Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion when I found Robert Graves’ book The White Goddess in an obscure corner of the public library. I had already reached a point where poetry seemed the most important thing I could do for myself. I’d made up rhymes and sayings before I could write, and being the youngest child by a 12 year gap meant I had peace to think and live in the world of the imagination. I’d been waylaid by the urge to write a poem about Canada when I was 11, having heard all about it from some visiting boys. Suddenly there was a poem on the page and the thrill was immense.

By the age of 14, I was copying my poems up in neat and forcing my ‘collection’ on friends and family to read. I wrote in free verse before I knew what it was called. I just called it ‘non-rhyming poetry’. I was reading a lot of poetry, and because there was no money for books in my working class family, the library was my resource. I would copy out poems I could not bear to be without into a loose leaf folder, which I still have. Rupert Brooke (not the war poems) and Wilfred Owen were in there, W.H Auden’s ‘Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love’, Louis MacNiece, Edwin Muir, and many others, dependent entirely on what was on the shelves. I’d read Blake, Milton, Keats and John Drinkwater at primary school when on Friday afternoons we could choose poems from battered ancient anthologies, to recite to the class. Later I was to discover Emily Dickinson, John Donne and Robert Frost. I fell in love with T.S Eliot and learned about difficulty, at the same time as finding The Mersey Sound at the back of the cupboard in a house my sister had moved into, and begged it from her. Roger McGough, in particular, struck me as having some useful techniques.

From Grammar school I went to university and discovered a lot more poets, though my own writing tailed off at this time. I was studying such wonderful literature from the modern and ancient world that I felt humbled. I remember I spent a long time trying to write a poem about a Grecian Urn, after Keats but based on one I had seen in Liverpool museum. I showed my poems to lots of my tutors and was given all sorts of advice. I had my first poem published (aside of the school magazine where almost every poet I know has their first efforts printed) in Arts Alive Merseyside, but was immediately dissatisfied with it. So I bought a copy of Frances Stillman’s The Poet’s Manual and Robin Skelton’s The Practice of Poetry and settled down into my apprenticeship to learn my craft. I had also met the poet Matt Simpson, who told me I ‘had something’ and a lecturer of mine said I had ‘decided talent’. This made up for my American Studies tutor who ‘rewrote’ my poems for me, horribly, turning personal experience into stereotype.

Two degrees later, during which time I had married, I descended into a difficult time. My father died and my mother was diagnosed as terminally ill. I had a job in the civil service and my shaky confidence was under mined by a bullying boss. I developed depression and had terrible nightmares. A day to the month after my mother died I was told I was expecting my first child. I slowly began to emerge from the darkness and take up my pen again. I booked a week at Arvon’s Lumb Bank Centre, choosing ‘Starting to Write’ even though I had been writing for so long. I wanted a new beginning.

Liz Lochhead was the poetry tutor and I booked an afternoon tutorial with her and with great fear, showed her my recent poems. She couldn’t have been more encouraging, telling me I was a born poet and HAD to get these poems published. Her belief in me made all the difference, as did her advice about resuming submitting to magazines. This is all much easier now with computers and the internet, but back then it meant trying to type poems up, and trying to find the magazines. The first one to accept me was Orbis. I wrote to Matt Simpson to tell him my news, including the beautiful baby girl I now had, we met up again and he invited me to join his workshop course in Runcorn. This was a formal critiquing workshop, where I learned to edit my poems, cope with criticism and was eventually told by Matt that I was ‘there’ and should look to publish a book or pamphlet. Rupert Loydell of Stride published my first collection in 1988, and my second ten years later. Imagine my joy when I bumped into Liz again at Alsager College (now part of MMU) where she was leading a workshop! I showed her my slim volume and she ran next door to where Carol Ann Duffy was also leading a workshop, saying ‘Hey, Carol Ann, look at this! I was there when some of these poems were written! Isn’t this great!’. She bought a copy (wouldn’t let me give her a copy) and was so delighted for me.

I’ve had bad luck too: my second collection was accidentally pulped after it has only been out for a year, and my third collection was published by a press which went out of business leaving a lot of poets high and dry, so was never properly promoted. I had to give up the freelance life for financial reasons in 1992 when my youngest daughter was in junior school, and teaching occupied me for sixteen years. My beloved Matt Simpson died in 2009, after a long, close friendship in which we critiqued each other’s poems and supported each other in many ways. Since I went back to freelancing, I have published a single collection for children with Salt as well as four chapbooks of adult poetry with a range of publishers.

I have never regretted my decision to dedicate my life to poetry. Graves says in The White Goddess that some people write poems but to be a poet you have to live for poetry. Matt Simpson called me a poet a few days before he died in hospital. Until that moment I never used the word poet about myself. That final gift from Matt has empowered me.

Angela Topping