Lesley Curwen’s poetry lives at the intersection of grief, sea spray, and half-dreamt language. Her earliest work, written in her teens, leaned toward the lyrical and descriptive, but that softness has since been tempered by time, by loss, and by a sharpened attention to sound. “In the course of life, my poems have become more focused on the interplay of vowel sounds, and an underlying, but not strict, rhythm,” she says. There’s a clarity now, and a darker urgency. Grief, loss, and ecological witness run through her recent work, anchored by a growing desire to “see past the surface of our consumerist lives to the unpalatable truth of what is being wasted.”
A pivotal moment came one night in Plymouth, when she woke and looked out at the Sound. “All its buoys were winking in the dark,” she recalls. That moment became the seed for In which I become Plymouth Sound, a poem that doesn’t just describe the place but becomes it. “I imagined myself as the Sound,” she explains, “a body of polluted water, a waterway that was used to launch colonial adventurers on missions of slavery and overthrow.” It marked a shift, from writing about place to writing as place. From reflection to embodiment.
Most of Curwen’s poems begin in the strange, porous hour between sleep and waking. “The germs of my poems come in the early morning,” she says, “as I am just waking. I write them into the notes section of my phone.” What she captures there might be a line, a phrase, sometimes a paragraph of raw thought, urgent, half-lit, emotionally charged. Later, at the laptop, she transcribes and edits. But catching the original pulse isn’t always easy. “Sometimes it is hard to recall the verbal pulse which started the whole thing off,” she admits. “I have to retreat into a kind of meditative state, looking for the emotional logic of where it began.” The form, she says, comes last. Often it requires multiple reshapes before it feels right, before the language finds its proper skin.
Her influences run deep and are never worn for show. The work of Pascale Petit, especially her use of animal metaphors to frame trauma, helped Curwen unlock her own family history, particularly around the story of forced adoption. She doesn’t just write about family; she rebuilds its wreckage with metaphor and sound. The sea, too, remains an ever-present figure in her work. “As a sailor, I keep coming back to the sea as a source,” she says. “It is everywhere in my poetry, along with the desire for exhilaration and danger.” Love has also entered her recent poems, not as fantasy, but as real, domestic joy. “I have written more about love in recent years than ever before,” she says, “and that is down to the great happiness I have found in my homelife.”
She writes from a low desk in her own quiet room. “It’s a great luxury,” she says plainly. A bright desk lamp, a vase of rosemary on the windowsill. Silence. “All this means I can think without noisy distractions, and try to trace back the logic of each stanza, to make sure the poem finds its right words.” That logic isn’t intellectual, it’s emotional. And it’s how her work carries such weight.
Over the last decade, Lesley Curwen has lost all of her closest family. Poetry didn’t save her from that grief, but it gave her a way to shape it, to name it, and to reanimate those she’s lost. “The ability to write about the experience of grief has shown me just how much it has changed me,” she says, “and warned me about my vulnerability.” But her poems aren’t draped in mourning. “I am beginning to see that the poetry of grief is not just elegies or sadness,” she continues, “but a way to celebrate the vivid lives of those who’ve gone, to paint them in full technicolour glory.”
And that vividness pulses through her publications. Rescue Lines, from Hedgehog Press, is a lyrical reckoning with survival, emotional, personal, and political. Sticky with Miles, published by Hybrid Dreich, hums with the improvisational heat of love and loss, its title echoing both jazz and intimacy. Invisible Continents, released by Nine Pens Press, maps the topography of absence, grief rendered as geography, where memory and myth tangle on the page. These collections don’t just showcase Curwen’s voice. They chart a life lived with attention, and a poet who refuses to look away.
