On this week’s podcast Sally Festing discusses her latest collection My Darling Derry. It’s a sequence of poems based on an archive of Sally’s father’s letters and diaries which she inherited 20 years after he died. It explores the impact of mental illness on her family which led her father, the neuroscientist Derek Richter, to establish the Mental Health Foundation.
Here is a poem from the collection.
A Poetry of Release
with a debt to WS Graham
My father’s efforts ran unhindered as the rain.
Those dearest to him from childhood
gone, he thought grief a gift he should earn.
There’s relatively little words can do for grief
but what else did he have?
There were, he knew, huge worlds to share. Explore.
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Let this poem be a still thing, a mountain
constructed from glass. I begin with
the ghost of an intension which blasts itself
to nurture a new collision.
Perhaps the shape of us – the wreckage,
the shame and the dance – is in our language.
Poetry Non-Stop 