The Remedies

"I used to live in the same village as Kathy Towers and there’s a sense of shared landscape. I’m aware that I’ve been trying to write inspired by some of the same landscapes as her – that bit of the Hope Valley in the Peak District – and for somebody to make a familiar landscape strange to you is a really powerful thing. She’s got a real precision to her work; they’re really haunting poems that take the pastoral and subvert it. I was most drawn to the title sequence, “The Remedies,” where there’s this idea that she’s decided to make flowers that are traditional cures for things suffer from the malady that they’re supposed to correct – what a great way of making something fresh, of making us look at something differently. They’re really melancholy, beautiful poems. Again, I’d just returned from Greenland when I read this and I was particularly drawn to the way she writes about ice. There’s a beautiful poem about icebergs that are almost like a bridal procession, and I thought that was just such an achievement. Having spent a lot of the summer myself trying to write about these awe-inspiring icy landscapes and trying to find an appropriate language of awe, to read somebody else’s way of evoking ice was really wonderful. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That’s something I’ve often felt in similar landscapes. I was thinking about the murmurations that I’ve tried to write about, and aspects particularly of the Hope Valley, and the more you try to write about, to inhabit a landscape, the more it makes you feel strange in your own skin – almost as if you don’t have the right to belong to it somehow. These are such pared-back, elegant and wistful poems. They feel like they’re poems that are really achieved, that they’ve been redrafted and redrafted and worked at, and I admire that sense of craft and whittling something down to what you really want to say."