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Lyn Moir:

My friendship with Daphne dates back twenty years – we joined Second Light together. I shall miss her in so many ways: we holidayed together, bounced poems, short stories, plays and even novels off each other… Daphne was the ideal companion, witty, erudite, irreverent, knowledgeable, curious about everything, passionate and, above all, honest. I found in her poetry a texture and colours which did not match my own, but which blended with them and opened my world out to a dimension I had never imagined. When I moved back to Scotland my chief regret was that it took me further from Daphne, but the emails flew, the phone buzzed, and even the railways gained from the distance. Because I was so far away I could not be as much of a support to her as those who had easier access to London, and so I leave the details of her last days to them. I cannot pick out one poem of Daphne’s, her range was so wide, her writing so precise, so intense. Read any you can get hold of. I trust that her later poems, so incisive and true, will be published in a posthumous collection. Some of them have been chosen here by others of her friends.

Jenny Vuglar:

What I think about when I think of Daphne is the attention she gave to everything: fossils, how the universe was formed, a grandson’s drawing, someone else’s poem, a cup of tea. Life, or as she said ‘the general mess of being’, was always something that she not only wanted to be part of but cared intensely about. On one of our last visits she said the worst thing about dying was leaving the world in the state it was in. And everything that interested her she wrote about. There are stories, a novel, several plays and poems that never stopped. She died “still deep with words”. She was adventurous – my favourite image is Daphne pulling herself on her stomach along lead mines “not knowing where it might end, / this sharp embrace”; empathetic – Don, her death row correspondent seeing “sudden sunrise… his sky-square turned to sun” and above all honest in following thought where it led:

 …I write across the page:
no one is perfect : but the ink
remains invisible.

I can’t sum up Daphne because she was too various. Read her poems.

Rosemary Norman:

When Daphne was moving house not long ago, she talked and wrote often about her ‘things’. The meaning they had was her meaning, what could they be to anyone else? So what to keep? Her writing is full of other people’s ‘things’, left behind by vanished mining communities, or war dead. And in these poems the meaning of ‘things’ isn’t controlled by the former owner or the poet, it’s where their dialogue takes place. To me, it’s this engagement, which never ended, that makes Daphne’s death at eighty seem premature, and it’s why we all miss her so much.

I’ve selected Daphne’s poem British Rail have finished clearing up the debris: to include. This one has an odd history, she’d forgotten about it and then we couldn’t remember what the incident was that’s behind it. It’s dated February 1991.

British Rail have finished clearing up the debris:

scrubbing blood off stone.
If you’ve ever scrubbed blood
you’ll know how thin it lies
on surfaces, pink water:
apologetic, almost, for being visible.

Rivers of life live in secret:
we pretend we are solid, pretend
weapons make holes we can plug
with body-filler.

Everyone should scrub blood
once in their lives.
Circle the lakes without bounds:
trap platelets in a floor cloth.
Soon dry. Brown crust and flake.
Only when first spilled you will remember
its slop round your wrists,
its quantity.

Adele Davide:

Daphne often spoke and wrote about the undervaluing of the little-known lives, of her admiration for the overlooked women’s arts such as in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where chest upon chest of drawers are filled with lace, and we were the only ones there. We met often at the Poetry Library to read our latest work, look over rows of magazines, then a little lunch.

There were outings to Kew Gardens in the chill, late spring watching swans fly low over a lake, hard to walk away from even though we stood freezing in a thin sun, or a sweltering walk in late July with tea and a put-to-right-the-world conversation in Green Park. There was her great love of Shakespeare; the Globe our meeting place. Or once the Round House where we were showered on from the leaky roof and had to move.

Towards the end of her life, too weak to travel, unable to answer e-mails, our poetry group visited half hours at a time. Her eyes brightened, spirit perked, re-ignited by imagination and the word. She was still writing nearly up to her death, and the quietness and directness of the last poems shudder recognition in the body quicker than the head. As Borges says, ‘music before meaning’. These late, idiosyncratic line breaks wouldn’t work for anyone else, have a punctuation that can’t be taught. She asked me again and again should she write about death, about preparing for death? about last goodbyes? maybe a last spring? She gave what people need, what’s been written so little about. What it’s like to know you’re dying. The last evening we spoke, Daphne cried on the telephone unable to express loss at losing the world. That’s sharing. That was what Daphne’s life and art were about.

When Poets Die

Poets die still deep with words,
ribbons of lines, verses
like unstitched tapestries and whole pages
not yet set. They lie deep,
crowded into jars and button tins,
beads waiting for stringing. Listen –
you hear them, small clinks of glass and pearl,
rolling around, not into emptiness, they wait
to make a way to the sun, quickened
even in earth.

Kate Foley:

Daphne was very good at rocks. No pun intended – her signature as a poet was a deep, patient understanding of the processes and formations of time and the geological events that wrestled out the rocks minerals and fossils that outcropped so effectively in her work; time, too, that had to be seized in the moment, or time spent at the bus stop. She grasped how “…a moment too small to measure” could turn into “the brilliant burn of being here / where ending and beginning have no space.”

She was good at green, too “… Let my green soul sit on my lips” she asks in Is it Now?, a poem chronicling her stay in St George’s Hospital. While the body might sing, accurately and painfully of “dark stone, of flint walls” her soul perched on her lips, would be “reaching for light.”

I don’t think Daphne would have had any trouble at all in regarding herself as still ‘green’. Right till the last she was asking questions, testing boundaries, making room, making space within her new physical and geographical limits. “There are other strange places to explore. Perhaps I can find a poem here. The space is not empty.” In what may have been her last poem, written only a very short time before her death she speaks of the “fight” to turn back, “into the / little morning star and the hollow / gap between dark and dark.”

My first contact with her was at a rather raucous and somewhat alcoholic sing-song at Launde Abbey. My last, as one of a number of privileged witnesses to her determination to live – and live honestly – till she died, was unforgettable.

As usual, Daphne’s own words say it best. In Indian Summer she writes “I too will spend my late days blazing” and I, as one of the celebrating, mourning contributors at her memorial celebration sang out, ‘BLAZE SHE BLOODY DID!’  I leave you with this short poem of Daphne’s:

Sleepless

These charcoal hours with long thin fingers
drawing night through glass
and the long wait for sullen days
they drag at the arms and separate
the smallness. Too little strength to unite day and dark,
the body slips into those winding coils
clouded and grey and there’s the fight
to turn back, into the
little morning star and the hollow
gap between dark and dark.