Poetry Hut Blog

Another in my series of author interview blog posts… I haven’t yet met a Salt book I didn’t like, so here we go.

Scottish poet Andrew Philip’s The Ambulance Box [ISBN: 9781844714919]

How did your book come to be published by Salt?

My fellow HappenStance poet — and now fellow Salt poet — Rob A Mackenzie [blog] and I swapped manuscripts and discussed where to submit; Salt was always one of our top targets. Its broad, exciting list and fantastic design, coupled with a forward-thinking approach to marketing, were strong attractions.

Chris Hamilton-Emery, the poetry editor at Salt, was aware of our HappenStance publications and was a Facebook friend of us both, so we weren’t cold-calling when we submitted. In fact, they’d closed the list to unsolicited debut poetry collections, but I’d been working hard on the accompanying material for the submission (see http://www.saltpublishing.com/info/proposals.htm), so I messaged Chris to ask whether he’d still be interested in seeing it, which he said he would. I e-mailed the submission — Salt accepts poetry submissions by e-mail only — on a Monday. Mid afternoon the next day, I saw a message in my inbox and thought, “That’ll be an acknowledgment.” I couldn’t believe it when I saw it was an offer of publication!

What was it like working with your publisher?

I’d worked hard on getting the collection right before I submitted, which paid off. Chris said, “There are no duds.” That was incredibly gratifying, as you can imagine. The few changes that we made to the manuscript were all my own interventions and most of my discussions with Chris have been about marketing. He’s a warm, approachable guy but extremely busy and has been even busier over the past couple of months as Salt has wrestled itself back from brink of financial collapse.

Chris also handles cover design. Salt’s covers are superb, and I’m delighted with mine; I think it’s spot on for the book. I can hardly believe how quickly Chris manages to produce such consistently eye-catching designs on top of everything else he does.

What do you think the relationship between art/poetry and trauma/grief is in general, as well as your experience, personally?

Great poems have arisen out of grief. Part of their greatness lies in the emotional power that has gone into the writing. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” as Frost said. But the writer always has to control his or her tears; the craft in the writing does that. There’s no art without craft because all art involves the imposition of some kind of order on its materials. Art that responds to, or arises out of, trauma and grief is no different. That’s not to decry art as therapy but, unless craft takes precedence at some point in the production of the work, it will never be anything more than therapy.

The poems in The Ambulance Box that deal with the death of my son were certainly part of my grieving, but it wouldn’t have been possible for me not to have worked at them as I would any other poem. Nonetheless, I made no assumptions about whether other people who didn’t share that grief would find them worth reading or hearing, so I was delighted and relieved when it transpired that they did. I think some of my strongest work has come out of that loss. Had it happened four or five years earlier, I wouldn’t have had the level of craft and skill necessary to make poetry worth reading out of the experience.

Poetry is. . .

The human spirit’s bread, butter and chocolate cake.

Writing poetry is. . .

The art of breathing more deeply.