The Black Unicorn

"I first came across The Black Unicorn in the 1980s. The poems are unified and I really like single collections where there’s some sort of connection rather than 40 disparate poems. This book has an incredible unity. I think it’s the most achieved of all of her poetry collections, and it’s a book I’ve had throughout my life. Yes, I met her. I worked for the publishers who published her and she stayed with me for a week when she came over for a feminist book fair in 1983. She was really lovely, really warm. A lot of people were scared of her, but I wasn’t, even though she was very outspoken. I loved the way she wrote and talked about silence and the way she used the Dahomey woman and African mythology in her poetry. I found that really inspiring. I loved how she created characters out of people. She has a poem called ‘Harriet’: ‘Harriet, Harriet, what do we call ourselves now our mother has gone?’ There are all sorts of lines that are really involved and she’s got a poem about being 14. She’s able to move in and out of a range of voices. A lot of her poems are political, like ‘Afterimages’. There are poems where she has been outraged at racism or at some dreadful thing that’s happened. But on the whole I like her quieter poems and her lyrical poems even more. Yes, definitely. She liked that I was Scottish and said, ‘You know, you can be black and Scottish, you don’t have to choose.’ I was in my early 20s and that seemed quite liberating. I was annoyed at not having cottoned on to being black, so I was rejecting the Scottish side of myself, and she was saying no, embrace all your contradictions. And that was very good advice to get at that age. She also read my poems and commented on them. She did an interview with Spare Rib and they sent her a cheque which she sent back to them, telling them to donate it to the magazine. They were annoyed by this, so she sent it to me and I was pregnant at the time with my son, who’s now 22. She told me to open a bank account for my son and her £60 opened my boy’s bank account. Yes, it is. It’s lovely."