I recommend listening to the recordings of Charles Causley reading his poems on the Poetry Archive. It is lovely to hear his voice and he also makes brief comments on the poems. I listened to this with my copy of Charles Causley’s Collected Poems 1951- 2000 (Picador, 2000) alongside, a great selection to dip into from time to time. I thought I would make a few comments on two well-known short poems, ‘Eden Rock’ and ‘Timothy Winters’. Causley says he made up the place ‘Eden Rock’ where he imagines his parents when they were alive. Timothy Winters was however a real person, he explains.  

This can always be a slight conundrum for a poet, how much to make up and how much to have fact-based. Of course, you can do both; you have that permission as a creative writer. I find, however, that sometimes I really want to stick to the facts as they are important to me, but that can undermine the poetry. I have to set aside the facts and come at them from a different direction, using the power of suggestion so that the reader imagines my story or even makes up their own story. 

Eden Rock could be any rock, but it anchors the sentiment in the poem. We can envisage the place, linking it to our own experience of sitting down for a picnic somewhere. The first line of the poem is much longer than the others with the place name at the end; it sticks out like a piece of rock. Written in five quatrains, the last quatrain is broken, with the final line separate, surrounded by white. This gives additional weight to the end of the poem. It is a poem full of descriptive detail which evokes both parents in their twenties; he has created a memory as an elegy to them. This is very effective as a vehicle to share his feelings about them. 

The poem ‘Timothy Winters’ has a child-like quality to it, written in quatrains with aabb rhyme. The first two quatrains have an immediacy about them, describing Winters as a boy in images which very much situate him in a time of war or post-war and poverty. There is humour in the description of school days. The poem covers a lot of ground in its thirty-two lines, including family history, the hard social circumstances which the child just has to accept. The detail rings true as a generic example of what might be happening to a child in that position. If you would like a prompt, try writing about someone you have known, thinking about the detail (true or imagined) which might bring that person alive for the reader. 

The staff at the Charles Causley Trust work tirelessly to promote Causley’s legacy. Do come along to the fundraisers including the one on 19th July when I will be reading from my latest book, Sleeping Under Clouds, a collaboration with artist Sula Rubens. Sula hopes to join me to talk about how we have worked together. Tickets are available here.

If you would like to contact me to comment or follow up, please send me an email via the contact box on my website. You can also contact me to buy a signed copy my books 

Sleeping Under Clouds (Clayhanger Press) and A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle).