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.

I apologize, as always, for omissions – it was painful to have to whittle down a many-splendoured longlist to something that wouldn’t fill a whole shelf – but I wish you as much pleasure reading these poems as I had foraging for them. One of the greatest beauties of poetry is that it reminds us that we are not, and never have been, alone. These women walked this way before us, and they have left us these bright threads to follow through the dark. For the days when the world weighs heavy on us, for the days when the struggle seems fiercest, I hope you will find a parachute in these pages.

Ana Sampson, 2020

‘I smelt the smell of distance and longed for another existence’ – Wanderlust and Dreams of Freedom

Here are poems that give us permission to dream, whether we are indulging in fantasies of a new life during a golden café afternoon, or whiling away a long lesson on a summer’s day. These poets beautifully express the desire to break free – to be, as Safia Elhillo writes, ‘ungovernable’.

Elinor Wylie imagines herself a tiny, twinkling thing, fleeing the world through an escape hatch so tiny and enchanted that she cannot be pursued. We hear from one of the world’s most celebrated recluses, Emily Dickinson, who locked herself down in the family home for two decades. She spoke to visitors through a door and treated the local children by lowering baskets of sweets from her window, but in her poetry she yearned for flight and freedom. Kate Wakeling, Carol Ann Duffy and civil rights activist Georgia Douglas Johnson urge us to throw open the door. The world is wide and waiting.

The Distance

Over the sounding sea,

Off the wandering sea

I smelt the smell of distance

And longed for another existence.

Smell of pineapple, maize, and myrrh,

Parrot-feather and monkey-fur,

Brown spice,

Blue ice,

Fields of tobacco and tea and rice,

And soundless snows,

And snowy cotton,

Otto of rose

Incense in an ivory palace,

Jungle rivers rich and rotten,

Slumbering valleys,

Smouldering mountains,

Rank morasses

And frozen fountains,

Black molasses and purple wine,

Coral and pearl and tar and brine,

The smell of panther and polar-bear

And leopard-lair

And mermaid-hair

Came from the four-cornered distance,

And I longed for another existence.

Eleanor Farjeon

Maybe I’ll Be The First

In the car, shreds of 8am light pool in,

the half-moons under her eyes.

She told me she’s been searching all her life –

her spine now a heavy root from years of reaching

and stretching and slipping between rock and struggle.

She is a small tree, in a big storm

refusing to be displaced.

Yet every so often

anger strips her tongue

into a lashing whip,

burns hot coals in the pit

of her stomach, blows back smoke

through her heart.

In her village, she watched many close to her fall. She told me

there were murmurs of dreamers hearing an oasis calling,

whispering honey as they slept and schemed,

letting the sweetness drip in deep waves. She said

she wants to know just once, if it is as warm as the dreamers say.

For my mother, I am trying to learn what freedom looks like

in this body of mine. What it tastes like in this mouth or feels like running

through the thick of my hair and the small of my hands. I am trying

to grasp freedom with my teeth, the tips of my toes. Trying to catch it

on my eyelash, for her.

She does not know freedom,

has never known freedom,

but I’ve seen it

looking good, sauntering elsewhere.

I want it.

The choice to go

where I choose when I am ready.

Michelle Tiwo

border/softer

in the new year or when i grow up or

if i live through the night i want to be

ungovernable no longer a citizen

to any of the names assigned my body

& then how boundless could i make my life

which for all its smallness still exhausts me

balancing act of all my margins all my conjugations

of cannot if i live through the night i will bleed

into all my edges until i am no longer a stroke

of some careless man’s pen after

a particularly liquid lunch churchill was said

to have created [ ] with a stroke of his [ ]

& isn’t a map only a joke we all agreed into a fact

& where can I touch the equator & how will i know

i am touching it & where is the end of my country

the beginning of the next how will i know i’ve crossed over

Safia Elhillo

untitled poem – on travel

It is a pleasant thing to roam abroad,

And gaze on scenes and objects strange and grand;

To sail in mighty ships o’er distant seas,

And roam the mountains of a foreign land.

Effie Afton

Galway Dreaming

I watch the gush of life in the May sunshine.

Galway is slow and golden syrup.

I sit outside the same café all afternoon

slowly sipping beers

watching students cavort

like the swallows above the town,

spring sun shines on my face,

I could not be more happy.

My heart leaps like the fish

in the shimmering river

and I let my gladness run free.

I imagine living here in Ireland,

how I would write another book,

a tender and poetic story and

I’d marry a strapping lad

with soft green-blue eyes,

sometimes we’d drink whiskey

and watch the full moon rise,

my cheeks would be pink

and my body a little plump

but my husband would cherish me,

he’d be faithful and steady and strong,

he’d pick me up and make me laugh like a girl.

I’d have a slower heartbeat.

I’d write poems on the beach each morning

and swim a mile in the bay at sunset.

It would be a good and happy life.

London would become a blurred fog,

a memory of bright lights, big talk and speed

and I dream this dream all day,

I dream this dream,

with one slow

exhalation.

Salena Godden

Escape

When foxes eat the last gold grape,

And the last white antelope is killed,

I shall stop fighting and escape

Into a little house I’ll build.

But first I’ll shrink to fairy size,

With a whisper no one understands,

Making blind moons of all your eyes,

And muddy roads of all your hands.

And you may grope for me in vain

In hollows under the mangrove root,

Or where, in apple-scented rain,

The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit.

Elinor Wylie

Your World

Your world is as big as you make it.

I know, for I used to abide

In the narrowest nest in a corner,

My wings pressing close to my side.

But I sighted the distant horizon

Where the skyline encircled the sea

And I throbbed with a burning desire

To travel this immensity.

I battered the cordons around me

And cradled my wings on the breeze,

Then soared to the uttermost reaches

With rapture, with power, with ease!

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Not knowing when the Dawn will come

Not knowing when the Dawn will come,

I open every Door,

Or has it Feathers, like a Bird,

Or Billows, like a Shore?

Emily Dickinson

The Instructions

1. How to spot THE INSTRUCTIONS

THE INSTRUCTIONS come in all shapes and sizes.

They are often found in and around:

• Tall buildings with statues of lions outside

• Faces with an angry expression

• Faces with a smile seen only in the mouth but (crucially) not in the eyes

2. The other instructions

There are plenty of other sorts of instructions, which can of course be useful.

For example:

• Try not to insert any part of your body into this pond: it contains an irritated crocodile

• For best results, keep both eyes open while landing this lopsided helicopter

• Do not under any circumstances eat the angry man’s sandwich

3. What THE INSTRUCTIONS want

You see, THE INSTRUCTIONS aren’t here to help you.

They want to help someone or something else.

THE INSTRUCTIONS say things like:

• No one’s ever done THAT before: it CAN’T be a good idea

• Please do the SAME thing as all those OTHER people over THERE

• Hear that person talking in the PARTICULARLY loud voice? They must DEFINITELY be RIGHT.

4. If you follow THE INSTRUCTIONS

If you follow THE INSTRUCTIONS it is unlikely

anyone will ever be very cross with you.

If you follow THE INSTRUCTIONS you are

guaranteed to feel neat and tidy (but also a little

short of breath)

5. If you don’t follow THE INSTRUCTIONS

You will likely face some tricky moments. Apologies for this.

However, there is also a good chance that something

Strangeexcitingremarkableunexpectedslightlyfrighteningbutbrightlycoloured

will happen.

6. The choice

is yours.

Kate Wakeling

Away and See

Away and see an ocean suck at a boiled sun

and say to someone things I’d blush even to dream.

Slip off your dress in a high room over the harbour.

Write to me soon.

New fruits sing on the flipside of night in a market

of language, light, a tune from the chapel nearby

stopping you dead, the peach in your palm respiring.

Taste it for me.

Away and see the things that words give a name to, the flight

of syllables, wingspan stretching a noun. Test words

wherever they live; listen and touch, smell, believe.

Spell them with love.

Skedaddle. Somebody chaps at the door at a year’s end, hopeful.

Away and see who it is. Let in the new, the vivid,

horror and pity, passion, the stranger holding the future.

Ask him his name.

Nothing’s the same as anything else. Away and see

for yourself. Walk. Fly. Take a boat till land reappears,

altered for ever, ringing its bells, alive. Go on. G’on. Gon.

Away and see.

Carol Ann Duffy

‘A girl unbridled’ – Feeling Free

These are poems to shout and shimmy to, united by the sheer sense of exhilaration with which they leap off the page. Here are all kinds of ways to get free, from Sarah Crossan stomping splashily through streams and Olive Runner racing the wind, to Amy Lowell laughing in the bath. (Also, please do seek out the Shirelles singing ‘What Does a Girl Do?’ before you read Marilyn Hacker’s bold and jaunty answer in ‘Mythology’ – it’s terrific.) There is a certain flavour of freedom I hadn’t felt for years that comes back to me vividly in Esther Morgan’s ‘The Long Holidays’.

These are writers who have found their voices and are not afraid of raising them, celebrating women who – as Carole Satyamurti gleefully notes – ‘sang their own numbers’.

Freedom

Give me the long, straight road before me,

A clear, cold day with a nipping air,

Tall, bare trees to run on beside me,

A heart that is light and free from care.

Then let me go! – I care not whither

My feet may lead, for my spirit shall be

Free as the brook that flows to the river,

Free as the river that flows to the sea.

Olive Runner

Mythology

Penelope as a garçon manqué

weaves sonnets on a barstool among sailors,

tapping her iambs out on the brass rail. Ours

is not the high-school text. Persephone

a.k.a Télémaque-who-tagged-along,

sleeps off her lunch on an Italian train

headed for Paris, while Ulysse-Maman

plugs into the Shirelles singing her song

(‘What Does a Girl Do?’). What does a girl do

but walk across the world, her kid in tow,

stopping at stations on the way, with friends

to tie her to the mast when she gets too

close to the edge? And when the voyage ends,

what does a girl do? Girl, that’s up to you.

Marilyn Hacker

Freedom Poem

Breathe

In.

Breathe

Out.

Gasp,

Sigh,

Scream,

Shout.

Spread your arms wide and smile

find yourself

find your style.

Make yourself tall, as tall can be

do the impossible

one time,

two times,

three

and say out loud

‘I am Free’.