My collection Hail Sisters of the Revolution (Cowslip Press), was published in the autumn of 2022. I celebrated with launches in Ulverston, where I live, and Lancaster, where I took my Creative Writing MA. Musical guests Crikey Aphrodite and #SASS – women’s acapella groups – added to the pleasure of the events. After the restrictions of the pandemic, it was a joy to read poems, mix with people, and listen to live music.
If you’d like to buy a copy, please contact me on caroline.gilfillan@btinternet.com
I’ll be reading poems from the collection at Brewery Poets in Kendal on 26 May, and at Verbalise – again at The Brewery – on 29 July.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a couple of poems published and placed in competitions. A poem about my grandmother won third prize in the Suffolk Poetry Society’s George Crabbe competition and will be included in my next collection. Here it is.
My Grandmother Visits the Father she’s Never Known (1883)
I was nine going on ten, coughing up
globs of phlegm, when Mother dragged me,
shivering, on the train from Whitburn
to an Edinburgh New Town house with windows
tall as horses and a surgeon’s plaque on the wall.
When asked why we’d come here, instead of going
to the quack in our town, she shushed me,
rang the bell and told me to watch my manners.
When we entered the surgeon’s room, my head
went into a spin, for the place smelt of wood, cigars,
hair oil – fine things that didn’t find their way
into the house where we boarded. He ran cool
fingertips round my jaw and pressed the chilly kiss
of a stethoscope to my chest before pronouncing
that I’d live. His eyes, I noticed, were brown as peat,
the lashes long. He had fine, grey whiskers.
Handing Mother a bottle of cough medicine
he said, stern, didn’t she have something warmer
to dress me in, something that fitted properly?
And what about a pair of boots that didn’t leak?
At this, she ordered me in a voice sharp as her
sewing scissors to wait outside. Through the door
I’d left open a crack I watched her hands
go on to her hips, heard the hiss of her whisper,
and the words, not enough. Red-cheeked,
he pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket.
Mother snatched a bundle of notes from him
and rushed me out of the front door.
Hurrying to the station, she insisted it was the wind,
cold as a butcher’s knife, making her eyes water.
I’ve written poetry for as long as I can remember, and, like most poets, I’m part of a community that discusses and celebrates poetry. My poem Advice from the Ulverston Canal, written during the Covid-19 lockdown, was featured in a display of lockdown poems in Tullie House, Carlisle, as part of the BBC Contains Strong Language festival in September 2020. I hope it captures both the beauty and the sorrow of this extraordinary time.
My poems have recently appeared in two anthologies: Reflected Light (Grey Hen Press), an anthology of poems that respond to works of art, and Bloody Amazing, 123 taboo smashing poems about menstruation and the menopause – a subject long overdue for poetic exploration.
I’ve published four poetry collections, most recently Poet in Boots, an illustrated poetry pamphlet about my walk along the Norfolk Coastal Path. My collection, Pepys (a poetic biography of the diarist Samuel Pepys) was published by Hawthorn Press in November 2012. My collection Yes, (Hawthorn Press, 2010), won the award for the best poetry book in the East Anglian Book Awards.
To buy any of these books – my own or the anthologies – please email me at caroline.gilfillan@btinternet.com
Like many poets, I enter competitions, partly because they bring recognition and prize money if you are placed, but also because they provide a strong incentive to polish individual poems. I’m delighted to say that my poem Reunion after a Long Pandemic was a runner-up in the 2021 Prole competition, and was published in their July issue. Here’s the poem:
Reunion after a Long Pandemic
You know the flat on the Hills Estate
where we slept under a pink striped blanket?
Start there. The block will smell of lime tree blossom
and there’ll be no drum and bass rolling like thunder
round the blocks. You’ll find the Escorts and Beamers
have disappeared: all that’s left are metal skeletons
hunched over faint smears of oil
between the dandelions.
Keeping your hood over your hair, head for
the main road. Watch out for the ditch –
a girl could drown in its khaki sludge.
Pass the green-tin synagogue and the stables
from where the ponies used to trot out,
proud as paint, on a Saturday morning.
My street is next to the mini-mart that sold
sesame loaves perfumed with butter and honey.
I’ll make a chalk mark faint as hope on the kerb
in front of my house. Go down the steps –
careful, careful – don’t trip and break a leg –
whistle the first line of Catch a Fire
and I’ll be there, and the dog with the honking bark,
and the ebony cat called Emily Pankhurst,
and the gas fire hissing its salmon-pink song.
You can kiss me, and I’ll kiss you back.
Our teeth will be snow. Take off your threads
and hob-nailed boots. I can summon up enough water
for a bath. Naked, you’ll know you’ve arrived.
You never know when you will be successful, but in 2019 I won the Yeovil Literary Prize for Poetry, and the judge, Philip Gross, commented: ‘This poem is so many things – colloquial and imagistic, private and public, snappy and sad and tough and ultimately – most startling – tender.’ Here’s my poem.
Origins
I was hatched in an angry nest. Spiky it was,
with loss and bruised knuckles, the coarse cloth
of a nun’s habit. It smelled of sulphur tonic
that could rot a girl’s teeth. Yet it was softened
by a river of hair running below a waist,
the hands of a man who’d been lifted by love.
The feathers were gleaned from a plum tree
in Hertfordshire whose roots crawled beneath
the Great North Road. I came out sickly
and damp by the sea, by a tamarisk tree.
Kindness raised me, and fairness and people
who knew when to keep their mouths shut.
But the anger had got into me, had scoured me
into something shiny and cross. I wrote letters
to the newspaper, received kinky replies. I hung out
with dope-smoking darlings, and stewed up bile against
the National Front, whose head office was in our town.
My parents shook their heads in private, let me fly,
jesses trailing. And now I talk to them in the gentle tent
of night, and they nod and breathe life into me, as I
breathe into them, so we are reborn, reborn, day on day.