Daphne Schiller
A Profile
One of the things that Daphne Schiller enjoys most in life is subversion; not banner-waving protest or limelight-seeking mutiny but a quiet, understated resistance. Similarly, Daphne’s poems do not draw attention to themselves with extravagant language, nor do they deliberately twist or strain poetic conventions. In fact, at first glance they may seem very ordinary, but there is always something in them that makes the reader think ‘hang on a minute’ and feel the need to take a second look. It is then that the reader will appreciate how carefully phrased they are and how much is hinted at within the spare language.
Daphne has a particular affinity with South as she had a Cornish father and went to school in Exmouth, Devon. The family later moved to a West Dorset village. She had an inspirational Sixth form English teacher, one F. E. S. Finn who, she later discovered, was involved with the ‘new’ poetry of the 1950’s and 60’s, but it wasn’t until she started teaching English herself that she began to write poetry. Perhaps her poetic instincts were stalled by her first encounter with a live poet on an English Society residential trip to North Wales while she was at University in Manchester. She describes the moment when R. S. Thomas came to read to them as ‘like being awestruck in the presence of a prophet. He wore his cassock and was a long streak of black, impressive but doom-ridden’. However, the impulse came when she moved to St Albans with her husband and children at the same time as two of her poems were highly commended in the Ver Poets Open Competition 1975 (then called the Michael Johnson Competition). She joined the St Albans-based Ver Poets where she received support and encouragement and the rest, as they say, is history. Ver Poets and its competition are still going strong today and Daphne is a driving force in the organisation of this society. One of her many responsibilities is arranging the workshops for members to receive feedback on works in progress. She feels that these are invaluable, because all writers need an objective eye which can confirm their own misgivings about lines or images or alternatively provide reassurance. However the main stimulus for writing for Daphne is entering competitions, because the deadlines force her to finish work which might otherwise lie for years in notebooks.
What leaves her observations, impressions and images lurking in notebooks is her concern with starting and ending well, always her aim in poetry. But who can resist great openings like “At dusk/ I go to work in an egg” (The Night Shift) and “They’re ready for you/ in the bleeding bay” (The Bleeding Bay). And who can argue with great endings like “fatally skewered by a frivolous gang/ of hair freaks and fashionistas” (The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian). It is the ordinariness of life peppered by the faintly surreal that marks out Daphne’s work. She has an acute sense of the ridiculous and through her poems we imagine her looking at life with a faint, quizzical smile. Daphne is an undemonstrative person, but in social situations I often sense there is a great deal more going on inside her head than she lets on and sometimes her poems give us a taste of the private thoughts she has amused herself with, for example, when she is invited into The Bleeding Bay and wonders who it is who is ready for her – “underfed leeches”, “physicians in wigs and knee-breeches” or “vampires gnashing their teeth”. Another poem which uses lines she has heard someone say and one of my favourites is Hanging Up Their Hats, which opens “Your mother couldn’t reach the hat-stand/ my father said”, which turns out to be the explanation for a “failed move to a parish/ in Guernsey”. There is a sitcom element to the description of a chequered ecclesiastical career, but behind the humour is an exploration of family relationships, of childhood and broken expectations. The relationship with her mother and her father especially is further explored in another of my favourites, Heritage, a poem which triggers so many emotions it would be foolish of me to even try to pin them down. You need to read the poem – several times.
This is ultimately what draws me to Daphne’s poems – it is never obvious what you are supposed to think or feel. Simplistic language hides a wealth of ideas as, for example, in her observations on a painting of The Rev. Robert Walker Skating which ends:
“I’m part
of God’s purpose, whatever
that is. Alert and relaxed,
I move
to wherever I’m going”
But Daphne is equally adept at employing the music of language when, for example, in Bath Night she describes a shoal of starlings “splashland, squabble,/ scrumdown, wing clap/ to the music of whistles/ warbling kettles, mobile tunes”. She has the skill of choosing just the right adjective or verb to carry the full meaning of a phrase: “an air-treading angel”, “a gutted rainbow”, “knife-edged winds”. Neither is Daphne averse to using traditional forms and particularly enjoys the challenge of writing sonnets, an example of which is included here in North Tawton.
Her poetry is controlled, her words carefully chosen and this to me is the real strength of poetry as a form – the economy of language which maximises impact. This is the reason, I believe, that despite dabbling in journalism and short story writing, taking an MA in creative writing at East Anglia in which there was no poetry stream and having unpublished novels waiting at home, she always comes back to poetry and it is poetry that she really wants to write. Daphne has had many poems published in magazines and anthologies, numerous commendations and prizes in competitions and has published pamphlets, the most recent of which being The Scarlet Fish. I hope that you enjoy the selection of her work on the following pages.
Acknowledgements
Some of the poems in this selection were first published in ‘14’, Connections, Equinox, The Interpreter’s House, Iota, ‘John Cotton’s 10 Liners’ (Ver Poets), The Mere Competition, Norwich Writers’ Anthology, Second Light Newsletter, Virginia Warbey Competition anthology, The White Dot and Writers’ News.
Page(s) 4-6
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The