A Place to Make Sense of the World

Ted Hughes said writing is about trying to take hold of the reality of your life. Why else work away at poems, redrafting and honing them? For me, the poem’s a place to make sense of the world and your place in it – to conjure up things that move, thrill and scare you. The poems in this pamphlet chart a period of intense personal change. Clinical depression hit me. For the first time I understood what others, friends and family alike, had fought with. I understood more about myself – how it was something I’d always carried, but also how hope and happiness come from the (sometimes painful) self-knowledge that poetry confronts. No coincidence one of the best-selling anthologies out there is called Staying Alive. I’m after emotional truth in these poems, though, not the documentary truth. Truths I hope anyone can recognise, rather than the illusion of a reliable account. I’m interested in different ways of seeing. We fall in love, and the world takes on a different shape and colour. A young boy stands in a football crowd, awestruck and scared and excited, caught in the moment. The hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Life goes on.

Notes on For Real, a pamphlet of poems by Ben Wilkinson.
Winner of the Poetry Business Prize and the Northern Promise Award. 
First published in The North #52, 2014.