parenthood – the baby sleeping through at 3am while the mind spirals toward death – to watching geese at dusk with his daughter, to his father ageing in a bed full of grey thoughts and black hairs, to his grandfather farming land that held fifty years of silence. O’Hanlon writes about the moon the way people only write about things they have genuinely lost. His is the longest section in the book, and it earns every page.

What Simmons, Kieran and Rich have assembled is not a collection that pretends family is simple. These poems hold grudges and grief, distance and devotion, the long silences and the calls that come too late. But underneath all of it runs something warmer and more stubborn – the recognition that however complicated the geography of family becomes, it remains the most familiar place most of us will ever inhabit. Like realising the place you kept returning to in your mind had a name all along.

Rowena Roberts never got to hold this book. Her two poems are here because great writing insists on being heard, with or without its author.

She left us a line to close on: “And only love remains.”

It does.

You can buy your copy of this beautiful collection direct from its letterpress printer and publisher, Paekakariki Press.