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My poem, 'Goulash', which was published in The North www.poetrybusiness.co.uk was shortlisted for the 2007 Forward prize for best single poem. Here it is:

GOULASH
for Grevel

A crucial ingredient is the right frame of mind
so abandon all ideas of getting on. Stop pedalling,
dismount, go indoors and give yourself masses of time.
Then begin by heating a pool of oil in a frying pan
and, Mrs. Beeton style, take a dozen onions
even though the space you're working in is smaller
than the scullery in a Victorian mansion. Pull off
the papery wrappings and feel the shiny globes' solidity
before you chop. Fry the segments in three batches.
Don't fuss about weeping eyes, with a wooden spoon
ease the pieces as they turn translucent and gold.
When you've browned but not burnt the cubes of beef
marry meat and onions in a deep pan, bless the mixture
with stock, spoonfuls of paprika, tomato purée
and crushed garlic. Enjoy the Pompeian-red warmth.
Outside, the sun is reddening the pale afternoon
and you'll watch as it sinks behind blurring roofs,
the raised arms of trees, the intrepid viaduct.
In the kitchen's triumph of colour and light the meat
is softening and everything in the pot is seeping
into everything else. By now you're thinking of love:
the merging which bodies long for, the merging
that's more than body. While you're stirring the stew
it dawns on you how much you need darkness.
It lives in the underskirts of thickets where sealed buds
coddle green, where butterflies folded in hibernation,
could be crumpled leaves. It lives in the sky that carries
a deep sense of blue and a thin boat of moon angled
as if it's rocking. It lives in the silent larder and upstairs
in the airing cupboard where a padded heart pumps
heat, in the well of bed where humans lace together.
Time to savour all this as the simmering continues,
as you lay the table and place at its centre a small jug
in which you've put three tentative roses and sprigs
of rosemary. At last you will sit down with friends
and ladle the dark red goulash onto plates bearing
beds of snowhite rice. As you eat the talk will be bright
as the garnets round your neck, as those buried
with an Anglo-Saxon king in a ship at Sutton Hoo,
and the ring of words will carry far into the night.

IMAGES OF WOMEN
by Contemporary Women Poets

'Images of Women', the exciting anthology of poetry by contemporary women poets, is now available. For more information please go to the Images of Women page.

There is an in-depth interview with me on the website of poet and academic Lidia Vianu: lidiavianu.scriptmaina.com

JOURNEY

I thought I'd scotched the exam dream by writing it down
but it's sneaked back. As I wake up I ask myself
why I've dreamt failure again. And now,
trapped on a bus that's overpacked with children
newly fledged from school, with women
yoked to shopping, with pushchairs and irritability,
I ask again: why has someone thrown away
their life on the Piccadilly Line? And I'm appalled
at the unending blankness the person must have seen,
don't want to enter it. Even the black rows of seat backs
speak despair. Why? I ask and this time I'm crying
and remembering how I slowly cast off fears which clung
like Cinderella rags, remembering the love I've been given.
Outside, I glimpse a heap of oranges, each a small sun,
and stares from uncurtained windows. We lurch
to a standstill thirty yards from a stop. An elderly
Indian man in a hat with earflaps shouts at the driver
to open up. The driver roars back. Muttering breaks out
like a measles rash. I can smell the bodies underneath
coats - any minute now the anger will fizz over. At last
the doors of this glass and metal trap zip apart
and what I want is to stream out with the overladen,
the crumbling, the long-legged kids in their clunky shoes.
What I want is to walk along Green Lanes in nothing
but the simple cool of my skin past the unending,
unbeautiful buildings, past the rows of steel kisses
sealing the entrances to Underground Stations.
What I want is to say: praise be for the wren I saw
this morning among the tiny flowers blue-creepering
a terrace wall, for the scrawled notes in my bag,
for mobile phones which offer the chance to send
urgent messages, praise be for Sioux Talbot,
who I read about in a magazine, how she abandoned
middle age in Bournemouth to open an orphanage
in Kathmandu because its streets are full of children
who have lost their parents. What I want is for politicians
to apply their naked minds to this planet's destitution.
What I want is for grassless Green Lanes to continue.

The following article which I wrote about reading Gerard Manley-Hopkins' poem, The Windhover' , appeared in the autumn Poetry News.

THE WINDHOVER by Gerard Manley Hopkins

If I think of 'The Windhover' I see myself in 1953 - all those years ago - sitting at my desk in a temporary classroom in Chichester High School for Girls. It's a warm day and our English teacher, Miss Stevenson, in her clear, engaged voice, is reading out a poem from This Half Century. The anthology is one of our set texts for the O-Level English Literature paper. We are all following the poem on the page:

'I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding…

' I am stunned by the unlikely combinations of words, the many alliterations, the strange rhythms. It is already in my head that I want to be a poet. I know The Lady of Shallot , Wordsworth's The Solitary Reaper and Keats' Autumn by heart and I'm excited by The Ancient Mariner but this poem is something other, something I cannot grasp. Panic rushes through me. What does 'kingdom of daylight's dauphin' mean? What is a 'wimpling wing'? How can the words 'Brute beauty and valour and act, air, pride plume here/Buckle' possibly be put together like this and how can new lines start in such peculiar places? In spite of my panic I'm electrified. The words are so alive, the rhythm is so insistent. Every line is highly charged. In spite of my confusion I have the sense of a door opening.

Over the next two lessons we discussed the poem with sensitive Miss Stevenson. I discovered that 'plume' and 'buckle' were being used as verbs, other pieces of syntax were unravelled and I learnt that the word, 'sillion', in the last verse meant furrow. Everything made more sense, the images, the emotion they carried, began to haunt me and I learnt the poem off by heart. Lines kept repeating themselves in my head:

  'As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'

These words filled me with a huge sense of energy and of closeness to the bird. The last verse, its imagery, alliteration, internal rhymes and the idea that hard monotonous work can create the beauty of shining light, that the friction of dying embers can raise 'gold-vermilion' sparks moved me inexplicably:

  'No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.'

As a Jewish girl who had grown up in Scotland and Surrey and was now living in Sussex, I'd had very limited contact with Judaism and what I'd seen I couldn't relate to. My parents had made it clear to me I wasn't a Christian but they'd let me attend school assemblies. In my mid-teens I was desperately searching for the meaning of life, for something to belong to. I felt considerable sympathy with Christianity and would have liked to to believe in Christ but I couldn't. It might seem strange that I responded so strongly to a poem dedicated: 'To Christ our Lord' which expresses its faith in every line but because I was familiar with the New Testament and literature that expressed Christian views I wasn't deterred by its piety. In fact it was the fervour which spoke to me. I felt close to nature, I longed both for religious belief and love and in this poem I felt a fusing of all three. Moreover, I often found life unbearably difficult in a family where friction simmered beneath the surface and where, in spite of frequent explosions, nothing was ever faced squarely and resolved. Highly strung and often hopelessly lost, I found Gerard Manley-Hopkins' intensity spoke to mine and his stunning creation of light and colour from bleakness at the conclusion of the sonnet offered me a kind of hope.

Other poems in the anthology also had a powerful effect on me. One of these was Thomas Hardy's 'In The Time of the Breaking of Nations'. Its pared, low key writing could hardly have been more different from Hopkins' but I found the simplicity both poignant and comforting.

Two years later in the sixth form Wordsworth's philosophy, and the way he expressed it at the end of 'Tintern Abbey', helped me resolve my search for religion. I became and still am a pantheist. But it was the poems in 'This Half Century', (a half century to which Hopkins belonged in spirit, if not in fact!) which led me to twentieth century poetry. And it was in 'The Windhover', lines of which I find myself repeating in my head to this day, that I discovered the potency of image and rhythm, the spirituality and intensity, which for me lie at the heart of poetry.