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GIVEN that Elizabeth Bewick was born in the north–east and has
retained strong attachments to that area, but has lived in Winchester for over forty years, it would be tempting to describe her as a poet of two, contrasting landscapes. This would be an exaggeration, however – not least because she writes out of the fullness of experience where she finds it, not out of a partial view that sets the 'harsh' north against the 'soft' south. There is, nevertheless, an obdurate quality to the character manifested in her poetry that may derive from her upbringing in the north. Elizabeth was born in County Durham in 1919. She came to Hampshire in 1961 to set up the School Library Service. Although she has been writing poetry most of her life, she only seriously considered publication in retirement.
Since then, too, she has been active, as participant and organiser, in
local poetry circles, and won a number of awards for her poetry. Her health has caused anxiety over the years and she has survived a number of serious illnesses and operations. Of these she says of herself with characteristic stoicism and determination, "each time recovering to record her experience in her poetry".

Her first collection, Comfort Me With Apples, published in a limited edition in 1987, was illustrated with wood–engravings by the publisher, Graham Williams, at the Florin Press. This was followed by her first full collection, Heartsease, published by Harry Chambers at Peterloo Poets in 1991. The same press produced her most recent collection, Making a Roux, in 2000. Elizabeth commands a number of poetic forms, but whether she is writing a sonnet or a villanelle or writing in 'free verse', her voice is immediately recognisable. It has an emotional fullness and vulnerability, which may in part be accounted for by the following words which she wrote about herself: "Falling literally madly in love at over sixty was both a shock and a delight and resulted in a number of love poems". She is, indeed, a remarkable love poet, but not only in the domain of romance. Her compassionate poems embrace family and friends, and reach out to strangers.

Strong emotion, with its attendant pleasure and pain, characterises
Elizabeth's poetry. But of course emotion by itself does not make a poet, and may easily unmake one, if not harnessed to discipline and a passion for form. In the case of Elizabeth, as in that of all true lyricists, it is the shaping of emotion that makes the poem. This is evident at once in the title poem of Heartsease:

My garden is a meadow lush with weeds
in whose green depths such hidden flowers grow
as one day will suffice for all your needs.
I thought so once ...

The initial cadence here recalls the Song of Songs, a strong influence upon seventeenth–century metaphysical poets. The formal containment of emotion that actually enables expression is another feature of the poem that recalls the metaphysicals. This is a case of a tradition thoroughly absorbed, as we see in the dramatic fluctuation of emotion between the third line and the fourth. As Elizabeth writes in "Herb Pot–Pourri": "we first get on with life, then shape our verse/out of the pattern that the years have made". This nicely encapsulates the relation between experience and poetic "shaping"
evident in the best poems in Heartsease and Making a Roux.

Flower imagery pervades Elizabeth's verse. This contributes to its delight in colour and scent and in nature's vitalising power. It is also central to its essentially religious nature. In "Greek Images", "Something I had thought/ quite wizened stirs to life,/new growth is painful/but genesis of pleasure". The meaning is overtly Christian, and at the same time draws upon the cycle of life and death and regeneration in nature. Elizabeth's poems of love in age frequently call to mind George Herbert's "Who would have thought my shrivelled heart/Could have recovered greenness?".

Elizabeth's sensuous imagination is in harmony with her realism and concern for truth. A poem in memory of her sister, who was an accomplished painter, begins: "Janet, have I brought rectitude to life/or made a mockery of memory,/a workshop exercise instead of truth?" Rectitude is not usually a concern of contemporary poetry, and nor, perhaps, is truth, but both are important to this poet. And, far from having made a mockery of memory, Elizabeth has written fine tributes to her beloved dead. Her realism both takes the moral form of self–criticism, and involves looking unflinchingly at harsh realities, as she does in her hospital poems, and her poems about
loss and death.

Elizabeth's Madam in "House of Girls" speaks of "my grandparents' photographs/ in the gold locket I always wear/nestling incongruously/between my naked breasts". Incongruous as the photographs in the locket between the breasts may be in this context, there is nothing incongruous in the world of feeling. The poet knows the capacity of the human heart, where sexual passion and a sense of the sacred may cohabit. The same poet realistically refuses to stand – or sit – on her dignity, as when in "Singleton" she writes of "wriggl[ing] my bottom/to relieve sciatic nerves".

Elizabeth admires W.B. Yeats "above almost all other poets and find him our greatest lyricist". Her tribute to Yeats, "Sweet and Harsh, Harsh and Sweet", makes the admiration palpable. Yeats was a poet who expressed the emotions of a lifetime, from youth to middle age and old age, in his poetry. Thomas Hardy was another. It is more common, perhaps, for a poet to express most effectively the emotions of one stage of life. One of the remarkable things about Elizabeth is that she has compacted such a range of emotions into the poems written since her sixtieth year. At the same time, her published work has a maturity that springs from knowledge of
the sweet and harsh, the pleasure and the pain, woven together in the one life. Her poems are a rich gathering, drawing together past and present, the years in County Durham and the years in Winchester.