Editorial

Recently I have been thinking about what a poet leaves behind. Since late last year I have been in contact with the family of a young woman regarding how best to remember their late daughter’s work. She died aged eighteen, on the cusp of leaving home to study literature at university. Her passion was to write poetry.

Reading over her work, I remembered that initial impulse that always fires the writer. It is my belief that, no matter the age of the poet, to write is to seek to enter a conversation that has been going on for thousands of years. We might read George Herbert’s ‘My heart alone is such a stone’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The world is a mist. And then the world is minute and vast and clear’ – and we are content to neither agree nor disagree. We want to follow those writers in voicing something as clearly as we can. To write is not to interrupt or speak over but is a means to take our turn and vouch for our own time and moment, our own portion of land, the view from our own hill or flat block (or even just that little land of the heart).

In these early poems, Hannah writes, ‘You pushed love out of bed/ reminded the heart to rise/ again’ – and I hear that old desire to go beyond merely feeling something. It is to begin to proclaim something out loud. Telling it to another. All writing, in its way, is an act of companionship with others we don’t know.

A second thought came to me. As a parent myself, these poems must be
a consolation to a parent, one that beautifully contradicts Juvenal’s assertion that it is a misfortune to have a writer in the family. Poetry is a wonder because you can read Yeats stating ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree’ – and feel the line suddenly alive and vigorous as though he were, right now, promising to make that journey for the first time. The poem keeps the freshness of the poet’s thought. It preserves the poet in the constant present of the poem’s utterance. Amidst such unimaginable sadness, how fortunate to have lines like, ‘Petals pushing and urging and gently loving the heart/ nothing is aching for us to be apart’, and to hear the living voice in them always, so full and so clear.

With thanks to the family of Hannah Lynch for allowing me to publish extracts of her work.