When I was living in the States I befriended a rare and generous soul, a poet and professor named Robert Cording, who had this to say about writing poetry:
“The poem has to feel, I think, as if there’s a real person struggling with real experiences that will not yield some handy lesson, but nevertheless are not entirely without meaning. The voice that convinces will always be the voice of the individual, not as a spokesperson for this or that idea.”
When I came to write my second book,
Her Father’s Daughter, I had to remember this to get me through the darker parts.
