Cro's poems
Friends of my late wife Cro will know that she was a very good poet and wrote many poems, full of joy and vigour and her own character. None of them have yet been published (although she had won poetry prizes with them). This summer I will put together a book of a collection of about thirty poems that she wrote and organised in the year that she was diagnosed with (and eventually died of) lung cancer. Her working title for this, with typical Cro irreverence, was 'My life in fags' (for US readers, of course 'fag' is Brit slang for a cigarette).
The topics in her poems were wide ranging, but chimed with all the beliefs and joys (and hates) that made up her character. She loved the world outside, an inveterate walker, so a lot of the poems have great descriptions of the pleasures of the natural world. She was also hugely aware that, even now, women get the rough end of the pineapple in many of the ways that power and money and acclaim are allocated in our society. So some of her poems have a strong theme of women's response to this 'allocation'. And those who had to deal with Cro as political opponents will have been vividly aware of this! She was her party's spokesperson for Carers and for Women on Suffolk County Council over several years.
The other thing that I notice reading her poems is that her immense range of reading comes out. She devoured books from a very early age and I once watched and timed her reading in bed to see how many pages an hour she could read. I was gobsmacked to find she could read at 200 pages an hour, but I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, as she tore into books with joy as soon as she got them. She had an early love of Anglo-Saxon, partly because her father was a specialist in it, and one of the poems - although in English - has a lot of humorous use of the conventions of Anglo-Saxon poetry. She even went as far as to write translations of Chinese poems that she liked, though none of those are in the collection.
And I do have a place where you can actually hear some of these poems because, when we celebrated Cro's life with about 300 of her friends in the month after she died, we decided to have the whole affair recorded and put it on Youtube. So the link below will take you to a more than 3-hour long recording of all the celebrating we did. Most of the video is a huge slideshow of photos of Cro at all the different phases of her life, but it is interrupted by video footage of the speeches and then the reading of about 15 of her poems by friends and family. All you need to do is scroll through to find the right bit. The speeches run from about 33:00 to about 1:02:00, and the poems run from about 2:04:30 to about 2:38:00, so if you want to hear some of the poems read out you know where they are.
And thinking about why we write poems and what they meant to Cro (quite apart from what they mean to anyone else), I think there are a mixture of motivations and rewards. For one thing, Cro was a good writer who loved literature and other people's poems, and maybe she felt is was her obligation to try to return the favour of the joy she had got from those other works. She was also aware of her own talents (I would say 'eventually' because there is a natural tendency to doubt our own talents until something else confirms them) and wanted to let other people see it and know it. And I suppose, even though she started writing poems many years ago, there was in this last collection a feeling of leaving a record of herself. To be seen, even after her death. And the poems, as you will see, do that very well. You can hear the smart, joyous, occasionally profane, and always distinctive voice of Cro in all of these.
And I have already made a list of people who want to acquire a copy of the poems in the summer but -ahem - that list is naturally quite open-ended. Enjoy.
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