Heather Moulson

That’s a relief! Pleasure to be here, Heather

I’d be glad to. I grew up in Manchester, read English at Oxford and worked for many years as a civil servant. I’ve recently been a borough and town councillor and was Mayor of Berkhamstead for a year.

Although I enjoyed my time in local politics, I stood down at the May elections to allow more space for poetry and my family. I have a wife, two daughters and two young grandsons.

As well as writing poetry, I’ve done some reviewing for The High Window and London Grip, among others.

I’m a member of Ver Poets, for whom I manage their social media and compile the monthly e-letter. I’ve recently become their Chair. We’re a long-established group in St Albans but have national and international membership.

We’re currently revamping our website and putting together a varied programme of readings, open-mic events and workshops. Open to non-members too.

I began writing poetry in my early teens. My mother taught English but it was my school teachers who were my main inspiration. One of our texts was The Albermarle Book of Modern Verse which became my gateway into 20th century poetry.

Despite some early success, there was a long period when I didn’t produce anything, even though I still read poems. When I did send some out to magazines, editors were encouraging but nothing got published.

It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I started writing seriously. I had a lack of time and confidence, poetry was too important to risk failing at. Then I reached an age when I realised I was going to fail by default, if I didn’t do something about it.

There are lots of poets I admire and many have influenced me, but I’ll pick out two – one bad and the other good. T.S. Eliot was a great poet but a bad influence on me as a teenager. It made me think good poetry had to be obscure. I was rescued by Hugo Williams – I admired his clarity and directness as well as his poems. How he revised poems from start to finish rather than line by line. It was a revelation to me.

Poetry Salzburg published my first pamphlet The War with Hannibal at the end of 2019. It isn’t an epic to do with the Second Punic War: the title poem is about a Latin lesson and there are poems on a variety of subjects. One reviewer noted that a number of them occur in pairs – two about Larkin, two about tying ties, two ekphrastic poems and three about birds.

The 3-D Clock which Dempsey & Windle published in 2020, deals with my late mother’s dementia. I hadn’t set out to write a sequence about it, but her illness was a large part of my life, so not surprising that it became a subject. The poems kept coming even after the pamphlet was published, although I hope they’ve stopped now – for everyone’s sake.

I’ve recently finished (I think) a series of poems about drawings in Hokusai’s The Great Picture Book of Everything. The pictures were made for an encyclopaedia that wasn’t printed, so they weren’t destroyed in the woodblock-making process. The British Museum acquired them and held an exhibition a couple of years ago.

At the moment, I’m working on a sequence of sonnets about people I met in hospital many years ago. I don’t know if it will come to anything.

My best gig was in June this year, when the Toddington Poetry Society had me as a guest reader at one of the regular meetings in the Luton Irish Forum. They were very welcoming and gave me three quarters of an hour in the first half, and five minutes at the end, so I was able to read a large selection of my work. They even bought copies of my pamphlets!

Yes, my heart went out to poets that had been published at that time. Well, your best gig sounded fantastic but your worst… oh no! Funny, you see these beautiful venues sometimes but….. I hope you make up for it with your next collection.

Thank you so much for coming on the show, Stephen. A fascinating and clever guest (ecstatic applause from audience) so out and about tonight, Stephen?

Ah yes, it’s the shirt and tie, you see. She didn’t like it – and speaking of which, here she comes!