Mining Memory in Latch: Rebecca Goss

My latest poetry collection, Latch, explores memory and the act of returning to the landscape of my childhood, to understand it anew. I grew up in Suffolk, then moved north to a city at eighteen and came to live in my home county again shortly before my fortieth birthday. I soon realised I wanted to write about my return, but it took me some time to get started. There were certain childhood experiences I was curious to mine, and, for the first time, I felt a desire to write about the countryside I was now immersed in, but I did not feel skilled enough to step into ‘nature poetry’ territory. Once I understood my book would contain themes that I did feel confident about examining such as girlhood, motherhood, and familial tensions I began to consider how I could weave those subjects into poems that explored the Suffolk landscape at the same time. Memory played a key part in this. Several years of my childhood were spent living on a rural run-down farm. It was a period of bucolic bliss for me and my three siblings, but a difficult episode for my parents and they eventually divorced. To revisit the memories from that time, I decided it might be fruitful to return to the farm itself. I wrote to the current owner, and she kindly said I could come back and spend as much time there as I needed. Her one instruction proved wise, telling me to delay knocking on her door upon arrival, so as not to interrupt my memories. I had not considered the potential impact of her presence, but her generous gift of private time was invaluable. I arrived, got out of my car and wandered into fields both familiar and strange. I particularly wanted to see the stream again and sat by it for a long time. A flurry of recollections overwhelmed me. I began making notes in my notebook but felt a strong resistance to record a diaristic account of my life at the farm. I rejected the idea of a straightforward narration of events. That would be too exposing for me and not necessarily interesting for the reader. Several small epiphanies took place during that return visit including the realisation that I could use nature to mine the personal, but without exposing my family, or my parents. So, I picked up that stream and carried it home. The result is a poem that uses nature and magic to access and articulate memory. Despite the poem not being ‘real’, the memories that quiver below its surface are. My hope is that the poem can simultaneously offer the beauty of the stream, and its emotional significance. 

Rebecca Goss

You can hear Rebecca talk about her work at SBL on 10th October. Tickets can be bought here: https://www.suffolkbookleague.org/events-1/rebecca-goss:

Woman Returns to Childhood Home, Carries Out an Act of Theft

I tell you it’s the stream I’d like to 

see again. Body of running water, 

unchanged. Its minor force continuous, 

still shallow, bubbling. Leaves 

in their race over small greening rocks. 

Field’s longest margin. Incessant edge 

I adhered to. Place of no shouting. 

Place of barefoot wading and other 

harmless actions. I bend down 

to find it surprisingly compliant. 

Translucent rope, wound, gathered, 

heavy as a baby by the time I reach the car, 

hoping that when I say goodbye

you won’t notice the dampness of my sleeves. 

Fourth gear, its small waterfalls noisy 

on the back seat, squirming free of the seatbelt 

to purl at my neck. I try to explain to my husband 

the need to smuggle in this water,  

why I need it to eddy at the foot of our bed. 

He says he will help me scoop the last bends 

from the footwell. We watch it run about the house, 

searching its new level, small stones tumbling, 

until it feels like it has always quivered here. 

I picture you, bewildered, pacing the dry bed. 

Nothing but your shoes kicking at soil. 

(from Latch, Rebecca Goss, Carcanet, 2023)