Jacqueline Woods has been a regular at Write Out Loud open-mic nights in the north-west for many years, and more recently at Write Out Loud online events. She says in the foreword to her latest collection, Finding The Words: “I have always loved poetry. It is part of my life, the essence of my being. I love reading it, writing it, performing it at local venues, or sharing it on Zoom meetings in different parts of the country from Suffolk homelands to the far reaches of Northumberland.” She has published two previous collections, Long Division and I Have Learned, and has had poems published in a number of anthologies. 

There’s a sense of family continuity throughout this collection. It begins with a poem ‘To My Great Great Granddaughter’, to whom she bequeaths her diaries, in the belief that she will “understand my good intentions”. In another, she remembers looking for lucky pebbles with a hole through them with her mother at the seaside: “The joy of that discovery remains through generations” (‘Hag Stones’). There are tender family poems, for her ageing mother (‘Daffodils’, and ‘Before My Time’), for grandchildren (Something She’ll Grow Out Of’), and a clear-eyed recognition of her own family’s care for her (‘Somewhere To Sit’). 

There is humour in these early family memories, too. The observant ‘Dad’s Visits’ recalls how her father “loved to visit people we hardly knew”, pitching up at her granddad’s German neighbour’s house, for instance, so she could practise the language, while avoiding all mention of the war. Her brother’s teacher’s cottage was in the same village where a relative lived. Her great uncle’s spinster cousin “tried to fathom who we were / and why we were in their parlour.” It’s a poem full of details, such as “tea in egg shell cups, / with homemade scones and biscuits.”  

She recalls her early schooldays, concluding in the final stanza of ‘First Days’: “I skirt the edges of the playground, / pretending not to care, desperate / to be liked, wanting to join in.” 

There are two luminous poems about childbirth, ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Fantastic Voyage’, as she navigates the “cosmology” of her newborn baby. 

She grew up in Suffolk, and there is a homesick air to ‘Manea Station’, where there is “no one waiting at the station”. In ‘Return to Suffolk’, the poet aches “for a pink cottage leased for life, / not a holiday home, with borrowed keys.” Her most recent move has been to Southport, on the north-west coast, where she is uplifted by the sight of geese and their flight formations of “unfathomable artistry”. 

She has moved house many times. The final stanza of ‘Moving House Again’ is lyrical and mournful, noting: 

 

     I liked to be the last to leave,

     to take a final tour round each room,

     where dust lingered with a sense of longing

     for what might have been, and the garden 

     grown suddenly greener by our going.

 

In another poem she returns to linger in the house she grew up in, imagining “the rootless ghost I will become // The door handle is cold to touch” (‘Beginnings’).  

‘Gallivant’, a reflection of her many years of attending poetry open-mics, captures that strange compulsion that we poets have to reveal our souls in public, and the twitching of curtains of those who do not understand such habits: 

 

     They wonder why I leave the warmth

     of my living room on a winter’s night

     to drive down dark and winding roads,

     sit in a room with hard chairs and sticky tables

     to hear poetry performed, and then bare

     my soul in the hope that someone out there

     might listen.  

 

Yes, why do we do it? Lord knows. But we do. 

There is real bravery in these poems, as the poet confronts years of illness, operations, and disability. She celebrates returning to Aldeburgh poetry festival in Suffolk, after a previous planned visit was overtaken by five weeks in hospital, where “a blot was discovered / on the landscape of my lung.” In the following poem, ‘Baptism’, a doctor arrives to tell her news that is “difficult to hear”. ‘The Sum Of My Parts’ lists accumulated surgery - elbow (twice), knuckles, fingers, wrist - leaving her to wonder “if this disease / could be a kind of karma, or perhaps just bad luck”.  

Despite such ominous words, the final, title poem of this collection still comes as an awful shock. Yet at the same time it shines with a remarkable optimism and vision. In this collection Jacky Woods has taken us on an unflinching journey that is often lifted and illuminated by moments of joy and hope. 

She says that the proceeds of this collection will go towards Queenscourt Hospice in Southport “who continue to support me and many others who have received the difficult and life-changing news that they have cancer”.  

 

Jacqueline Woods, Finding The Words, Three Piers Publishing, £7.50 (£10 p&p)