In Terms of Vulnerability
Erica Hesketh and Niall Campbell talk difficult subject matter
Niall Campbell, Erica Hesketh
Niall Campbell: Oddly, let me start at the end of your new book, In the Lily Room. I was so moved by the last poem, ‘June’. “A late breeze/ kissing/ the curtain’s edge and night/ never falling” – that’s lovely. It feels a nice way of closing off a collection about firsts and your life changing. There’s an openness to the poem’s outlook. This is your debut collection – I wonder about two things: was it easy to decide on this poem as an end point? And two, did you have any guiding lights from other collections that made you think ‘ah, now that’s a way to wave a reader off?’
I remember with Moontide, my own first book, I wanted to begin and end with how John Glenday bookended his book Grain – with a tiny bursts of lyricism. Those poems, especially ‘Epitaph’, were real guides for me.
Erica Hesketh: That’s a lovely response, thank you. And thank you for introducing me to John Glenday’s ‘Epitaph’, it’s beautiful.
Actually, ‘June’ was originally going to be the opening poem of my second collection, and only snuck into In the Lily Room late on in the editing process. Maybe it’s the case that good first and last poems have a certain openness in common – they are both doors, after all. I found, writing about early motherhood, that my thoughts often snagged on beginnings and endings, how they contain one another, and also on the endless, iterative nature of care-work, as well as the seasons. Straight lines and circles. In terms of the structure of In the Lily Room, the opening poem ‘Tidings’ – a sort of ‘before-time’ evocation of the mother-baby relationship in utero – is followed by a renga sequence (a Japanese form full of seasonal language). And the collection ends mirror-wise: another renga sequence, followed by ‘June’ which tries to capture a perfect, suspended moment about to tumble towards the future. The collection as a whole deals with postpartum mental illness among other things, so a future-greeting poem seemed like the right way to sign off.
No, I wasn’t inspired by a particular other poet, though I’d like to shout out Denise Saul’s The Room Between Us for one of the most exquisite endings I’ve ever read.
Can you tell me about how you approached time in Noctuary? The collection feels like it unfolds over the course of a single expansive night – a deep, intimate night-time outside of the world’s usual reckonings – so it is a sort of miracle to realise that there is a tiny baby at the start of the book and a three-year-old at the end. Did you set out to create this night-world-space, or did the poems just come to you with that atmosphere? My second question is about the person of the father: in these delicate, lyrical poems the father speaks of himself as a farmer, a packhorse, a poacher, a night-watchman, a water-carrier and so on – ancient roles within a rural community. Can you talk about your exploration of the father through these archetypes?
NC: Ah, the packhorse – that came from running to the train. I had Soren in a sling across my chest, a nappy bag off one shoulder, my rucksack over the other, and a suitcase trailing from one hand. Chaos. But even as I ran, I was thinking about the labour of love. The weight and carry to it. With all these occupations, I was just trying to find an image to explore the ‘workness’ of love. Its dedication and discipline. As well as the joy, etc.
I love that ‘June’ was going to be the first poem in the next book. I have some recollection of Heaney saying that he liked a book’s last poem to always point the direction for where his poetry or thought might go next. The last poem serving as one of those old country signposts – Next Book, 600km.
Noctuary was a strange experience because that initial part of new parenthood felt all-encompassing. And then, the shock of the experience in the last poem of being awake but the child being old enough to sleep through the night. You find yourself less needed, your main duty (their most vulnerable years) seemingly served. What was difficult was that the poem felt like an end that didn’t point the way forward to any new terrain. It was an era ending – but who knew what was coming next. Poetically, that took me some time to figure out. I hope it has been a smoother course for you – the ‘June’ poem makes me think I can hope so. What do you think?
I would also like to ask about vulnerability. Good poems, like these in your collection, risk taking the reader into personally uncomfortable terrain. For me, that vulnerability tended to come in the redraft. I had to work up to being that vulnerable with a reader. How did you navigate it how true to be? Did you find it natural, part of the process of the poem? Or was there a later point when looking over the manuscript that you hesitated on certain poems?
EH: And thanks for making the connection between your child’s sleep patterns and the work of tending to them; of course, that makes sense of Noctuary being set at night – the arena of the work – and I can sympathise with feeling bereft when the work is suddenly no longer needed.
I came to writing poems relatively late (in my late-thirties). Early motherhood gave me the first subject matter I felt any confidence ‘owning’ as a writer, if that makes sense. I was thrilled to have this rich topic to explore formally and lyrically, and I can say honestly that this turned me into a poet. Then I became worried that motherhood might be the only thing I wrote about! But actually what has happened is that, with my newfound (and still developing) skills and voice, I’m now turning to other topics – the climate crisis, art, war, my relationship with Japan – in a way I never would have dared to previously.
In terms of vulnerability, one thing I love about poems is that they can be truthful without being factual – or rather, whether they are factual isn’t really the point. In the Lily Room tells a story of a new mother, and I didn’t find it difficult to tell her story. I was the writer, presenting my protagonist and her world with as much skill (and also kindness) as I could. I didn’t and don’t feel that she is me, although we have much in common. My whole aim with the collection was to say true things about early motherhood – which feels emancipatory rather than vulnerable.
I wonder if it’s different for fathers? Did you feel a pressure to wrap the feelings and experiences you wanted to talk about in intellectual or theoretical packaging, to be at a distance from it? You mentioned a love of the lyric burst. I’m wondering how the lyric helped you navigate this territory – thinking of poems such as ‘Midnight’ and Thirties’, two of my favourites in the collection.
NC: First off – truthful without being factual. That’s a sentiment that we need to really underline. Absolutely agree with you. It’s so important for poetry. When mentoring people I often mark out moments in poems that feel ‘true – as in it happened, rather than being poetically true – true to the poem’. Mainly I warn mentees about being too wedded to real-life event. I badger on about my Ingmar Bergman quote, ‘I’m not trying to make it real, I’m trying to make it alive’. I argue that sometimes making it real just gets in the way of it being alive.
But here’s the deal – different poems have different rules. I’m thinking here of my intentions across recent books. Noctuary had those poems you mention, and others, where I wanted to try capture the trueness of what I was feeling. For these, a lot of the process was introspection. What did I really feel? In my recent collection there is a sequence ‘Love Letters from the Tenth Year (of Marriage)’, and a large part of it was getting to the root of what I was experiencing – that men especially confuse love changing with love ending. And it can be a sorrowful change. But there are also poems where I wanted to sing and so I just let the rhythm decide the true route of the poem – or I wanted to be anarchic and so let the whim choose the true course.
What do you think about this idea – the poetries we write? The rule is maybe only ever the rule for that type of poem. Is that something you felt in In the Lily Room and/or now that you are writing these new poems?
EH: I like the idea of evolving poetries. Maybe it has something to do with the shifting positionality of the poet? Am I as the poet standing apart from the poem like a painter facing an easel, or am I elbows-deep in it like a midwife? What’s at stake for me?
With In the Lily Room, I was directing all my attention to the new mother, sitting beside her and trying to empathise with her so I could speak as/with her. It was important to me that I achieved this. With my new pamphlet To an Unknown Receiver: Sonnets & Cascades, my gaze takes in the wider world – humanity’s creative brilliance and grievous harms (put simply it’s a sequence of eco-sonnets). While I was writing the poems I thought I’d found a more ‘lyrical’ voice, less encumbered by specific circumstance – but looking back, of course the poet is still a parent, a woman, a person of Asian heritage; I’ll never not be those things.
Hm, rules. I think of poetry rules like I do rules of a game: as conventions, or traditions – artefacts of shared practice. To engage with rules (by following them or by subverting them) is to engage with the history of the game, and the people who’ve played it before you, and ultimately to add to that history. I often talk about ‘belonging through participation’. The point is that it’s intentional, not passive. I was that annoying kid in class who put her hand up and asked for the reason behind every instruction – not to be a pain but to be more able to fully participate. You can’t be intentional if it’s just mechanics.
Let me come at this another way. I think the ‘real’ that you were trying to get at in the poems you mention is truth over fact, because you were reaching for a ‘real’ resonance. As far as I’m concerned, poetry is resonating language – it produces resonance in the reader/listener, and also between the maker and the receiver. Poets are humans in the world, and like with other humans sometimes the things of the world (or their echoes in our thoughts) cause a resonance that stops us in our tracks. We have lots of terms for this: revelation, light-bulb, truth, connection. Virginia Woolf calls it a ‘moment of being’ (I learned that from Kim Moore). As poets, I think our work is to play with words, syntax, register, form, shape and rhythm to produce a resonance like the one we encountered in the world – we tap our constructions with little hammers repeatedly to check for it, and we know when we’ve got it. So there is something ‘real’ about it, but actually what we’ve made has travelled quite far from the biographically factual thing which sent us on the quest to begin with.
Do I sound loopy? It’s my inner musician talking, I think. I wrote music years before I wrote poems. I also did maths and philosophy at uni – start me off on a chat about meaning and structure and we’ll be here awhile!
What is resonating with you at the moment, Niall?
NC: How funny you say that about the little hammers checking that the poem is sounding right – I use this analogy with mentees too. Dum–dum–dum – no, this line just isn’t right. Hear it. It’s muffled. It’s constricted and isn’t ringing properly. A poem is just a bell we are tapping to make sure it is sounding out clearly.
This is where public readings are so important too. Nothing will reveal a bum note more than reciting in front of an audience. These readings are another testing ground for the poem. I wonder if we see them too much as an end-point – the poem is done and can now be read to people. Wouldn’t it be better to view the public reading as another path that should bring us back to the desk for a redraft?
This is a tangent but something I wish I could change in the culture – the idea that discovery/magic is only in the first draft. We get that buzz of turning a blank page into something, and we seem to think this is the greatest act. But it’s not. There is just as much discovery and wonder in the second draft and the tenth draft. And the hundredth. It’s here you find the deeper mysteries.
But I would like to close with one last question. I also have a fascination with music, despite playing no instrument. How does your background in music influence your writing? Do you sometimes feel it in specific ways – oh, that’s definitely the music speaking, etc. Do you feel that musical knowledge/predilection can serve well as a guide in poetry?
EH: A big question! I’ll say a couple of things.
Firstly, music is a language – one that is both highly meaningful, associative and elemental and also highly mathematical. I’ve spent a lifetime puzzling over musical structures, the maths of intervals, modulations etc – my first musical love was jazz – so it’s a short hop to puzzling over poetical language and structures. In both music and poetry, the thrill of this sort of study for me is in the meeting between ‘pure’ structure and human practice. For example, unpacking the layered music of a ghazal at the level of the line and glimpsing how (and why) this music has been used and shaped by so many generations of people in different languages. Or at the other extreme, considering the freedom/emptiness of twelve-note composition in the context of a battered post-WWI Europe. It makes me so fond of human beings, that we make these complex, living, meaning-bearing structures called language, that we put everything of ourselves into them.
Secondly, I’m a singer, and much of my singing has been in a religious context, where singing has a very important role – to embody ancient texts so that everyone can receive them, and to create the conditions for a response, either individual or collective. Singing helps people to resonate together, if you like. So I guess the idea of resonating with (and for) other people isn’t so strange to me. This vocational idea of the poet is by no means limited to people of faith, of course. I know plenty of poets totally committed to their path who couldn’t be less religious! Singing the truth in urgent times.
I think you’re right about the endpoint of a poem, and reading aloud. The other week I read a poem from In the Lily Room in the same set as a much newer piece, and realised I’d used the phrase ‘utterly engrossed’ in both! I took that learning back to the desk the next day. Perhaps we’ve given books too much authority and we ought to think of them more as programme notes for the ongoing poetic performance? My friend Will Harris sometimes reads more than one version of the same poem at readings, and actually talks about its development. We should make this more of a thing!
It’s been lovely to chat with you Niall, thanks for the conversation.
Erica Hesketh is a poet and editor, originally from Japan and Denmark. Her poetry has been commissioned by the Royal Festival Hall, Spread the Word, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Exeter University. Her debut collection, In the Lily Room, is published by Nine Arches Press and explores early motherhood. Her poem ‘Night feed’ was highly commended in the 2025 Forward Prizes. She is also the author of To an Unknown Receiver: Sonnets & Cascades (Guillemot Press), and co-author with Laura Sampson of the forthcoming Moon, Snow, Blossom: Wintry Folk Tales from Across Japan (Elliott & Thompson). From 2016 to 2024 she was director of the Poetry Translation Centre, and she is currently artistic director of Winchester Poetry Festival.
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His latest collection, The Island in the Sound, was published in September of 2024 by Bloodaxe Books. He works as a librettist and is the editor of Poetry London. He lives in Fife.
