Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Berta who died this summer was a poet, playwright, novelist, short-story writer and much-loved teacher.  In 2006, her novel Mass Dreams won the London Region competition of Discovered Authors, who published the work, under their D A Diamonds imprint, in 2007.

The novel is a fantasy invoking an ideal (and often not so ideal) society where women live without men and meet daily at the Eye the Girls café. As you become immersed in this world and its characters you realise that there was very little Berta did not know about women, Lesbian women and about herself. The richness and humour of the material dazzles and the challenge, to conceive a world where women are in control, suggest comparisons with novelists like George Orwell and Margaret Atwood.

Berta studied drama and taught at east London secondary schools. Later she taught creative writing at the Mary Ward Centre of Birkbeck College, University of London and was a published poet. Her lively work is in Second Light Network anthologies, in A Twist of Malice, Uncomfortable Poems by Older Women (Grey Hen Press, 2008), in magazines such as Mslexia and ARTEMISpoetry. Readers may also remember her poignant contribution to the article about holocaust experiences and influences in ARTEMISpoetry Issue 2.

Though so talented, Berta was always game for another slice of education. She obtained her MA aged 50 and freely submitted her writing to discussion and criticism, striving to control the out-pourings of a fecund imagination. She worked with the Poetry School and with Second Light at several Launde Abbey residential workshops.

Many of those attending Launde with Berta will remember her witty performances in her readings. Reading in Berta’s Guardian obituary (August 30, 2009) that she ‘caused her Lesbian audience to weep with laughter as she slyly parodied our political meetings’ I was reminded of a person as honest and steely as she was generous and loving. Berta was a delightful and unforgettable companion – intelligent, stimulating and enquiring. The word which comes to mind is ‘irrepressible’, despite the disability that went with her Parkinson’s Disease and subsequent cancer.