As Isabelle Baafi’s debut collection, Chaotic Good, is awarded the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, we’re sharing a conversation between the poet and her editor, Lavinia Greenlaw, from the book’s launch event at the London Review Bookshop.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. A recording of the entire event can be listened to on the London Review Bookshop podcast.
Lavinia Greenlaw: I’d like to go back to when you first encountered poetry. In an interview, you said, ‘When I was five, a children’s author came to my school and talked to us about how books are made. By that point, I was already obsessed with books. That was the day I realised that I wanted to write them, too.’
Isabelle Baafi: I don’t think I was reading poetry back then, but I loved books and I loved entering different worlds. That was the moment I realised that books don’t just exist; people make them. And so, I wanted that to be me.
In terms of poetry, there were many different firsts. My family had a poster of ‘If—’ by Rudyard Kipling on the wall. It was probably my dad’s idea, and it’s quite a grand and big poem. I used to read that a lot. I remember studying ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and discovering the symbolism of the albatross and realising for the first time that something could be invoked to represent something else. I was just fascinated by that idea. Throughout my teen years, I wrote poetry as I studied it. But it’s been a long journey of going to it, and coming away from it, and coming back to it – each time with a different impetus.
Lavinia Greenlaw: And that going away and coming back happens, perhaps, during the evolution of an individual poem as well?
Isabelle Baafi: There are many poems that I would set aside and then, years later, I’d pick them back up. There are loads of poems that almost didn’t make it, and it would just be one thought or one line that stood out. I would feel ‘maybe this can be salvaged’. And that would bring me back.
‘Subject’s a tricky word, isn’t it? Like when people say, ‘What are your poems about?’ That’s just an awful question, difficult to answer for anyone. I say, ‘Cats and sunsets.’ I think that’s always a good reply. Shuts them up.’
Lavinia Greenlaw: One of the many things that fascinates me is that your work always keeps alive that sense of a dynamic relationship with the subject. One useful illustration of that is your poem ‘To the woman sobbing into her phone on a park bench’. There’s her, the phone and the person she’s talking to. There’s you and her and the poem. And you’re capturing how the subject took shape, perhaps, for you.
Isabelle Baafi: When you say subject, you mean the topic, or . . . ?
Lavinia Greenlaw: Well, yes. Subject’s a tricky word, isn’t it? Like when people say, ‘What are your poems about?’ That’s just an awful question, difficult to answer for anyone. I say, ‘Cats and sunsets.’ I think that’s always a good reply. Shuts them up.
What I suppose I’m getting at is that there’s a triangulation between the thing – could be a phrase, could be an event, could be the observing of the woman and the hearing of the conversation – the poet, and what becomes the poem. So from the start, it’s not a direct engagement. There’s a thing being made. And the thing that’s being made is about the core experience that’s taking place – not really about the fact there’s a woman on a bench, but it’s about what is felt out of what is being heard.
Isabelle Baafi: As you’re speaking, I’m remembering one of our earlier conversations. There’s the event that happens, and then there’s you writing the poem, remembering it. Every time you come back to edit the poem, you’re mediating that and changing the truth of what happened. There’s always a form of a collapsing of temporalities as well, between the then and the now. There was the moment I saw the woman, and there’s the moment I first tried to write about it, and there have been all those moments since. I’m always interested in involving the reader as well, even when it’s not in the second person and I’m not addressing them directly. It’s always, I suppose, about finding a way of coming at the event slant-ways.
Lavinia Greenlaw: ‘Tell the truth, but tell it slant.’
Isabelle Baafi: Exactly.
‘As I was writing, I was always writing not just to dwell or mope, but always to find a way through. Finding a vocabulary for difficult ideas and circumstances and realities is to find a way of conquering them.’
Lavinia Greenlaw: Chaotic Good has been receiving praise even before it was published. There’s been great excitement about the collection and how it helps to ‘redefine stigma and trauma’. It is challenging our perception of and our response to those things in the way that the person speaking in the first person throughout the book navigates and interprets and then actually turns over and transforms these things.
Isabelle Baafi: As I was writing, I was always writing not just to dwell or mope, but always to find a way through. Finding a vocabulary for difficult ideas and circumstances and realities is to find a way of conquering them. And holding onto the self, redefining the self and shaping the reality around the speaker.
Lavinia Greenlaw: The book really does that. It’s incredibly powerful and constructive and really stimulating. It takes us through things which can obliterate the self – and then you realise the self is not only still here, but is remade. The poems themselves do that, too. I love the way that you play with form. You have lots of technical – I was about to say ‘games’, but it is much more thoughtful than a game; it’s playfulness used to slip and slide from one meaning to another. There are poems where you’re offered the option, when it comes to key words, of two opposing choices. It’s as if you’ve made a conscious decision to actively and explicitly mark the runaway aspects of language that slip through our fingers. However much we carefully control and make a poem, that kind of aliveness or wildness of language can’t help but be present and actually should be present if a poem is to feel alive and, ideally, wild.
Isabelle Baafi: That’s one of the things I find fascinating about language: these very narrow gaps between ideas which are in close proximity – things like homophones and homographs – and can look the same but mean very different things. At times I play with puns as well, and I like experimenting with language to show how things can be misdirected and how easy those mistakes are, because I feel like that reflects much of life.
‘I love to leave enough unsaid that the reader can fill in the gaps and use association and associative logic. In a way, I’m drawing on dynamics and realities that exist in the world without feeling the need to be polemical about them, and to just evoke and invoke, and to comment indirectly through the reader.’
Lavinia Greenlaw: I think that’s true. The poems are written in the first person, but my experience of reading the book is that the speaker isn’t characterised. The speaker feels like a presence and a position which the reader is invited to occupy, in a way. And although the details, the narrative details, are very specific, we read it not so much as somebody’s story, but as a series of investigations. The relationship between life and art is far more complex than something that can be simply divided into ‘truth’ or ‘not truth’ – and, actually, the reader is activated by their own experiences and associations. Ultimately, yours – not only yours, but a poet’s specifics are a surface of the poem and the reader meets you underneath that surface. Does that make sense to you?
Isabelle Baafi: It does, and I love that, what you’re saying about the reader bringing in their own understanding and themselves. That’s what I love. I love to leave enough unsaid that the reader can fill in the gaps and use association and associative logic. In a way, I’m drawing on dynamics and realities that exist in the world without feeling the need to be polemical about them, and to just evoke and invoke, and to comment indirectly through the reader. Maybe that ties back to what you’re saying about triangulation. In terms of the autobiographical, there are many poems which say ‘I’, but they’re not from my perspective; the ‘I’ is not even a version of me. There are things which draw from my experiences, but the details cannot be attributed to things that actually happened.
Lavinia Greenlaw: It’s like what Philip Sidney said, ‘I am not I, pity the tale of me’; ‘pity’ as in ‘empathise’. The reader is looking for themselves, and I think these poems invite our presence and involvement and empathy beautifully. I’ve so loved our editorial sessions. They were a joy.
This interview took place at an event celebrating the publication of Isabelle Baafi’s debut, Chaotic Good, hosted at the London Review Bookshop on 9 April 2025. With our gratitude to the London Review Bookshop podcast – the full episode can be listened to here.
Buy the Book
A piercing debut about how we are made, how we get lost and how we find new selves.
About the Author
Isabelle Baafi is a poet, editor and critic. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress) won the Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her poetry and prose have been published in the TLS, the Poetry Review, the London Magazine, Oxford Poetry and elsewhere.
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