The Scotsman Sessions #425: Jenni Fagan

“To the poetry/ that found me/ at seven years old,” begins the poem, “in a caravan park;/ cold stones in my pockets;” and it captures the vital importance of poetry in Fagan’s writing life.

“I’d been reading a lot of books,” Fagan explains, “and I just thought, aged seven, that I would write one for myself. I wrote a wee poetry collection – I remember there was one about bees, and another about grandmas – and I put them in a book.

“And the thing about it was that after I made that book, I could go back and look at it, and see my own voice, there on the pages. That was very important, because I felt very voiceless in my life; and that was how my writing life started.”

Forty years on, Fagan is an award-winning writer, well known for her novels The Panopticon, The Sunlight Pilgrims, Luckenbooth and Hex; she has also written a memoir, Ootlin. Yet poetry remains central to her work, and to her life. A Swan’s Neck On The Butcher’s block is her seventh published collection, ranging brilliantly across themes from the deeply personal to the fiercely political; and linking both worlds with an intensity that offers a rare depth of feeling, and a searing truthfulness, about how it feels to live in our time.

For this Scotsman session, though, Fagan has chosen one of the most personal poems in her new collection. Titled Benediction, it sits on the page like a small paragraph of prose, although its language is full of powerful rhythms; and its subject is Fagan’s response to the recent death of her birth father, a heavy drinker whom she only met on a few occasions. She imagines his final night in his favourite bar; and ends with a powerful, heartbreaking vision of his long-ago Glasgow childhood.

“Sometimes I feel that the poetry world has become too focussed on performance,” says Fagan, “and on people writing smart, entertaining work that focusses on easily recognisable contemporary subjects. But I like to feel the heart and soul of the person behind the poetry, and in that sense it should always be personal.

"For myself, I never try to write poetry, and never force it. I write it when I feel it. And when I talk to young people in care, as I often do now, I tell them that my relationship with poetry is the longest and oldest relationship in my life. It was there when I had nothing and no-one else, it’s always been there, and it’s with me now. Writing novels is hard work. But poetry, for me, is way of being; not so much something I do, as something I am, and always will be.”

A Swan’s Neck On The Butcher’s Block is published by Polygon, £10.99