WARWICK POET LAUREATE: JANE HOLLAND

Jane Holland photo by Jen Hamilton Emery

Warwick Poet Laureate (2007-08) Jane Holland was born 41 years ago in Ilford, Essex. She is the daughter of famous romantic novelist Charlotte Lamb and biographer Richard Holland. According to her ‘biography’, she started to write poems in primary school but became a professional snooker player and was ranked 24th in the world women circuit. She switched to writing after a disagreement with the local governing body in 1995 and won an ERIC GREGORY AWARD in 1996.

While she was a mature English undergraduate at Brasenose College (University of Oxford) her first novel KISSING THE PINK was published by Sceptre in 1999. Her first collection of poetry THE BRIEF HISTORY OF A DISREPUTABLE WOMAN was published by Bloodaxe in 1997. BOUDICCA & CO was published by Salt Publishing in 2006 and her recent 2008 poetry collection THE LAMENT OF THE WANDERER was published by Heaventree.

The married mother of five children founded BLADE magazine in 1995. She is the editor of Horizon Review, a new literary online magazine by Salt Publishing. She is also one of the brains behind the poetry database Poets On Fire. Her poems have been featured in several anthologies e.g. an anthology of love poems edited by Sally Emerson titled BE MINE (Little Brown 2007). The novelist and poet is not just a role model for kids who are interested in writing but also an inspiration to women who want to become writers.

In Response to a Nude Photograph of Mina Loy, 1905

They Are a Tableau at the Kissing Gate

Women poets are not supposed to look like that,

did nobody tell you? The one

with the cigarette is bullish enough

but this, taken naked, face

against the wall with one arse cheek

suggestively raised

is the portrait of a muse, my dear.

In later years, your beauty was eclipsed by age.

Here your skin’s like frost, that white back

and hourglass waist

crying out to be marked, to be photographed.

Did it feel safer like this, turned away

in your nakedness,

to be stared at, lusted after?

‘Leave off looking to men to find out

what you are not,’ you said.

Then let me take you to bed, Mina,

to the ostrich feather bed

of our imagination. There we’ll smoke

and make poetry all day, decadent

in our sticky love,

looking each other in the eye, drinking

each other’s blood

like tea from a china dish, steeped

in what it means to be us, spawning

our poems like fish.

Jane Holland

in collection Boudicca & Co., 2006,

Salt Publishing, ISBN: 1-844712-89-3
http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/janehollandpoems.html