MAGGIE SAWKINS
About Maggie Sawkins
Maggie Sawkins was born in 1953 and spent her childhood in Leigh Park, a large council housing estate north of Portsmouth. She began writing poetry at the age of nine after being inspired by her head teacher. Her first poems were published in Hampshire Poets when she was seventeen. After a series of office jobs, including three years with The Exeter Flying Post, Maggie returned to education and went on to gain an MA with distinction in Creative Writing. For the past twelve years she has taught students with specific learning difficulties at South Downs College near Portsmouth. In 2004 Maggie co-founded the popular Tongues & Grooves Poetry and Music Club in Southsea where she now lives with her husband, younger daughter and a growing menagerie. Flarestack published a pamphlet collection, Charcot’s Pet, in 2003. The Zig Zag Woman is her first full collection.
Praise for Maggie Sawkins
‘Maggie Sawkins draws brilliantly on extended metaphor and the surreal to explore painful relationships, mental illness and problematic situations. She writes both from personal experience and beyond it. Her inventive and highly individual voice is always authentic. The taut writing carries emotional weight and sends that shiver up my spine which tells me I am reading real poetry. This is a very exciting first collection.’ Myra Schneider
'I loved The Zig Zag Woman. Maggie Sawkins has a distinctive and beguiling voice. Her poems are tautly written, full of wonderful and strange images and heart-breakingly moving.' Vicki Feaver
'Spare, spacious and restrained.' Poetry London
'These poems recall the rich confessional poetry of Pascale Petit or the surreal psychodramas of Selima Hill, and herald a bold, truthful new voice.' Magma
'Here is a poet whose language is like a multi-coloured kite: she knows how to let it fly and swoop, but she never lets go of the strings.' Poetry Express
'The kind of confident, natural poetry where the reader is hardly aware of the craft behind it, where the rightness of the language speaks straight to the mind and heart. Each poem here delivers its emotional charge without fuss but with new insights into everything from the half-understood traumas of childhood to the process of writing itself.' Frogmore Papers
'Poems whose apparent simplicity of language and form convey complex emotional realities.' Artemis Poetry
'Observing strangeness is what Maggie Sawkins excels at. Reading her poems in this, her first full collection, lets us into her world with all its strange particularities, its "little bits of darkness that slip through", to share her view and to marvel at it.' The North
An interview with Maggie Sawkins
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I wrote my first poem when I was nine after finding a book of children’s poems by Robert Louis Stevenson in a parcel of clothes sent by an aunt in Denver. But my fascination with words probably stemmed from my parents’ use of colourful language. One of my mum’s favourite idioms was, ‘When poverty comes in the door, love flies out the window.’ I used to imagine poverty as a tall thin man in a long coat, and love as a small white heart with wings - and it was all happening in our kitchen! I have used some of these sayings in my poem Brass Monkeys.
When I was sixteen the book that shook my world was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I was inside Raskolnikov’s head from start to finish. I was also influenced by the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, translated writers such as Tolstoy and Herman Hesse, and poets like Emily Dickinson and William Blake. I’m drawn to writers who use understated language to write about metaphysical, psychological, existentialist themes. The poet I’ve been most able to relate to over the last ten years or so has been Selima Hill. I love the hint of humour that simmers away in most of her collections.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Zig Zag Woman? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?
The first section contains poems about my childhood and how it was influenced by my parents’ past. The title, The Little Box remembers her Childhood, is borrowed from Vasko Popa’s poem, The Little Box. The poems, written over the last thirteen years, are arranged so that they seem to tell the story of my life - though this wasn’t a conscious intention in their writing. The earliest one, Into the Silence, begins with a memory of myself as a baby in my father’s arms. Something that concerns me is the difficulty of breaking away from the weight of the past – what Larkin called ‘the coastal shelf.’ I’ve noticed that even when I try to write upbeat poems, a little bit of darkness manages to slip through! I think poems are like dreams - they know more than you do.
The middle section entitled My Mutant Butterfly has poems about my elder daughter who was diagnosed with a serious mental illness in 2001. At the time I was studying for an MA in creative writing and I found it useless trying to write about anything else. The last section is a kind of ‘coming through’ with themes of displacement, acceptance and an opening up to wider issues.
The title of the collection comes from The Zig-Zag Girl illusion – a trick where the magician divides his assistant into thirds so that her middle appears to be displaced to one side. Sometimes in life you have to displace your heart in order to survive. Writing helps you to make sense of the past and the present - even if the subject matter is disturbing, the act of creation is a positive - art allows you to find resolutions that can’t be found in life.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
I’m not conscious of trying to create a voice, though I’m alert to when a poem feels like the real thing. If it doesn’t happen than I scrap it. I like the type of poem that comes to me as a line with its own voice whispering or shouting, follow me! They’re the ones worth stalking to find out what they’re trying to say, which doesn’t usually happen until I’ve found the perfect ending. Sometimes if the voice of a poem is struggling to come through I find it helps to adopt a persona as in Charcot’s Pet and My Pet Mother.
How and when do you write?
I keep several notebooks and write scraps in the one that happens to be nearest. I try to write a little when I wake up in the morning. Occasionally something I’ve started continues to badger me while I’m driving to work and I have to wait until I’m in the college car park to write it down. Most of what I write doesn’t make it into a poem - I’m quite tough on myself. Sometimes I read through my old notebooks and resurrect something that I’d considered drivel at the time of writing. When a poem begins to take shape on the page, or in my head, I transfer it to the word processor. That’s when the work begins. My favourite poems are often the ones that have almost written themselves - they’re the ones that deserve the hours of fine-tuning.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
Other poets - most recently Wallace Stevens, W S Graham, and Vicki Feaver’s Book of Blood. I’ve just finished Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore. It’s full of surreal happenings like fish falling from the sky and cats that converse with people, but it’s totally believable. I can also recommend J M Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K for its understated powerful prose.
