I was looking at my most recent poems and found I could see a certain narrative crystallising within them. Well, a theme perhaps, linking them, an elementary organising pattern. ‘Youth’ ‘Middle Age’, ‘Death’. (The elementary organising pattern!)

For a moment it felt big and important, as though in one woman’s life, I might bring to light many more. I began scratching down ideas, seeing how poems I am working on might fit, embryonic poems that have only just announced themselves but seem, almost miraculously, to fit this new scheme. I’m excited and hopeful, but am trying to be measured because I know how ideas work: they appear easy and exciting at first, but turn out to be complex and difficult in the execution.

It is good to have some thoughts on a follow-up to The Poems of Veda Gray, though. Yes, that is what the publishers are calling it—excruciating title, but they decide these things, not me. I wanted to call it Elephant in the Room but they objected on the grounds that it sounds like a children’s book. Meanwhile, the cover: all of Vellum’s poetry is published in the most dismal brown and cream cover art. Reminds me of the shorthand books I used to study at Goodwin’s. My publisher says it is for the purposes of ‘easy identification’—all readers will know a Vellum poetry publication by its puce and tan colour scheme. (All readers will be dissuaded from purchasing a Vellum poetry publication by its puce and tan colour scheme.) Anyway, I’ve given way on this like everything else.

My new work will be absolutely as I want it. That’s the pay-off I foresee. Once The Poems of Veda Gray is out, I will have a little more freedom, a little more say, a little more leverage. I will write the book I want to write, and not feel corralled by the wishes of nervous editors and edgy booksellers and fickle book-buyers.

But I must go. Have dog (new). Needs walk. It’s a fat little brick of a thing: a Boston terrier. Inherited it from my neighbour who can’t walk it (or abide it) anymore. It ‘gets me out of the house’, as they say. The schoolchildren stop and pat it, and ladies in shops are clucky when they see me with him. Little did I know what an introduction to the community a dog might be. Name: Griffin.

Lots of love,

Veda x

† † †

3 SEPTEMBER 1969

Dear Tilde,

I’m sitting here alone in the living room feeling completely out of sorts. I am sure I am being punished for the sin of pride. I jinx myself by imagining I have something to offer the world. You should take my last letter and just put it in the woodstove.