I was the first ever poet in residence at Kelmscott Manor in Oxon, the home of artist and designer William Morris. In collaboration with visual artist Jessica Palmer we created a Summer of Creativity (2025), bringing the spirit of the house alive through innovative public engagement activities.
These ranged from an audio trail of 10 poems through the house, workshops in creative writing and paper cutting, the creation of a 3-D model of the house, and a new community poem based on visitor responses.
My poem Possibly was featured in a new poetry trail at Jane Austen's house at Chawton, interpreting her life and times afresh. The poem was triggered by a caption in a Jane Austen exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, mentioning Jane Austen‘s meeting with a young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy – ‘whom she possibly fell in love with’. It was that 'possibly' that opened up for me a whole world of possibilities, all the other lives Jane Austen might have lived.
Coming out of my two residencies at Kelmscott Manor and the Sir John Soane's Museum, I have become very interested in the power of poetry to evoke place and interpret collections. See a feature article written for the Poetry Archive website, exploring the different ways that I have worked with artefacts and artworks, historic spaces and buildings, to give them a new and contemporary voice.
