I started working on Lovelines about 2 years ago. I never thought my poems were good enough to be published and indeed only started reading them in public recently. I gained confidence through very positive receptions to my poems at small Hackney speakeasies, poetry readings, Labour Party and Stand up to Racism meetings. Some of the poems are very recent, some date back 40 years.
Rosemary Bailey, a well known poet herself, now in her 80s, is my partner’s aunt, and she also gave me great encouragement, reading and commenting on some of the poems in the book. With her help I learnt how to shape my work which tended to degenerate into a personal or political rant, and to try to see things always from the readers viewpoint. Poems need crafting and re-working many times. They almost have a life of their own; they speak to you in the middle of the night or half way through dinner conversations.
Poems have always just come into my head. Until very recently, when occasionally people have asked me to write about certain topics, I have never sat at a desk at a particular time and thought, I must write something. The ideas come, I jot a few notes down on a scrap of paper, and then go back to think about them, months or sometimes years later.
So, the opus being ready, I had no idea how to get it out in the world. My IT skills are negligible and, combined with Covid 19 lockDown, the practical task seemed insurmountable. However, help was at hand in the large, cuddly shape of David Gardiner, a friend’s partner. He has published several books himself, runs a Poetry magazine called Gold Dust, and was willing to help me by editing the book and advising me on self-publishing through Lulu.com. He spent many painstaking hours on margins and lay out.
It was Dave’s idea to illustrate the book so I contacted another dear friend, Jeff Stewart, who although living in Australia, has been a regular house guest at my home, together with his partner Cath Davies. He works with many art forms: graffitti, children’s entertainment through story telling and hand crafted puppet theatres, poetry, line drawing. He agreed to create the beautiful illustrations without which the book would lose a lot of its force. He knows me very well and his illustrations are very much in tune with my verses.
Once lockDown is over we plan to have a Very Big Party to launch Lovelines in real time at a venue in Hackney.
It has been a 40 year held dream of mine to publish my poems, and there are many more to come. The process has been far more enjoyable than I ever imagined. There are many more to come!
Praise
This collection does what it says on the tin. It speaks of ‘love, fear, lust, empathy’ of what it is to be human in a wide variety of settings and situations.
Compassionate though never sentimental, these are poems of lived experience, recording moments of perception in the life of an unusually adventurous woman who has been, and seen and thought everywhere – ‘world’s apart’ from the Lebanon to Lincolnshire, from Hackney to the horrors of the Jungle refugee camp in Calais and all stations in between.
Fresh, accurate, powerful, these are poems for our times. Don’t miss them.
R V Bailey