ALISON MACE

Why I Write: ALISON MACE

I write because I have to. I’ve felt always that writing poems is a compulsive activity; sometimes it has kept me revising till five in the morning! – a good sign, that, of a promising poem.  Even when a poem seems to have written itself, just to have arrived, I’m likely to pick at it for days or weeks.
 
What lies behind this compulsion?  Let’s go at this question from the other end: once written and licked into the best shape I can manage, a poem can be found to have had a cathartic effect. An example:
 
                                                 Sorry
                       
                        Aunt, I look back at last, and I am sorry,
                        sorry for how we were, for things we said,
                        often unkind. We did each other no good.
                        I grieve now too for your fate: you’d never marry,
                        your Geoffrey cold under France, your heart a stone
                        as, smiling, you gave thanks, seeing each young brother*
                        come home unhurt from one war or another.
                        What longings you must have felt, but could not own.
 
                        You took me on, a grieving child, when you
                        were old and already ill; how hard you tried,
                        I see now, strove to do right, until you died –
                        crushed by the weight of all you had to do,
                        trapped in a mesh of toil, confusion, worry.
                        I never loved or thanked you. Edith, I’m sorry.
 
*Six younger brothers, all surviving.
 
Edith brought me up after my mother died when I was eight. I resented her from the moment I came home—not until after the funeral and a stay at an uncle’s— and she greeted me effusively as if, it seemed to me, she owned the place and I was now a visitor.  We progressed somehow through the years till I left, but she was often ill, and always tired and stressed. I wasn’t much help to her. Getting older myself, I started to understand her life as the unprivileged, disappointing one it was: eventually she had slowly become senile: her only escape. 
When I’d finished writing ‘Sorry’ I found I could love and respect Edith in memory as I had not done in her lifetime; and I was released from guilt. I had no such aim, though: it just insisted on arriving.
 
Even poems written to prescribed themes can sometimes turn out to be essential, springing directly from the psyche, and to yield similarly life-changing effects.
                    Alison Mace is the author of Last of the Cake  Her first collection, Man in the Icehouse, was published by The High Window