Around 2011, I sent my first submission to The Rialto magazine, under the extraordinary editorship of Michael Mackmin. I may have submitted three poems. Certainly two. The two poems I remember were born holding hands. The first was a longish poem about my mother’s difficult childhood. I don’t know much about it now, but I remember finishing it in tears. Almost immediately, like a twin in the womb that a mother didn’t know was there, another, much shorter, entity arrived. Unlike the longer poem, it didn’t seem to want much in the way of alteration. It was immediately in couplets. Whole. But I doubted. After the first draft, I felt I should at least have the decency to change something, so I altered one word.
A few weeks after submitting, I received a very encouraging note from Michael Mackmin. Much to my astonishment, he thought the mother-poem I had been so proud of wasn’t worth a mention. Instead, he singled out ‘Yesterday’s Child,’ the tiny thing I wasn’t sure was even breathing. But, he said, he’d take it if I altered one word. It was the very word I had altered when redrafting. Immediately, the word ‘doggedly’ came to mind, so I changed it and sent it off (I was in a hurry). It was only later, when I went through my drafts and looked at the original that I realised ‘doggedly’ was the initial choice in draft one, and the only word I had tampered with.
‘Yesterday’s Child’ always knew herself. I just didn’t know how dogged she actually was.
Of course, most of my poems—or, I suspect, anyone’s— don’t happen like this. There’s more struggle, a lot more, in almost every single one of them. But the fact that poems like this can happen: that’s a huge part of the joy of writing, to see that something has been released, set free, that was not part of any conscious intention.
It’s also great that it isn’t a narrative poem, that it has never felt like ‘my’ poem, and seems to spring from the deeper reaches of childhood memory.
I once had a hand-painted plate, with a dark-haired girl on it who looked a bit like me, pictured scrubbing floors, of all things, and that said in red letters around the rim: ‘Saturday’s child works hard for a living.’ The plate was displayed on my bedroom wall for many years during my childhood, so I read that legend and the image that went with it a lot. It was given to me by a friend from nursery school who left the area. When she left and I said goodbye, I wept and wept a huge surge of loneliness because it seemed like my best and only school friend was gone (I was a painfully shy child who did not make friends easily). I never saw that friend again.
None of this biographical data explains the poem. It doesn’t map onto anything directly. Though what I love about poetry may be glimpsed in this: the speaking beyond speaking, intention beyond intention.1
‘Yesterday’s Child First Appeared in The Rialto in 2012. It was later Highly Commended in The Forward Prize, and also appeared in Trieste (2015) In 2023, it appeared in The Rialto’s wonderful anthology Poetry With An Axe To Grind.