Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
From Helen Dunmore
Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.
When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.
To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.
Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.
The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.
The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.
Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives