Below is the image, from photographer Christina Mittermeier, that inspired my poem Skomm from my collection Going in With Flowers, from Linen Press which to my surprise and delight has been highly commended in the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
I was already drafting a poem about women in prison and their shame, when I came across the photo. I’d been thinking about a particular day when I got to the classroom and found the women fretful and unhappy. They wanted to talk about the past, and the way their abuse haunted them. It was snowing outside. They talked, I listened and watched the snow fall. This memory, in this place, is where the draft began.
I didn’t know the word Skomm, when I first started work on the poem, it came later when I looked at the etymology of Shame. I found it then, an old norse word which seemed weighty and fresh.
I talked the draft over with my writing mentor and buddy, Wendy Robertson, who had worked in the prison with me. Then by chance on Twitter, I saw the photograph and the metaphor just fell into place.
The poem still didn’t come easily, it didn’t just arrive on the page. It went through many drafts, and I think because of this I lost the sense of its power, which others have thankfully found.
Skomm won the York Poetry Prize in 2019. Without this recognition it would not have made it into the Forward Prize Anthology – many thanks to all involved in the wonderful York Competition, especially poet Clare Shaw, who judged it and founders and organisers David Nicholson and poet, Carole Bromley. You can read Skomm here
Just read it. I’ve not too many words, it’s beyond it, isn’t it? Wow, and oh god, come to mind. I’ve worked around just so women. I always had trouble with, how these histories happen, without witness, without foregrounding and gas lighting. The what was, is just too big. And from the voiceless then, to the unseen and unremarkable, as many they are looked upon now, journeys happened in ways more dynamic than the A to Z of many celebrated lives. In your poem I remember one or two who, are no longer with us. Some lives just move past you like a river: and sometimes all you can do is just, I don’t even know, witness, watch.
Witness and watch – as you say – sometime sits all we can do or all that is needed. thanks for reading Warren
Just read, Sometimes a River Song. I won’t clog up your blog with my thoughts on how good it is. Have you read: Delia Owens: Where The Crawdad’s Sing? Same and different again, good bedfellows in many ways. Your book is one to re-read, Avril, I do love to discover a book that has re-readability about it- and them’s not books ten-a-penny!
Hi Warren – thanks so much for reading Sometimes a River Song. A lot of people have said recently that it has similarities to Where the Crawdad’s Sing – I agree.I loved that book (published after River Song) so I feel quite honoured when people speak of my book in the same sentence. Mind you, Crawdad’s was a best seller – millions of copies. Not so for River Song!