When I started reading Kate Clanchy’s How to Grow Your Own Poem I got the idea that I could work through it, reading the poems and writing my own. And after a few months I would have a notebook bulging with ideas. Instead I read a few chapters and no more poems grew for three months, until now.

Ordinary people lead extraordinary lives and their life experience does not often find its way into poems. Rita Ann Higgins grew up in poverty and reflects on this in Some People, a poem that is angry, defiant, sometimes funny and always honest. Kate Clanchy invites us to construct a similar poem about our own experience. I knew poverty growing up. But when I tried to write an angry, defiant poem it turned into a love poem to my mam. At least it’s honest.