Interview with poet Jackie Wills

Six poetry collections by Jackie Wills since 1995
Powder Tower, Party, Fever Tree, Commandments,
Woman's Head as Jug, A Friable Earth

Poet Jackie Wills turned 70 last month, so it seems a perfect time to talk to her about her writing. I met Wills when she was looking after sheep in Mallorca and I was walking on a centuries old path through the land. She admired my hat. There are decades between us but we stayed in touch and as I read her work I appreciated its focus on womens' lives, the earth and felt the empathy her poems exude. Her work has been described as irreverent, bewitching, compassionate and surreal.

Q: Jackie, it's great to reconnect. You've published six books and a pamphlet. Do you have a favourite?

A: Each time a title comes off the press it's a favourite because most of them, especially the later ones, come from years of writing, thinking, discarding and editing. What I can say is that each book is delivered by a different era in my life - my first major relationship breakup, my children as babies, then teens, my relationship with South Africa through the father of my children, menopause and post menopause. 

Q: So your poems are documentary? 

A: Many of the older ones are narrative. They're less so now. Every writer draws on her own experience, but in a poem the images, the metaphors are all important. They can help keep a narrative short, intense. I draw on what's around me but what I want when I read is to see something differently. I hope I explore the very ordinary and unflashy life that so many of us live with its moments of insight, beauty, revelation. 

(Wills) manages beautifully the conjuring trick of writing poems that begin with simple moment, observation or place, but that spin off, tracking soundwaves through space to become lyrical and humane meditations on the possibilities of life, love and death. Amanda Dalton

Q: Why did you write about South Africa?

A: We visited over 18 years so our children could know that side of the family, feel they belonged. It worked. They do, they visit often, work there too. So for a couple of decades my focus was on ensuring my children knew their other culture and were part of it. I knew almost nothing about either side of my family until I followed up on a DNA test. That's another story. I wrote about SA to make sense of what I was going through as a mother and partner. 

Q: Do you think you're a political poet?

A: I've always been a political person and I've written poems I believe are political, even if that was not my intention. I write out of the everyday, and that is always political isn't it? People have sneered about womens' mundane experiences, elevating the lyric poem beyond all else. We're hopefully past that now. But there are still those who don't want to believe the experience of an old woman matters if all she's doing is shuffling along a pavement towards Poundland. I say, bring it on. Show her to me. My occasional overt campaigning poems stay in a rejects folder. Looking back though, I've written poems that are probably political in the broadest sense - poems like 'Tyre Factory' in Powder Tower, 'Party' in my second collection, poems about women over all collections, including 'Words for Women' which I continue to add to, and poems about the earth in my last collection. I think the political poems tend to be more surreal. 

A Friable Earth investigates with compassion memory and time, the ache of what we can never know, people who exist in the cracks.  John McCullough

Q: Your first book was published in 1995, where do you fit in contemporary poetry? 

A: When I wrote On Poetry I was reflecting on years of work in the community and schools, and Peter Sansom of The Poetry Business pushed me to write more about poets and poems who'd influenced me. There are so many but I took it as an opportunity to understand and be grateful I started writing at a really exciting time for poetry, the arts and I was so lucky - there were small presses, amazing women poets changing what poetry was capable of. And so I put myself there, I guess, among poets experimenting in the late 1980s, publishing in the decade up to the turn of the millennium and after. But I don't have a publisher any more so the future's uncertain. 

Q: Why?

A: Arc Publications, like many of the small presses set up decades ago, has been run on dedication and love of poetry by Tony Ward and Angela Jarman. They need to pull back from the volume of work they've been doing. Tony founded the press in 1969. And so I'm sitting on a manuscript which has been accumulating new poems since Covid. My last book came out in 2019. 

Q: So what themes have you been working on? And how do you keep yourself going without a publisher?

A: It's been hard to keep going but I think I'm out of that ditch of doubt. I send poems to magazines. They come back. It's like the gym. I keep trying to be stronger, to stay alive. 

To pick up Jackie Wills' Commandments is to be struck by how very English it is - by which I mean grounded, filled with the stuff of the world, and colour. Jane Routh

Like so many people of my age, I'm caring for my mother so it's inevitable this experience will show itself in the poems, if obliquely. The great gaps in my family are also rising to the surface. Extinction is a no brainer, it's all around me, evident when I am on my allotment, as are the changing seasons and their impact on what I grow. 

I've written a whole section on sewing, mainly mending, but also a sequence on making my daughter's wedding dress. I'm reminded of the late Michael Longley's beautiful poem about finding his widow's wedding dress paper pattern. We seem to have forgotten most women used to make their own clothes, and mended so much. I've written poems about bullying and money - the themes of daily life. I've stopped writing about South Africa because I don't go anymore.