Like Freud's ‘screen memories’ which mask the actual traumatic events of childhood – what Adam Phillips calls ‘a waking dream of the past’– the poem has a wonderful capacity to transform experience or make something new of it, but also to disguise it. Sometimes this happens consciously; sometimes it comes about simply through the process of writing. Curiously, it isn't necessarily the most important feelings or memories that make themselves available as poems. The ‘tell it slant’ capacity of the poem, which allows the writer to be surprised, is one of the things I enjoy most about writing: memories creep up and are transformed, and become a way of not only knowing the self but of rethinking one's own position in the world.

The process of remembering and forgetting one's own history and personal mythology does, of course, become foregrounded and encoded in the writing of the poem. Yet the question of my own relation to the geography of the city in which I was born and lived for 18 years, and have now returned to, is an interesting and difficult one. I rarely write about known places, let alone my home city. Paradoxically, it is perhaps exactly this denial of named geographies in my work that creates a space out of which to write.

Two poets who are important to me as both a reader and a writer, and who address the relationship with geography, are Elizabeth Bishop (1911–79) and Fleur Adcock (born 1934). Both demonstrate the relationship of the self to the environment as a way of defining the place – and sometimes placelessness – of the female observer. Bishop is the most important poet to my work at the moment, though her influence is probably not immediately discernible.