A Climb Through Altered Landscapes (Blackwater, 1998)
Retrospective Interview:
Q: You are often spoken of as a seminal love poet. What is the relationship between your love poems and your political ones?
A: I often think there is more continuity there than meets the eye. I came to a point just before The Exile's House when I realised that I'd taught myself how to write an Ian Parks love poem - and that I could have continued to do do with very little effort. There was no challenge in that and no room to develop or grow. What continues into the political poems is a certain tone, a certain passion, and a resistance to exaggerate a situation for the same of the poem. Elegy for the Chartist Poets is entirely political - but I believe it balances on the kind of intimate address I came to use in the love poems. And the love poems keep coming too.
Q: You chose "Unicorns" and "Sirens", which are powerful contemporary reimaginings of the folkloric/mythic to my reading. What relevance to political poetry are these images?
A: I see them in a different context really. They're two of several poems - The Blizzard, The Guest, and Lavernock included - that deal with the idea of an encounter with the mysterious, the ghostly, or the miraculous. Some of the love poems too are poems of encounter although they occur in a much more natural environment. There's a fine line between the world as we perceive it through or senses and the generally unperceived world that lies outside it. Robert Graves understood that when he wrote The White Goddess. Poetry can sometimes act as a connection point with the supernatural. Unicorns and Sirens try to find a language for such encounters. A new poem, Winter Hill, describes an everyday encounter but tries to see the mysterious in it.