Last night, I attended the Society of Authors’ annual awards ceremony at which many of the country’s leading literary prizes are announced. For the sixth year, I was helping to judge the Eric Gregory Awards for poets under thirty and Carol Ann Duffy was there to hand out the prizes (including a Travelling Scholarship to Worple Press’s Elizabeth Cook).

I think it’s important for older, more established writers to contribute in this way – after all, despite Facebook and Twitter, it’s not easy for young poets to make people take notice of their work. I remember only too well the nightmare of searching for a home for my own early collection. Eventually, Roland John’s Hippopotamus Press took it — Westerners, a book I’m still fond of, entirely about the two years I spent in Egypt. Roland’s press added to the diversity of the poetry scene in the 1980s as Peter and Amanda Carpenter’s Worple does now. Young writers depend on the generosity of small presses and appreciate the support and feedback that they can give.  That’s one of the reasons I respect Edmund Blunden, whose life is very much on my mind at the moment (I’m editing a new edition of Undertones of War for O.U.P.): he did so much to encourage other emerging figures (Ivor Gurney, for instance) and to revive interest in neglected poets such as John Clare.

I suppose one of the reasons I wrote Knot, which Worple published last April, was to celebrate the under-celebrated: the poet William Drummond himself, of course, whose home at Hawthornden Castle was our ‘retreat’ and the setting for the masque in the book’s second section; but also those various Elizabethans whose voices drift through the text. Why don’t we read George Gascoigne any more, for example? A wonderfully various Bedfordshire poet, full of humour and a thoroughly modern sensibility. Or Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel – two of the major contemporaries of Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself knew how shaky reputation can be. His own sonnets were a bid for immortality, and repeatedly make the point that producing good poetry is our best chance of living for ever.  No prizes for poets under thirty in those days, however, and just to live beyond thirty was probably prize enough. But there was always the hope that some nobleman would endorse your work and even hand over some gold. Well done, then, to all the Gregory winners.

Elizabeth Cook will be speaking at Transcultural Imaginaries: Making New, Making Strange – A Festival of Writing at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The festival, which runs from 14 – 17 June, features readings and workshops from writers from around the world, such as Olive Senior and Dermot Healy, alongside a number of Singaporean writers, including Grace Chia and O Thiam Chin. Elizabeth will be leading a poetry workshop and reading from her acclaimed work of fiction Achilles (Methuen, 2001).  Worple has recently reprinted Elizabeth’s poetry collection Bowl.

I wrote recently about poets who disappear from view, specifically Susannah Amoore, from Faber’s Poetry Introduction 6.

My point is far from faceitious: I once disappeared myself.

Readers of this blog will know I woke up on New Year’s Day in 2006 with a strange pain in my right side. Weeks of testing later I was told on Valentine’s Day this was caused by the pressure of a tumour on nerve endings near my kidneys. I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system.

This was worrying for two reasons. Naturally I wanted to know if I would live or die.

Also, I  had a new book of poems coming out and knew I would be able to do nothing to promote it.

Doing my best to practice what my therapist would later call acceptance, I decided very quickly that maybe, just this once, the book could be left to look after itself while I got on with living and/or dying.

I make it sound easy. Let me tell you, it wasn’t. 

Anthony’s latest collection, Riddance

Whether we are conscious of it or admit to it or not, every writer I know buys into what Anne Lamott calls ‘somebodyism’ at some level. It’s none of our fault. It’s inevitable. It’s in the culture, from the moment we draw breath, this competitive urge to be noticed and accepted and loved for what we do (in this case, write). Having cancer was a great way to discover the essential bullshit of this premise.

Not only would there be no book promotion to look forward to, I also felt poetry itself  had left me. No longer was I able to concentrate on reading the poets I loved, and I certainly had no desire to write any.

I thought: if I die before my book comes out and is then deemed to be rubbish, or worse, ignored, there is nothing I can do. In the event it did come out, I did not die, and it was still ignored. And that is fine. Really. I discovered I was loved for reasons other than my writing, and began to practise acceptance for those people and things, often most close to me, I had previously and perilously come close to ignoring at the expense of ‘work’.

Of course I would rather cancer had not happened to me, but I can say truthfully that the same level of rabid disappointment and jealousy no longer greets both my failures and the successes of my peers . I am pleased to be breathing at all, you see. If that includes a day with a poem, written or read, then the bonus is mine, a delight, pure gravy as Carver would say, pure gravy.

London - 1st October – Beyond Words, Gipsy Hill Tavern

London – 19th October – Poetry in Palmers Green

Torbay – 27th October –TorbayFestival

London – 2nd November – Poetry in the Crypt, St Mary’s Church, Islington

November/December (t.b.a.) –Kimbolton Castle local launch

London - 17th December – Lumen, 88 Tavistock Place (with Alison Brackenbury)

Falmouth and vicinity – 15th – 22nd February 2014 – various readings.

Jim Burns

Cambridge – Wednesday 30th May – part of the NIGHT MUSE series of poetry readings in the ante-chapel of Trinity College, 9:30-10:30 p.m – free and open to all university members

Cambridge – Thursday 20 June – celebrating the publication of Clive’s New and Selected Poems. The Morrison Room at Cambridge University Library at 5.00pm. Entrance free, refreshments provided

Download the postal order form to purchase Knot by cheque, or use PayPal button below.

Anthony Wilson’s Riddance has been reviewed by Judi Sutherland on Irregular Features: “Riddance is honest and raw poetry. It deserves to be in every oncologist’s waiting room and given to every cancer patient’s family because it tells us how it actually feels to be treated for cancer, and it resists the ‘othering’ of cancer patients. The book exhorts us to treat them as themselves rather than as sufferers, to bring them normality rather than hushed tones and pious hopes. Above all it teaches us that no amount of ‘being brave’ will help us ‘fight’ cancer. If there is a battle going on it is between our own cells and modern medicine; patients are not the army but the battlefield.” You can read the review here.

Elizabeth is the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keats and author of Achilles (Methuen and Picador USA), a work of fiction with a performance life, acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Her poetry, short fiction and critical reviews have appeared in many journals including Agenda, The London Review of Books, Poetry London, Stand, Moving Worlds and Tears in the Fence. To find out more, read more reviews, and pre-order a copy of this powerful debut collection visit the publication page here.

David Caddy, Tears in the Fence

“Elizabeth Cook’s poems in Bowl, enveloped within a delicate diction, insinuate themselves through a reverence for the elemental and those vessels that hold memory. They are substantial…and yet light, alert to measurement and revelation.”

The Use of English

“There is an apprehension of violence and danger in the poems…The short lyrical poems…float and sting…Elizabeth Cook is… something to be reckoned with.”

George Szirtes, Poetry London

“Just a glance at the opening few poems of this collection show [Cook] able to reflect on the world with the precision and intelligence of the philosopher’s eye. The wonderful opening poem ‘Bowl’ seems born out of nothing as it takes us on a journey through the object’s individual and universal nature, acting as both a hymn in praise of objects and a meditation on the complex way they inhabit the universe…images are being constantly transformed as we see her paying tribute to the delicacy of nature’s movements (as bees hold back from disturbing the universe)…Her well-chosen economic language allows her to interweave the individual with the universal.”

The North