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The Magma Showcase highlights a poet whose work we feel deserves to be more widely known. It gives a larger selection of new poems than we can usually include for one poet. In this edition, we are showcasing Jane Routh.

We asked Jane to tell us about her work, influences and ambitions as a poet:

“I live in Lancashire. I’m a latecomer to poetry: until the mid-Nineties I was teaching at Lancaster University and my creative work was in black and white photography. Now I look after woodlands and a flock of geese – and worry about how the H5N1 virus has been spread along roads and railways rather than bird migration routes.

“My first collection Circumnavigation won the Poetry Business Competition in 2002, and was short-listed for the Forward Prize. A second collection, Teach Yourself Mapmaking, due from Smith/Doorstop in Autumn 2006, seemed more difficult (it had to be better) until it took on a life of its own – like an exhibition does when you’re hanging photographs: each one telling part of a larger story. I admire how David Harsent has worked like this, beyond a single poem.

“I can see other similarities between poems and photographs: they need technical skill and invention; work can be reprinted/revised in a way not always possible in other media. There’s the same feeling of expansion when the rare perfect negative prints like a dream first time as when every word seems to fall naturally into place. But my struggles with a poem last longer.

“There’ll be thousands of books I’ve yet to read, but there’s always one (no, more) under my bed by Charles Wright. I hadn’t thought of ‘ambitions’ until Magma asked, but there it is: to be able to write as musically as Wright does – and as intelligently (and wittily) as Michael Donaghy. Or maybe as distinctively as Eavan Boland, or… It’s a long list, yet you only write like yourself.”