It's fantastic news, having had my poem 'Green Man' voted as Poem of the Month. So where did that poem come from, what's its history?

Well, it was written about seven years ago, roughly when I was going out with a crazy long-haired musician and living in a commune with a load of vegans and dreadlocked hippies. It was a strange time for me, but very liberating.

Shortly after that relationship ended, I left the commune and hit the open road in an ancient camper van I'd bought after selling my house. That was another strange time. 'Green Man' was conceived somewhere around or between those times. Interestingly though, the poem is not about the musician but about a relationship even earlier than that, one which haunted me for years and is touched on in many of the earlier poems in my latest collection, 'Boudicca & Co', which is heavily pagan and medieval in tone.

I think, on a deeper level, this poem 'Green Man'' is about how we often try to put the transpersonal and numinous onto the personal, and end up overloading what is actually a normal, human relationship to the point where it breaks. More mundanely, it's also about wishing to be pregnant. Luckily, not long after that very dark and difficult time on the road, I met a man to whom I'm now married and with whom I've had three more children! So all's well that ends well ...

Jane x