A mother's death and a life told back to front
Poet Anna Woodford on her new collection
Anna Woodford’s mother, Moira, died in hospital during Covid. Not of Covid, though. “They didn’t know what it was,” says Anna. “In the end it was an ulcer or something.”
It was 2021 and she had been in the Freeman Hospital, in Newcastle, for seven weeks.
Covid restrictions were still in place and people were talking wryly about the ‘new normal’.
Anna hadn’t been able to visit and that was a wrench.
“We lived round the corner so used to see each other a lot. Seven weeks was as long as I’d gone without seeing her.
“I wasn’t really expecting her to die. But then I got this call out of the blue: ‘Why don’t you come in?’ I knew there could be only one reason.
“I went running. The adrenalin was pumping. I was lucky in that I live near the Freeman and was able to get in quickly. She died just after I got there.”
There was a final fleeting glance of recognition, a look Anna interpreted as: “Where have you been?”
Some four years later, the memory is undimmed. Anna recalls the swirling emotions.
“We all thought she was coming out so it was a great shock.
“But in a weird way I was also happy, so grateful to have been given the opportunity to see her. Other people didn’t get that call.
“And I thought, thank God I was there. She saw me.”
She laughs now at the memory of that inquiring last look, suggesting “Where the heck have you been?” might have been a more accurate interpretation.
Anyway, being a poet, Anna responded poetically to that churning moment, a poem forming even as she left the hospital.
“It was such a huge moment. I was thinking, ‘Just get it down’.”
She did get it down. Go, Mum! must be a contender for the most dynamic, upbeat poem about death ever written.
“You were flying, Mum. Bloody Great Death
Was at every window, jemmying them open
So you could make clean away in your hospital gown…”
And the final, exultant line…
“What could I do
But cheer you on – Go Mum! Go for it! Moira, Go!”
It was a contender in a more conventional sense, too, highly commended in the prestigious Forward Prize in 2023 and also in the Moth Poetry Prize in 2021.
And now it’s in Anna’s new collection of poems – almost its beating heart, in fact – called Everything Is Present, described on the back cover as “a mid-life coming of age tale”.
The title’s from Buddhist philosophy, explains Anna, the idea that all experiences past and present exist in the here and now. She’s not a Buddhist, she says, but does meditate.
And she writes, of course.
Reflecting on the immediate aftermath of her mother’s passing, she says: “I needed to keep writing as a way of dealing with it, telling the story again and again.
“I wrote a few more poems about my mum. I didn’t want to write a load of miserable poems so they were all trying to be upbeat.
“Life goes on. So it was all about living really, trying to be joyful.”
So rather than an ending, Moira’s death is near the start of her third collection - after Birdhouse (2010) and Changing Room (2018) – which is autobiographical, the quirk being that it’s arranged in three sections, End, Middle and Beginning, in that order.
The End section focuses on her parents and late grandparents and, boy, are there some stories there!
Anna tells of her paternal grandmother who married a young Jewish man who’d got out of Lwów, in Poland (now Lviv, in Ukraine), just before the war which would see it plunged into unspeakable horrors.
Well-placed in the army, his father had sensed what was coming. The young man, Ludwig Magenheim, wound up in Nottingham, ostensibly to study. Taking a new surname from a street map, he became Richard Woodford.
He’d intended to return home but it became impossible and his family all died. But he had fallen in love with Anna’s grandmother and they were married.
“They lived in this little terraced house and he called it Lwów and put a sign on the door,” says Anna. “Amazing!”
Also amazing is that when he died quite young, Anna’s now widowed grandmother married his friend, another Polish refugee also called Ludwig. She would refer to them as Ludwig I and Ludwig II.
Anna only remembers the latter, her step-grandfather.
The collection’s opening poem, Portrait of My Grandparents as Souvenirs, referring to their lives, won the Wigtown Prize in 2021.
And in another, ‘The Former Life’, she recalls how her grandmother – “it must have been a deeply psychological thing” – put the few written scraps and photos attesting to the existence of Ludwig I into a brown envelope and hid it in the shed…
“‘The Former Life’ Full Stop
A contract between them, Kept
In the outhouse with the out of reach bottles,
spidery potatoes, damaged packets…”
Growing up, none of this was talked about much but Anna, fascinated, pieced it together and relates it in poetic form.
Her father, she says, never talked much about any of it.
Chris Woodford is remembered in another award-winning poem, Delirium (Great Balls of Fire), winner of the Ledbury Prize in 2023.
He worked at Newcastle University but rock ‘n’ roll was his passion.
“He used to write for a rock ‘n’ roll magazine in Newcastle, Now Dig This. He was a huge Jerry Lee Lewis fan and that’s a poem about my dad going into A & E suffering from delirium.
“I was trying to explain a bit about who he was, a bit of an old rocker. It’s full of references to his mates, like Freddie ‘Fingers’ Lee who lived in County Durham.”
Born Frederick Cheesman, in Blackhill, Freddie lost an eye in a childhood accident but played guitar and later piano for Screaming Lord Sutch and once smashed up a piano on stage.
“I was brought up very much in that atmosphere of rock ‘n’ roll and stuff,” says Anna.
That upbringing comes at the end, which is to say the Beginning section with its poems of childhood and adolescence.
There’s 14-year-old Anna, one of the “vicious little metronomes” giving the music teacher at La Sagesse a hard time (in A Claim on the Estate of Miss Rene Shill), and, in 16/17, relishing life beyond Newcastle College and The Broken Doll.
“I need to rise out of my pit
Like the Iron Man and get my clank on. I need to
Stop hanging around.”
Having long since risen from her pit and got her clank on, Anna is now an acclaimed poet and busy freelance writer and educator. A mum herself, too.
She has been doing a lot as a fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, working with students in the School of English at Newcastle University and with trainee nurses and midwives at Northumbria.
She has been setting up writing courses and progressing her collaborative work with “brilliant” fellow poet Tara Bergin inspired by the Brontës. “We’re working towards a collection,” she says.
Plenty there to make the family – Moira, Chris, Ludwigs I, II and all the rest of them – feel proud, posthumously or otherwise.
Everything is Present, published, like her previous collections, by Salt Publishing, of Cromer, is out now.
You are also a very good writer David.