To celebrate the release of her latest Bloodaxe collection Women in Comfortable
Shoes, Selima Hill gave an exclusive interview to Bloodaxe Books Editor Neil Astley.
Neil Astley: You’ve moved from Men Who Feed Pigeons to Women in Comfortable Shoes. Can you say something about that journey in poems which wasn’t a progression as such, given that many of the sequences relating to women in comfortable shoes were written before or around the same time as those published in the earlier book relating to men who feed pigeons?
Selima Hill: My friend M's dying words: "If anyone uses that word “journey” to me again, I'll throttle them!" Stanley Kunitz talks about art as finding meaning instead of just moving on. So, more like dancing than a journey. Dancing to my own music. Music becoming silence. Per Petterson (trans: Anne Born) "until the silence inside me matches the silence that surrounds me". Writing poetry, to me, is also like playing tennis – trying to keep the ball in the air!
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