Headlining the Wordspace event as part of Leeds Trinity’s Journalism and Media Week was award-winning writer Sarah Holland-Batt, who reflected on her newest poetry anthology ‘The Jaguar’.
At the event, Sarah shared some personal anecdotes to contextualize her poetry, such as how her father’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease inspired poems like ‘My Father as a Giant Koi.’
The titular piece, ‘The Jaguar’, contemplates her father’s defiant purchase of a new car despite facing steady mental decline. Sarah spoke about how the humour of this bold and infuriating decision gave her a new insight into her father’s condition.
Sarah said: “Writing about my father’s Parkinson’s, I really have to think of the poem as an artefact, because someone will read it, and they don’t know my father. For me, the challenge in those kinds of poems is shaping the scene and getting a sense of character and voice.”
The anthology has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australia, making it the second time she has been shortlisted for the award, having won it in 2016 for her work ‘The Hazards’.
“It’s ok to have periods where you’re not writing. I think the poem finds you at the right time.”
Sarah meticulously crafts each of her poems, coming back to them multiple times and tweaking every syllable. She argues that the notion a great poem can be written in one sitting is an idealized myth, she said “I wish it were like it is in the movies where you can just toss out a poem and it’s a work of genius. What you can do in a poem is just about what you can do in a photograph or a painting, you can give a snapshot.”
During the reading, Sarah jokingly shared with the audience that although she grew up in Surfers Paradise, “the Miami of Australia” she is credited in her books as being born in “Southport”, a suburb of the area. She admitted this was because she was embarrassed by the name of the city. Sarah said that in recent years she has come to own the identity, finding humour in its absurdity.
Sarah is currently touring the UK reading selected poems with Bloodaxe Books Ltd, with events scheduled in Berwick, Ilkley, Leeds, Glasgow, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Oxford.