Sarah Maguire on translation, Flora Poetica and form: an interview

James Byrne interviews Sarah Maguire, introduced as a leading lyric poet of her generation, with several collections behind her, including Spilt Milk, and the horticultural anthology Flora Poetica. At the time she worked at SOAS in London, and a collection provisionally titled The Pomegranates of Kandahar was imminent. The first question asks about her early job as a gardening apprentice with Ealing Council; she says manual labour left little time to think and that she stopped writing until her mid-twenties.

Much of the first half concerns translation. A Royal Literary Fund placement at SOAS in 2001 showed her how much remarkable poetry was within reach there, so she began translation workshops, then a Poetry Translation Centre. They had covered more than fifteen languages, and she argues that English poetry needs fresh blood from beyond Europe, and that poetry is central to Islamic and Somali culture. She admits that her own books were out of print, which she calls painful, and explains how Flora Poetica grew from a residency at the Chelsea Physic Garden and was arranged by plant families, so that Aphra Behn sits beside Tom Paulin.

Asked who is the most gifted poet she knows, she names August Kleinzahler, praises Adrienne Rich on free verse and sides, in the divide between form and free verse, with 'the freedom fighters'. She says poets cannot always be trusted, using John Clare and Blake as examples of those distrusted in their own time. Later answers cover the influence of jazz and soul, the difficulty women have in claiming the identity of poet, her preference for Plath over Hughes, and American models from Whitman and Dickinson to Rich.

On close reading she says a poem cannot be separated from its political context without being lost, and that her title poem 'Spilt Milk' is essentially about gender and power. She does not see writing and community work as a duty so much as an exhilarating opportunity, describes how travel, including Palestine, prompts poems, and ends with her love of London, its many languages and the Thames, which she expected to shape her next collection.

Poems in this selection

• Spilt Milk

poets in this country now have access to poets of all different cultures

Sarah Maguire, The Wolf, issue 6

I'm with the freedom fighters

Sarah Maguire, The Wolf, issue 6