Poetry by Anne Bailey

I grew up in a Yorkshire village near the Pennines. The outdoors and the nearby Moorland were very important to me. To be alone in that environment as a teenager and recite Wordsworth on the top of an escarpment called Royd Edge was a way of creating an identity which felt robust even invulnerable in the face of my father‘s death and it’s aftermath which shaped things for our family ‘indoors’. Those years were followed by university in London, marriage teaching and building a family. I trained as a counsellor and worked in central London before moving to Norfolk where although the topography is very different to the Yorkshire moors, strangely, the wildness of the Marshland next to the sea embodies a very similar feeling. I now have the opportunity to return to poetry as a writer. I hope some of Wordsworth’s joy finds its way into my poems but they do usually turn out to be quite dark – with a humorous twist – see what you think!