Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This interview is taken from PN Review 226, Volume 42 Number 2, November - December 2015.

In Conversation (Helen Tookey) and Two Poems Helen Tookey

Helen Tookey:  I wanted to start by asking you about what I think is a characteristic structure in your poems. You often start with an object, or even a word, and then the poem unrolls it in various different ways – as in ‘Cigar’, where the idea of unrolling the cigar itself leads into unrolling the material history and the mythical dimensions; or in ‘Pomegranate’, where you explore the etymology and all its associations. Lots of your poems, I think, work like that, spiralling, unrolling.

Grevel Lindop: It’s true that when I think about writing a poem the image I always have is of something in front of me: an object or a situation, that I’m going into. I think of the poem as being an investigation, or sometimes it’s like dissecting something, or it’s like looking into the interior of a watch with a jeweller’s eyeglass to see what’s gone wrong with it, or how it works. I think there’s a lot of that in Heaney – he thinks of poetry as archaeology, doesn’t he? But also I think I’ve always felt that when you get the beginning of a poem – when a phrase or line pops into your head – it’s like a mathematical problem as well. You then work through the poem to get to the solution, to find out why that line was so significant. So again there’s a matter of analysis. And the assumption that the poem’s already there, but it’s got to be discovered or dug out in some way. It pre-exists.

One of the main ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image