When I was doing my PhD, which was on Greek religion, a lot of it was about what was under the earth. There’s a Greek motif that you find light – or the knowledge you need – under the earth. That is the katabasis tradition: Odysseus goes down to find out how to get home; and he meets the shade of his mother there too. While I did the thesis I was beginning to write poems and I read a little essay by Kathleen Raine called ‘The Inner Journey of the Poet’ – she’s hot on inspiration and Blake, and I found it a really interesting idea, that you have to go down into yourself, into memory, to bring back the true poem. That’s what Adrienne Rich does in ‘Diving into the Wreck’, and Atwood has talked about it too: you go down deep into yourself and the past, and it’s hard – you might see ghosts, or worse things than ghosts, which are in you. That’s where the poems are going to come from; good stuff comes out of the dark.

In writing this poem, I had no idea – I thought the book was finished. It’s now the last poem in the book. I was staying with friends in France at the end of summer a few months after my mother died, and I’d never been to any of the prehistoric painted caves. I had written about them! There’s an essay on Wild Court about Czesław Miłosz and the spotted horses of the Pech Merle cave, and when I was writing that I happened to be staying with my mother, and damn me she said she’d been to Pech Merle. She said in her sceptical way, ‘I didn’t believe in those spotted horses for a second’. I hope her sceptical self is going to come over in the book.

I had no idea that she’d been to any of these caves. I never had. It was about an hour’s drive away, last summer. I really wanted to go, and I enthused other people to go with me and in fact we all got so inspired we went twice. The extraordinary thing about those paintings, the horses and bison, is, why on earth would they paint them? You really had to go a long way down, through all sorts of caverns and twists, so how did they get in there? They must have had fire – it was before pottery. They just would have carried flaming torches to get to this great big cavern where they started painting these animals. An extraordinary thing to do. In that Miłosz essay, I talk about how the first art is representations of animals. And that was very important to my mum too – she was a biologist. But I didn’t have any of that in mind. Initially it was just… reaction.

It was deep diving, and I did not know I was going to write a poem about it. We came back, we drank some wine, we talked about it, but it wasn’t until I got back here that I started. When I finished it, I showed it to my daughter Gwen, who was in Colombia, and she said, ‘It’s a journey to the underworld’. I thought, ‘Bloody hell. So it is.’

Through images. The experience itself was quite moving and a bit scary. We had some younger people with us who were worried about vampires. I was more worried about breaking an ankle – there were slippery bits of stalactites and everything…

It was. Also, I was with dear friends, that’s important – people I’ve known for 30 years or more – and one of them was in mourning too. We looked at the website in advance. I remember someone saying, ‘Of course I’m going to take my mobile phone’. But when we got there, we were told we couldn’t bring anything with us, couldn’t take handbags or mobile phones. We were divested.

It came completely naturally out of the experience, but stylistically it probably does come from George Seferis and the Mythistorima. I’m looking back now – he wrote a poem called Mythistorima, which means ‘novel’ in modern Greek, but it’s also myth and history and it’s in 24 poems. It was written in the 1930s before the war and based on the Odyssey, but it’s in the voice of the companions of Odysseus – there’s a ‘we’, it’s a collective experience.

I had written most of the book… I thought I’d written all of it! I began to realise I’d written something which other people might find reflected their own experience of bereavement. By bereavement standards, it was a very gentle one. My mother was very lucky and so were we – I didn’t have to focus on huge pain, on the agony of watching someone else in pain. It was more being there with her, in a transition that had to happen –  and then with missing her.

There are lots of things in there. One first thing – about the ‘we’ voice – there are some ‘we’ voices in the collection to do with feeling close to my brothers and sister, all the family, while we were around her. There’s a poem called ‘Nursing Wing’ in which I talk about waiting, about trying to phone wherever we could find a signal, running out of milk – all the things you’re doing when you’re snatched out of your normal life. It took three weeks. We didn’t know what was going to happen. She started dying and then stopped. We gathered round her first in the hospital, where the phones were ok, but then in the nursing wing of the home, where it was maddening – you couldn’t get a signal… and that seemed a metaphor for all kinds of things. There was also a gentleness around. All extended families have complexities, but we were all very helpful to each other: I held my phone to her ear in the hospital so she could talk to my daughter in Colombia, one of her grandsons in Palestine, another in Barcelona. And other people, cousins and friends, were weeping on the phone saying goodbye. And lots of people actually came, so there was a benign collective around her dying. One person said, ‘We went to visit her to cheer her up – and she cheered us up.’ This poem picks that up and radiates it out a bit.

But yes, Orpheus – earlier in the book there’s a poem called ‘Tuning Your Lyre Among the Shades’ about going down an emerald mine in Colombia. I didn’t actually do that because it’s too dangerous, not because of the mine but because of the guns. I did go to an emerald market in Bogota, and talk to a lot of people, and do a lot of research around emeralds. Emerald mining happens in carbon stone. Everything is black, and it’s hot – lots of warm water rushing down – and I imagined Orpheus suffocating, 40 feet down. So Orpheus comes up in that poem too. There’s also the sense of music: my family are all involved in music; my parents met playing music; so there’s this sense of music bringing people together. Orpheus comes into the book in lots of hidden ways, I think. As for a duty… maybe I don’t feel it’s so much a duty to the dead to bring them back, as he wanted to do, but a duty to your own sense of the dead person: that you want to celebrate them in song, to find something good in the experience, both of saying goodbye as they die, and of missing them.

My dad was a psychoanalyst, so my mum had a slightly conflicted relationship with Freud and psychoanalysis. I remember I took her to a meeting of the Psychoanalytical Society after he died, because they started a meeting with a very warm memorial to him. Then they wanted to get on with their meeting, and I took her out. As we were leaving she said, ‘I never have to go to another of those meetings again’. Of course, she was honoured and listened, and she was interested in his ideas. But it’s a big thing to live with, psychoanalysis! And I was interested too. There’s always a sense of excavation. Arthur Evans was digging up the Palace of Knossos in Crete just around the same time that Freud was writing about the unconscious. Freud himself was very interested in things that had been dug up. All those objets in the Freud Museum, which he brought by train from Vienna – he got out in the nick of time – are Greek or Egyptian archaeological treasures. He was a manic collector. I wrote a poem about them in The Mara Crossing called ‘The Freud Museum’ after attending a conference there called ‘What is an Object?’

I had never written a poem like it before. In the past, any personal poems I’ve written have tended to be love poems. I haven’t excavated childhood much at all. Perhaps in my second book, Angel, a little. My first book, Summer Snow, focussed on my daughter as a baby. Since 2004, I’ve been writing about science, migration, Darwin, the Middle East – I had no idea I was going to do this. And it now seems impossible. Already I’m thinking, how did I get there? How did I write that?

It’s interesting, coming to see her life from different angles. There’s a fruit and veg shop round the corner – the people are from Afghanistan. I was in there around the time she died and I said, ‘My mother has just died.’ And one said, ‘Mother – is love’. I found people did say important things, or I found them important: everyone resonates to that loss. But after she dies… You start to think about the person who has died in different ways, you wonder about their lives, their childhood. What did her childhood really feel like? What you know and what you don’t know.

Also, to look back and think of what new ways of thinking about things you have always known. It’s another sort of excavating.

It’s also connected to the birthstone. The book was always going to be called Emerald. I did tonnes of research about emerald mining and the emerald trade; how the Spanish were exporting emeralds from the Andes to India already in the 1540s. The 1540s! I thought that was so interesting. I also researched the Emerald Tablet, which is supposed to be the founding text of alchemy, and what Jung said about it. And the idea of birth came up because emerald is for May, and spring: it is my birthstone. So I suppose you’re thinking of birth here, of something dark being brought to the light. And then, when I sing in the poem… because I do like singing in echoey places to see what the echo is like…

Yes. Our guide said the archaeologists wondered if the Ice Age artists chose to put the paintings there because it was also such a good acoustic space.

I am very influenced by Heaney. Not only his poems, but also his critical voice, which is so rich. Critical is almost the wrong word – it’s a very conscientious, thoughtful, voice, but also of course very imaginative: it always seems to open doors. Every sentence opens a new idea – which is so unlike so much criticism, which often closes interpretation down. Heaney invokes Eliot, but also his Irish forebears, like Beckett and Joyce. Station Island is one of my favourite Heaney collections. But for me, I suppose there are the older Greek tragic poets, whose words I have spent so much time with. Hopkins too; the nature poems, but also his own indebtedness to Greek choral lyric. And Elizabeth Bishop – I love her scrupulousness.

Totally unconscious – I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. But it’s also what Darwin did: a lot of his theories depended on very small creatures – coral, worms, bees or barnacles. He built his big theories on tiny things. My mum had been a biologist and was working in cancer research when I came along, but she gave that up to have children, as they did in those days. And when she first came to a poetry reading of mine, she said, ‘I see the point of poetry now. Poets notice things’. I’ve always thought natural history is sort of parallel to poetry because of that noticing. Both depend on relating the very small things you observe to the big things.

You leave it to the other person, the reader. You have to put the concrete evidence there, then stand back and let them feel what they want to feel. Keats said that no one likes a man who keeps trying to put his hand in your pocket. I’ve been quite sparing with adjectives, too. I always tell people when I’m teaching to beware of adverbs, which are the parts of speech that do the most ‘telling not showing’. I feel adverbs are very bossy. But I seem to have applied that to adjectives here, too.

I always thought the similes in the Iliad are windows out of the terrible world of the battlefield into another life. Like the moment in Book 4, where there’s the breaking of the truce. Menelaus and Paris are due to have a private duel – one will win and everyone else will go home safe. But that’s not what the gods want, so a god gets someone to shoot an arrow and it goes into a thigh, ‘like when a woman stains the ivory cheek-piece of a horse in a bridle’. And there she is, staining it, making something careful and deliberate, peaceful and creative, a complete contrast to what’s going on. And when the arrow is shot, breaking the truce, all hell breaks loose and we have the next 20 books of the Iliad. I’ve always thought of similes as windows. I was once in a Cézanne exhibition in Paris – it was a round room with the paintings all round the wall, and I suddenly saw them as windows out, into a completely other world, the world of his vision. I think that’s what images in a poem can be – a window out. As in Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘I Dwell In Possibility’: ‘A fairer House than Prose – /More numerous of Windows – /Superior – for Doors –’

Another thing people pick up on in my work is how I keep connecting the ancient and the modern. I don’t do that consciously; it seems to be how my mind likes to move. There’s a poem in Voodoo Shop called ‘Writing to Onegin’: a version, made from three translations (I don’t know Russian), of a passage from Pushkin’s epic poem Eugene Onegin. Some people queried that I’d brought in modern things, screensavers etc, but to me it felt natural, moving between the past and the present. There’s a passage in ‘Landscape with Flight to Egypt’ in The Mara Crossingwhere I write that ‘Landscape is your life seen in distance, when you know //for just an interval of sunlight, how to join /time travelled with time still to go.

Spaces! I’m doing that through the whole book – there are only two commas in the book and they’re in the title of a poem. There are no commas in the poems. Instead there are spaces – like breaths. I think this was partly to do with tentativeness. And with taking your time.

It did. I was very interested in Ocean Vuong’s book – I was doing spaces like this already when I first picked it up in a Brooklyn bookshop, and I was delighted to learn from his line. I had been thinking about how you read aloud, how you give a poem to other people when you read it, wanting to mark the breathing spaces – like musical rests. Beckett was very interested in silence. I once heard a wonderful talk by a singer who’d worked with him, played music with him, about how in his plays he was very precise in how long he wanted the actor to pause. I think of it as a music thing. Something I don’t think I could do with just a comma. Maybe it was the subject, too: there’s a solemnity about dying, the feelings you’re having at the time and afterwards, and perhaps that offered a license to do it.

I was also thinking about the integrity of a line. I had a conversation with an American editor a year ago, in which I talked about the integrity of the line and how many British poets seemed to me to consider it more than some American poets: I wondered if he thought there was a difference there. He said, ‘Well you can call it  integrity,’ and when I asked what else he would call it he said, ‘conventional’. I reported this back to the poet I was staying with. He said that Robert Creeley threw out ‘integrity of the line’ but it kept creeping back. Like when you destroy a spider’s web, he said, and it remakes it, but each time more faintly. I think it’s probably to do with musical phrasing. If you’re going to break notes that belong together, you need a good reason to do so.

We have line-breaks. That’s what we have. One of the first lectures at King’s on my poetry course is called ‘You Are Your Line Breaks’. We’ve got to use the line break. And keep thinking about them. I didn’t make a conscious decision not to use commas, I just found I was doing it. Maybe it came from being with someone who’s dying; you’re just terribly careful how she sits up, how she sips from a mug. Every small thing you have to be careful about.

The return of the comma!

The speakers at that point are the stalagmites. 40,000 years of sediment and drip! It is they who are time. I suppose I wanted to take the reader down there, when it says, ‘watch out you’ll have to crouch’. I suppose I was half-thinking of Dante too.

It’s interesting that you bring up this idea of bigger and smaller. I think I’ve always had that, but I wasn’t so aware of it. For instance, at the moment I’m writing an essay about fire and Prometheus, and myths about the origins of fire. And way back in 1998, in a collection called Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, there’s a poem called ‘Myths of the Origins of Fire’, with a quotation from Frazer about how fire is a secret that is always lost and always has to be re-found. I believe we all have our own layers of imaginative connections, and images. And part of the job is going down into them, but also connecting them to the big things outside your own self.

I was talking yesterday to a group about Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. I was quite shocked by the level of reaction in reviews to that book. They made me not want to read it, but when I did, I felt it was deeply about Brexit, about the world now. Its conceit is a mist emanating from a Buried Giant, which makes people forget everything. But at the end, there’s a question: do you really want to kill this thing? If you do, the forgetting will stop, but you’re going to bring back tribalism, revenge, feuds: all the stuff which has now awoken, horrible racialism and the rest of it. I thought that was a very interesting idea. Buriedness. The things buried in you are your poetic capital, but you can’t know exactly where they are, – no fracking, as it were. But sometimes when you’re writing, if you listen, they may float up.

I don’t think when I’m writing in terms of conscious and unconscious, I just try to be open to connections. Sometimes a word will do it: sometimes if you think of a simile, or a synonym, other connections will arise which may lead on to something else. For me, it’s about being open and listening.

I love that! Probably I do have early drafts of this poem, but also there were so many stages to it. One extraordinary thing was that my aunt and my mum died at the same time, six hours and 100 miles apart. They weren’t blood related, they were sisters-in-law. Putting that in there set everything up, as a time apart. And then, in the cave, another time apart, there was being stripped. Some people were horror-struck to be parted from their phones.

It was also the hills. When you came out from the cave that’s what you saw – the green hills. One of the motifs of the paintings in that cave is lots of backs of bison – the painters were practising sketching the lines of animal backs. That’s what you would see, if you saw a whole herd galloping away. The hills were like that too.

I suppose one other influence is the last poem in The Poem and the Journey: the Miłosz poem about Orpheus. It ends with Orpheus lying on the earth – ‘he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.’

I think probably every writer will say similar things at this point: how else can you get through life but by making something from it? I’m re-writing a novel at the moment from the perspective of a character who is a painter, so I spoke to painter friends and I got very interested in the life of Cézanne. He was a compulsive painter: he would go out into the landscape to paint and sometimes just leave the paintings there! It was all about the making. Many of those landscape paintings seem to express a lot of pain. Even in looking at landscape, the intensity drives you to want to make something, and to make it, you draw on what is in you at the time.

They are very much to do with the voice. But not exactly singing – they don’t have pitch or melody. I feel that poems have their own music which is to do with their vowels and their patterns. For a while, I had a really tough time with my speaking voice. It was breaking, my throat felt constricted, I was worried something was really harmed. I went to a voice coach, who was great, and at one point she said, ‘Why don’t you sing that line instead?’ I did, and she said ‘there you are, it’s perfectly fine. Nothing’s physically wrong, but you’ve never had to use your singing voice to make yourself heard.’ For a woman, particularly, it can be hard to use your voice to be heard in a male environment. Sometimes, she said, actors can speak but not sing: for them it is the other way round. I sing naturally and freely but for a time I couldn’t use my speaking voice.

That’s fascinating. I wasn’t consciously thinking of the answering voice: it was more about loss of direction. My mum was always on the end of the phone; I would ring her when I was at the bus stop going to work, only it got more difficult because she couldn’t hear. Or when I was about to catch a plane. She was always there and she was a compass point. I went to New York last year after she died and stayed with a friend whose mother had also just died, so there was a sort of kinship. Then I lost my mobile phone, and if you don’t know where you are – although New York City is a grid system, it’s incredibly easy to not know which direction you’re going in – you have to ask somebody. There was this huge general sense of disorientation.

Yes. Being known. That response, near the end of the poem, to ‘carry the true good burden of being known’: to say the story of ourselves truthfully, not pretend about bits of ourselves we’d rather hide. And so you go out, into the light.