Bright Fear again demonstrates your ability to balance an exacting craft and great emotion. I was struck by how uncluttered your book and its individual poems are. How do you achieve such lucidity without sacrificing complexity of thought?

That’s kind of you to say! I felt with Bright Fear that I was trying to get at a poetics which might be seen as rather spare (in that my poems tend to be short and precise), but I also wanted to retain the intensity of thought and emotion that feels true to who I am as a person and poet.

Editing is a huge part of my writing process, so much so that I can’t recall a single poem in this book that hasn’t gone through at least five revisions. I love staring at a single word and asking myself: is this exactly right – in terms of tone, shade, colour, sound or meaning? Am I sacrificing one aspect for another (e.g., it works on the level of musicality, but isn’t quite the right image, or vice versa)? Similarly, I might revisit a longstanding line break or stanza break, then realise that the entire poem would work better if it were completely re-lineated.

This kind of painstaking editing process helps me distil what I’m thinking and feeling. I tend not to allow myself to get away with easy options or quick fixes, which hopefully entails poems which, at the very least, feel satisfying to me as a reader.

Looking at the book as a whole, I note it’s divided into three sections: ‘Grief Lessons’, ‘Ars Poetica’ and ‘Field Notes on a Family’. Could you share your thoughts behind this order?

With the central poetic sequence, ‘Ars Poetica’, I knew it had to be in the middle of the book, insofar as it is the beating heart of Bright Fear. The question of what poetry is, can be, and has been (to me personally) is what enabled the collection to be written in the first place, as these were the first poems to come out of a long period of not writing (about ten months in 2020). ‘Grief Lessons’ felt like a set of rather emotionally difficult poems which help set the tone for the book, so I felt that it had to come earlier in the collection. ‘Field Notes on a Family’ draws together various threads from the first two sections, and ends on a note of brightness and hope, which felt important to me.