To Fold the Evening Star

"I chose this one because McMillan has been a really big influence on me as a poet – he’s one of the first poets that I started to read when I started to write my own stuff as a teenage, and I think having all his work brought together like this really brings home the seriousness of his particular brand of surrealism. People don’t often pay attention that side of his work. Especially in some of the early poems and collections – like his “The er Barnsley Seascapes” and his poem “Pit Closure as Art” – he has this amazing capacity to use the surreal or black humour to explore themes, particularly of industrial decline and political conflicts. I was very drawn to those poems because they had a landscape or a context that were familiar to me. I think the juxtapositions in his work are really significant – I don’t know anyone else who writes about, say, pit closure, in quite that way. Having a range of his work brought together like this [collection does], really does bring that home. And also, just to see the achievement of his writing life – what an eclectic writer he is. So prolific, too – I mean, what a commitment to poetry; it’s very inspiring. Exactly – that to be local isn’t to be parochial. That’s one of the things I’ve always taken from McMillan; he made me feel like it was OK to write about Chesterfield and Sheffield and to focus on street names. It makes me think of that nice quote from Patrick Kavanagh where he said – and I’m paraphrasing – that to know fully even one field or one gap in a fence is a lifetime’s work. Definitely, and he’s just such a great public figure in the poetry world – he’s a great advocate for poetry, and sometimes people seem to forget about the quality of his own work. That’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to this book – I really enjoyed re-reading it and recapturing that feeling of being a teenager encountering some of those poems for the first time. Even individual poems are full of optimism, even when they’re dealing with landscape and loss – he’s very good at showing rather than telling, but there’s still a sense of hopefulness. I love the way he writes about train journeys and the community aspect of that – what it means for us to travel together. Definitely, and knowing when you’re writing something because you’re the right person to say it or whether you’re writing something because you feel like you should. I’m always wary of that, particularly politically; I’m wary of adding a voice to something that might not happen to be the right voice, as it were, or might not have a particular reason to speak. When Ian McMillan writes about politics it’s very subtle and you always feel as if he needed to be the person to evoke that."