She Will Soar

For my parents, with love and thanks

Contents

Introduction

I’d like to travel back through time and tell my schoolgirl self that, one day, I’d consider poetry to be a magic carpet. (Although, I suspect she would have looked up from wrestling with a knotty slice of D. H. Lawrence only to roll her eyes!) To me now, though, there is no more efficient escape hatch from the daily grind than a poem. In just a handful of lines, a poet can snatch us up to dangle us over mountain ranges, sweep us into starry space or plunge us into the ocean’s green depths. Poetry can take you anywhere.

When I began gathering work by women poets and reading about their lives, I started to understand just how much was stacked against them. To make any kind of art, an artist requires leisure, learning and liberty – all privileges that have been harder for women than men to access throughout history and into our own time. During most periods, only a handful of aristocratic women enjoyed the time, education and opportunity to aspire to a literary career and, even then, they were often mocked or condemned for their daring. ‘Intense thought spoils a lady’s features,’ asserted eighteenth-century critic William Rose, and gentlemen of the press raged against women who neglected their domestic duties to write. Well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, women’s writing has routinely been dismissed and undervalued. Female writers have, therefore, always had good cause to write about the liberties they have so often been denied. What began as a book about travel – through this world and others, through the air and over the waves, into space and beneath the earth – transformed in the gathering into a collection of bright, brave poems about escape and freedom. From frustrated housewives to passionate activists, here is a bold choir of voices shouting for independence and celebrating their power.

This collection was conceived in 2019. These words – about wanderlust and longing to be free – took on a deeper resonance as the world locked down in the face of a global pandemic. The verses I had collected were suddenly my only means of travel or escape and felt all the more necessary for it. We don’t know how long our wings will be clipped in some ways but, like many others, I have found comfort and a taste of liberty every time I have opened a book. I hope this volume can add to that reservoir of consolation.

There are many reasons to be cheerful about the status of women’s writing. Women fill stadiums, win prizes and scale the bestseller lists. Digital ecosystems such as Instagram have created a new generation of poetry lovers and enabled talented poets to leapfrog the genre’s traditional gatekeepers to reach readers. Publishers and critics have acknowledged the imbalances of the past and are newly mindful of their responsibility to produce a more diverse canon for the future. Some of the women in these pages remained unpublished or unpraised during their lifetimes, and I find it completely wonderful to know that they are moving new readers now.