Episode 90
Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans
Suzannah V. Evans reads ‘Letter to My Mother’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.
This poem is from:
Available from:
Under the Blue is available from:
The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry
Letter to My Mother
by Suzannah V. Evans
You, pedalling your arms
above your head in bed,
that bad arm suddenly
mobile and flexible.
You, meeting me at school,
feeling something stir,
sprinting across the grass . . .
the two of us laughing,
Mr. Tarpin peering
quizzically from the gate.
You, with your bright lipstick.
You, with your hands like mine.
You, with your floppy hat.
You, with your easy laugh.
You, with the ellipses
of your emails. Your strong
front crawl. Your assertive
gestures as you motion
through talk. Now, when I swim,
the movement of my arms
is for you. A high arc,
fingertips cleaving bright.
Shuddering kick of legs.
The sea pool in Seixal
is for you. Craggy rocks
and my head dipped to blue.
Grey crabs line the rocks:
I think of the limpets
that spot McClure’s painting
with the reading woman,
sun hat, white paper sheaf.
Memory of last summer,
absorbed in Woolf outside.
A sudden rush of wind
caused the parasol to lift
and your own hat to spin
right up from your head –
where it hovered longer
than seemed possible,
black ribbon flapping.
Interview transcript
Mark: Suzannah, where did this poem come from?
Suzannah: So this poem emerged towards the end of my writing process for writing the poems in Under the Blue which is my first poetry collection. And the first two parts of the book… The book is a triptych of sequences, sort of playing with epistolary forms, so postcards and letters. The first two parts of the book are playing quite specifically with the form of the postcard, and the poems are quite private poems, in some ways. And I was interested in using the postcard form because it is a form which is both private and, in a sense, public in that, when you’re writing a postcard, you’re writing it to an individual. But a postie can turn that postcard over and read what’s on the back. Anyone can read what’s on the back.
And with this third section in the book, I wanted to directly address some of the earlier figures who had appeared in the first two sections, and I suppose, to address them and to kind of write directly to people. So this poem is written to my mother, and it’s in the form of a letter. And I’d say that the writing of this particular poem, this section of the book, was much more deliberate in some ways than the first two sections, which kind of emerged. And then, once I’d written those sections, I had sort of most of a manuscript, and these letters were really kind of, for me, kind of sealing and sending the manuscript off and kind of finishing it in that sense.
Mark: Okay. It’s really interesting to know that, the postcards come first in the book, and they’re all prose poems, aren’t they?
Mark: So they look like postcards on the page. And then, at the end, you’ve got the sequence of letters, which are kind of long and thin, maybe, to me, suggesting letters are longer than postcards. So, how did you start writing postcards, to begin with? And then we’ll move on to the letters.
Suzannah: That’s a good question. So the postcards, I think I’m always looking for formal inspiration in the things around me. So I am a formal poet in the sense that I’ve written sonnets. I’ve written rondels, a lot of rondels. And I’m very interested in traditional form, but I’m also interested in the way that the world can provide forms for the poet. And I was on holiday, visiting my partner’s father, when… So this is the first postcard in the book, although it’s not sort of titled as a postcard. It’s called ‘Under the Blue’. It’s the title poem. And that sort of was drawn from a roughly real-life event, where sort of there was this incident with a kayak. My partner was swept off his feet, and it really just brought back to me an earlier experience of actually witnessing a seizure.
And that was an experience which had really, really shocked me, and it had come completely out of the blue, really just out of nowhere. And I don’t know why, but I had wanted to write about it. Maybe that’s a kind of processing thing, or maybe it’s just a way to kind of hold close different things that happen in your life. But I’d known for a while that I’d wanted to write about it, and this was years and years later. But seeing this figure being kind of knocked over and sort of just being sort of buffeted in that way really took me back to that night with the seizure. And I felt like these two events were kind of doubled, and I could kind of see both of them at the same time. So it started off with writing about that. And it was, because I was on holiday, a postcard seemed like an apt way to write about that.
And so I suppose, kind of, it really started with that first poem. And it’s quite subtle, I think, the moment with the seizure. It sort of comes towards the end of the poem. You can sort of read it almost without thinking about the seizure too much. But it does. I think, sort of, that event refracts across the collection. So even though there are moments sort of later in the book where the word seizures is used, someone seizes someone else’s wrist in that sort of, a kind of reference back, there’s a lot of falling over in the book, a lot of stumbling. And yeah, so I think the impetus for the postcards, kind of, it came from that first section.
And actually, they were literal postcards, because I sent some of them. I kind of printed them off and sent them to friends in the post. Because I love…I’m a big letter writer. I send a lot of postcards. Like, postcards are really a big…it sounds weird to say that postcards are a big part of my life, but they kind of are. Like, I really love postcards. I like to collect them from galleries. And so it’s partly a homage to my love of the postcard. And I think, also, with postcards, you have the art or the image on the postcard as well. And there’s a few kind of ekphrastic moments in the book. So, kind of, all of that is woven in, I think.
And the idea of what you can’t say in a postcard, I think that’s what the middle section of the book, for me, kind of turns the form on its head a little bit more to kind of write about things that maybe you actually wouldn’t necessarily write in a postcard. So, to me, I kind of think of them as anti-postcards, almost. Yeah.
Mark: So, the form is actually rooted in your life, that you do send postcards. It’s not just a conceit for you.
Suzannah: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark: And of course, when a poem is framed as a postcard or a letter, there is a sense of it feels personal. You know, ‘I’ and ‘you’ are always… Quite often, there can be quite a lot of ambiguity about who the I is and who the you is. But if you signal it as a letter, like last month, I did Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, which was four verse epistles to Viscount Bolingbroke. And so that puts a different frame on it when you know that he’s addressing, ‘My Lord,’ and we’re kind of overhearing that.
Mark: There’s a sense that this is a personal communication, that maybe there’s a real relationship underpinning.
Suzannah: Yes. And I think that’s something that the whole collection kind of plays with in a way. When I teach poetry, I’m always very adamant, or sort of something that I talk about with students is this idea that you never really can conflate the I of the poem with the poet. Even when there is autobiographical kind of crossover, I think there’s something that happens. When you write a poem, it becomes an art object. It becomes something that is changed. I almost want to say it’s not a photograph, but I think photographs are kind of complex as well in the way that they capture reality.
So I think, for me, there is a real distinction between the first and second sections and the third section of the book. But something that I kind of have been thinking about as well is there’s a poem that T.S. Eliot wrote to his wife, and he says something, like, ‘These are private words addressed to you in public.’ And so I think this idea of what is private and what is public is really…it makes it quite hard for me to talk about the book sometimes, I think, but it’s really at the crux of what it is, the sense of sort of letting the reader into some kind of quite private spaces and the importance of doing that as well, how the private is political. Just all of those things are kind of in there.
But I think, in particular, the letters are really public declarations of love and trust, and they are very felt poems that are intended to honour particular people. And the collection ends with a letter to my father, who… The father figure is sort of less present in the earlier sections of the book, but it sort of attributes to my dad. That is an autobiographical kind of poem at the end of the book, which is in thanks really for everything that he does to hold up the people who are in earlier parts of the book and to kind of celebrate his role, to celebrate what he does as a carer, but also just to kind of… I think the letters are just…they’re like praise poems really. They’re just intended to celebrate these people.
Mark: That’s a nice idea, isn’t it? The praise poem. That should maybe be more prominent, shouldn’t it?
Mark: So with this one, specifically, what could you say about your intention in writing the letter to your mother?
Suzannah: I think that this was one of the letters that I found more difficult to write, because the figure of the mother…and again, I won’t say my mother because I think, for me, there’s still this distinction between, even while the book draws on lived experience, it’s not a direct reflection of that. But I think because of the earlier sections of the book, which are, at times, quite stark, I really wanted to write a poem that, I don’t know, that sort of dwelled on movement and closeness and joy, I guess, just the delight, the sheer kind of delight of someone moving how they want to move.
I think that I was kind of looking at this poem again before, thinking that we were going to talk about it. And that movement, to me, there’s a shift after all the sort of you, you, you parts of the poem, which sort of have more kind of…the lines sort of go more to the end of the line. And then, when it starts talking about swimming, there are sort of full stops towards the middle of the lines. And I sort of wanted there to be almost like a kind of pull through those lines, as if someone is swimming through those lines, and you feel the arm going down, your strong front crawl, pause, your assertive gestures as you motion through talk. So kind of like having that pulling movement as swimming in the poem.
And my mum, who is disabled, she was diagnosed with a neurological illness when I was 12. She used to be a really keen swimmer. And I remember as a child seeing her do front crawl and being, like, ‘Wow.’ I actually only learned to do front crawl properly when I was in my late twenties. And I now love… I really love doing front crawl. I absolutely love it. And again, I swim in celebration of my mum. So if I swim front crawl, I’ll always do a length for my mum and kind of dedicate that length to her.
So all of those things, again, they’re kind of these quite private things that are kind of in the poem, but not fully in the poem. But I think that if you have those kind of reverberations of these kind of memories or feelings, even if you don’t write about them directly, they’re kind of pulled into the poem through the energy of the language that you do decide to use.
Mark: And interestingly, as you talk about the relationship between the real person and the person in the poem, I guess another effect, for me, at least, as a reader, is when I read this, it just makes me think, Oh yeah, people do have their different ways of moving and opening a book or eating a salad, or whatever it may be. That’s their kind of signature style in life. Or the little quirks in the way they punctuate their emails.
Mark: And so there’s the thing of it’s very specific, but it’s also very suggestive, I think, that we easily identify with a relationship like this, even if the circumstances are different.
Suzannah: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like what you say about movement, though. And I feel like every person has their own kind of form, like, if we’re thinking about form in poetry. It’s what I think about when I watch people run a lot of the time. I’m thinking about, ‘Wow.’ Really, really, really different form, really different ways of moving, even though that repetitive motion is very… There are only so many ways that you can run, and yet it is so different for everyone.
And I think, with this poem as well, something that I was interested in doing was kind of going back to an earlier point, kind of. So, that ‘You, meeting me at school,’ kind of thinking about earlier times as well. And again, the ‘sprinting across the grass’ kind of goes back in a way to that opening epigraph to the book, which is from Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf being a modernist writer. And it’s… Oh, not Virginia Woolf, sorry, what am I saying? It does go back to that, but I’m actually thinking of Charles Baudelaire, who talks about ‘the ecstasy and horror of life’.
Mark: He’s great, isn’t he?
Suzannah: Yeah, really. But this idea of the kind of sprinting across the grass, it was just such a joyful thing, such an incredibly out-of-the-blue, again, to go back to that phrase, sudden burst of energy and motion. And I think we were laughing, but also probably crying, so we probably looked pretty strange. And again, I think the book is really interested in those kind of doubled states where maybe there’s sort of deep despair, but also real joy, or anger, but delight. So kind of there’s a sense of these cyclical movements through those different states, different emotions, or even a kind of merging of those two things together at the same time.
Mark: And can I pick up on the Virginia Woolf reference, because that…I mean, in your writing, there’s a lot of summer seaside imagery, and you’ve got the epigraph from To the Lighthouse. So, I would bet that the person reading Woolf outside was reading To the Lighthouse in this poem. And of course, that’s a novel with a mother very much at the centre of it. I mean, it’s clearly artfully placed in the poem. So I was curious about, what was your decision to put that in?
Suzannah: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a very sort of associative poem. It kind of goes from the reference to Daphne McClure, who is an artist, and she has this wonderful, kind of quite humorous painting of a woman reading. And then it kind of goes to actual reading.
Suzannah: But then it kind of goes back to McClure as well, because in the painting, this woman is reading, she’s got this big sheaf of papers or this big kind of white book paper that she’s reading. And then the poem kind of has that in mind. And then, when the hat lifts at the end of the poem, sort of, you’ve got all of it there. So it’s kind of going back to that visual image and making its own kind of different visual image at the end of the poem. And I really love, in Woolf’s novel, there’s this idea of, like, Lily, the painter, and she’s thinking about sort of making her mark. And how do you make a mark? How do you begin? How do you create? How do you have a vision? So I suppose that’s part of it.
And then the epigraph to the book is really just my favourite sort of thing, and it’s this idea that Woolf is writing about that if you’re watching, if you’re looking at waves from far off, kind of, they look very symmetrical, and they look very regular. But if your perspective changes and you’re suddenly the swimmer in those waves, it’s completely different. You’re having this entirely other experience where, you know, how a painter might paint those waves from far off, these lovely, kind of, they’re all the same size, they’re kind of coming regularly. And then, to be that swimmer, who is having to kind of arch over each wave or sort of get over each wave, and relentlessly, just wave after wave, and each one is different, you know.
So again, there’s that kind of repetition idea in there, but also this idea of scale and perspective, and the idea that you might kind of look at something from far away, and it seems very orderly, and it seems very symmetrical, and it seems very easy to deal with, essentially. But if you are the swimmer, that’s not the case. And each thing requires a lot of consideration. And that’s really what the middle section of the book is interested in, sort of how to write about care and how to write about things, which are just very different, I think, when you’re in the midst of them, and every particular thing is something that needs to be negotiated in that way.
So the image of waves in the Woolf novel is very important, and also the idea of, in the novel, obviously, the lighthouse is this kind of ever-present, sort of, almost like a character. And I wanted the sea to have that role in this book. So a lot of my earlier writing has been about the sea. And this book is less directly about the sea, but the sea is always present, and I wanted it to be heard and felt, even when it’s not kind of being described in detail.
Mark: That’s a very interesting point about different perspectives, because I think we experience that throughout the book. So some of the postcards are very much about the more difficult aspects of care, caring for a parent. So we read this one in the light of that, and vice versa, and so this is, if you like, the praise poem, the joy, the celebratory.
Suzannah: Yes. And I think I’m very, very interested in the relationship between prose… I was going to say prose poetry and line-broken poetry, but also just poetry and prose. And a lot of my influences for writing are quite prose-y, often. I’m interested in prose writers, and I’m interested in where that line is between this idea of what makes a prose poem a poem. And I think if you give a reader a kind of extensive amount of prose, and that sets up a particular kind of rhythm, a particular kind of feel, but then, to follow that with very short-lined poems, line-broken poems, it’s a different kind of… I think I wanted it to be almost like a kind of lift at the end of the book, where you’ve kind of had this kind of, I don’t want to say denser, but definitely starker prose. And then there’s kind of a much shorter section at the end of the letters, it’s very short, but it’s kind of just a movement into a different kind of writing. And I wanted that to be a noticeable kind of contrast.
Mark: Yeah, definitely. I mean, even visually on the page, the prose looks denser, whereas these, I don’t know, it feels like you pick your way a bit more nimbly through these. How did you arrive at that as the solution to how you represent a letter on a page? And was this one of the later ones? So in a sense, the form was predetermined, but it’s like you’re writing a sonnet sequence, and then you know that there’s going to be another one like that.
Suzannah: Yeah. So I really do like a sequence. A huge amount of my writing involves sequences, and I think there’s something about, if you do something one time and you like it, I think it’s worth doing it again. So my first pamphlet is a sequence of poems about the British surrealist artist Eileen Agar. And I often just keep going. If I’m writing something, kind of, I keep going with that. So yes, this was part of an earlier sequence in the sense that the first letter in the book is the first letter that I wrote, and I think, in that sense, the form was kind of set out. And then, in terms of it being kind of, like, a longer shorter-lined poem, I was thinking a little bit about how if you unfold a letter from an envelope, you would have to do that with this poem.
Mark: Oh, yes, I remember that.
Suzannah: Yeah. And it can be quite tricky, actually. I find it quite tricky to fold letters so they fit correctly in their envelope. But yeah, there’s something about that. Whereas the postcard poems, they are, like, poems that you could almost kind of fit to the back of a postcard. But the ones that kind of escape from that or kind of defy that form, I think, are also…that’s interesting to me as well, kind of, to flip that. So, for example, I think the most…the postcard that, to me, is the crux of the middle section is the postcard on Christmas night, which is one that I had thought that I would not ever really want to read out loud because it’s quite an intense poem. But I did read that one at the London launch for my book at Burley Fisher Books because I was kind of surrounded by people that I knew, and it felt right. But that poem is a much longer postcard.
And again, I like the idea of a postcard where you’re defying the amount of space that you have to write in. And again, I think that prose poems also do that, because there’s a similar kind of sense of overspill in a prose poem, because you’re tipping over that line end, and that’s quite defiant as well. So I think, if you then tip over the form of the postcard, it’s kind of a doubly defiant, formally, kind of way of writing.
Mark: Thank you, Suzannah, for sharing such a personal and beautiful poem today and a joyful one. And I would encourage listeners to go and check out the rest of the book and see how it fits into the sequence, because this is really one of those books where the parts really do make up something bigger than the whole. So let’s have another lesson to ‘Letter to My Mother’.
Letter to My Mother
by Suzannah V. Evans
You, pedalling your arms
above your head in bed,
that bad arm suddenly
mobile and flexible.
You, meeting me at school,
feeling something stir,
sprinting across the grass . . .
the two of us laughing,
Mr. Tarpin peering
quizzically from the gate.
You, with your bright lipstick.
You, with your hands like mine.
You, with your floppy hat.
You, with your easy laugh.
You, with the ellipses
of your emails. Your strong
front crawl. Your assertive
gestures as you motion
through talk. Now, when I swim,
the movement of my arms
is for you. A high arc,
fingertips cleaving bright.
Shuddering kick of legs.
The sea pool in Seixal
is for you. Craggy rocks
and my head dipped to blue.
Grey crabs line the rocks:
I think of the limpets
that spot McClure’s painting
with the reading woman,
sun hat, white paper sheaf.
Memory of last summer,
absorbed in Woolf outside.
A sudden rush of wind
caused the parasol to lift
and your own hat to spin
right up from your head –
where it hovered longer
than seemed possible,
black ribbon flapping.
Under the Blue
‘Letter to My Mother’ is from Under the Blue, published by Bloomsbury Poetry.
Available from:
Under the Blue is available from:
The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry
Suzannah V. Evans
Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, researcher, and educator. Her debut collection Under the Blue is shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and her work has received the Ivan Juritz Prize and a Northern Writers’ Award. Her poetry pamphlets are Brightwork and Marine Objects / Some Language. She teaches poetry in adult education and works with Poetry By Heart.
Photograph by Naomi Woddis
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