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Caroline Natzler’s first full collection, Design Fault, has just been published by Flambard. A collection of short stories, Water Wings, was published in 1990 and a poetry pamphlet Speaking the Wetlands in 1998. She teaches creative writing in London.

DB: One theme that interests me in your poems is your relationship to the everyday. Sometimes you would like to rise above it as when you write about the glorious moment that is charged with grace, sometimes you fear falling through it to where you feel I’m in darkness, choking, and sometimes you want to escape from it into a simpler existence, as down the straight road in the poem Absolute, but that seems to miss something out - the dog rambles off the road.

CN: The relationship has changed as I’ve grown older. The everyday grows less threatening but also less banal. There seems less of a rupture between the material world and the sense of a spiritual world - more immanence than a specific religious feeling. Absolute harked back to how I used to be and how I realised that the dog is the one who has life, rather than the person who wants to reduce everything to a scheme. Another poem I wrote at the time was Absence it took me 18 months and after that the sense of a nameless pull to something beyond dissipated. That’s what can be so powerful about writing.

DB: I’ve been struck by your imagery. Sometimes it’s very dear, like the kaleidoscope that gives you both a mosaic and a horizon. Sometimes it’s more obviously arresting, like the new toaster “gleaming with savoir-faire”. Do poems come to you in images?

CN: Usually poems start with moods or feelings. Sometimes a ready-made image will come out of the narrative of the experience. And I dream a lot, so at some level I must experience images but they get buried and I have to bring them out. I work on my images - I don’t write easily.

DB: I enjoy the humour in your poems - the “positive-thinking daffodils”, the fearful poet of “Don’t speak among people / They’ll mess up your ideas”. One poem I particularly liked was Girls, because the humour seemed part of a rich emotional development, from dislike of the girls to a touching half-humorous appreciation. Another poem I especially enjoyed was There. It has a great momentum.

CN: People read it as being about my mother, but it’s not. At some level my childhood experience had a gothic edge to it, and something more gothic than my literal external life appeared in the poem. It sprang from an exercise in a class about returning to a place, so I started by thinking about the house and was surprised how much richness and ambivalence came out of that.

DB: Some of the momentum is from having the refrain “She’s there” but not placing it regularly letting it appear when the emotion demands it.

CN: That’s interesting because I would like to re-ground my poems in song, which There has more of than a lot of my work.

DB: Did you start writing poetry early on in your life?

CN: I started with short stories when I was nine. I wrote poems as a teenager. I felt lonely and isolated and it was a religious type of activity, a bit like worship. I’d see this stupendous sunset and wonder what I could do, what I could give back Then I wrote no more poetry till my book of short stories was published in 1990. I’d written myself out autobiographically. A friend in a writing group suggested poetry. I felt daunted. Then I realised that the way I think suits poetry - in fragments rather than as narrative. And the way one’s unconscious gets all mixed up in something - poetry can address that and reflect on it. I felt a tremendous sense of relief, like discovering writing all over again.

DB: You’ve written both prose and poetry - have they influenced one another?

CN: Having written prose meant I could relax a bit when it came to poetry. I didn’t feel I had to say everything every time. I could have a more precise vision - a single moment, a single image. I think it would be lovely to go back to writing prose fiction using my experience with poetry to be more subtle and less over-written.

DB: Is there any way in which you write against the contemporary grain?

CN: When I’m more blatantly searching in a philosophical, spiritual way. And it’s more important to me to be lucid than to some of my contemporaries. On the other hand there are contemporary ways of writing I’d like to be able to do more of - dialogue, or the vernacular.

DB: You teach writing. What do you find you particularly need to point out to students?

CN: A lot of people, young as well as old, think poetry has to rhyme. Then they go for the most boring rhyme words. It’s interesting that writing syllabic verse does not seem to limit students in the way rhyme does - Haiku work well in classes. Some people are obscure. They’re writing for themselves alone, in a way they would not do with fiction. And I try to guide students to think metaphorically - if they have an abstract feeling or idea, what might it smell like?

DB: I was wondering how your life outside writing has influenced your poetry. For example you’ve worked as a lawyer. Your poetry is very exact - does that link up?

CN: Law has forced me to think and explain clearly. Also, it’s brought me into touch with people’s material and emotional problems and with issues to do with society generally. I’ve needed to hook on to life - as a student I was a very rarefied person. So I’m not sorry I’ve done law, though I now hope to earn a living by teaching and writing.

DB: Is there any question I’ve not asked that you would like to answer?

CN: I thought you might ask who I wrote for, maybe because that’s a question that’s been in my mind over the years. I like to think I now write for real living people in the real living world, and not as prayer, or for a composite of my mother, my favourite schoolteacher and so on.