Humphrey Astley talks to poet Frances Leviston who returns from an eight-year break with a new masterpiece 

  • Frances Leviston
  • The Crown, Woodstock
  • April 20

It’s been nearly a decade since Frances Leviston’s debut poetry collection, Public Dream, was published, but the excitement it caused at the time doesn’t seem to have faded. No surprise – it was, after all, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Jerwood-Aldeburgh Prize. Her new collection, Disinformation, was published in February of this year and the consensus seems to be that it was very much worth the wait.

Tonight she’s giving a relatively low-key reading organised by The Woodstock Bookshop, and has kindly agreed to answer a few questions. I’m curious about the eight-year gap between her two books and wonder if it was intentional, but she’s not quite the master-planner her accomplished writing might suggest.

"The gap was pretty natural," she explains. And in terms of intentionality, the same goes for Disinformation – the collection "address[es] one of the key questions of the age", according to the PR, but isn’t really so contrived.

"Be wary of the blurb!" she warns. "I found through the writing what the book was about – I certainly didn’t sit down and decide to write a book that addresses one of the key questions of the age! I think that’s probably death for any project... It’s best just to open the doors and then try to rationalise it all later.

"Too much rationalising early on and you end up writing to prescription."

Of course, one should look to the poems themselves for a sense of what Disinformation is really about, and the half-dozen pieces she reads tonight are fairly representative of its range. Eschewing any introductory talk about herself or her work, Leviston goes straight into the collection’s title poem, and it’s a stark opener. Indeed the piece serves almost as an epigraph, in which the handling of "Party bags/ designed to please infants" primes the audience for content that defies expectations (as most good poetry does).

Prefacing Woodland Burial, she breaks the ice with the "hope that the poems I write are more intelligent than what I might have to say about them", which gets a laugh but also seems to acknowledge the poetic paradox of writing a piece that explores a specific subject – in this case a painting by Titian – and then having to explain the very thing that is supposed to be doing the explaining.

Nevertheless, the background she gives probably is necessary, as the poem itself consists of long, densely recursive sentences that might otherwise go over our heads.

Pyramid is perhaps more suited to a reading thanks to the immediacy of its imagery. The "cranes/ [like] knives dropped/ vertically into carpet" is attention-grabbing to say the least, and the poem’s closing simile – rain falling through a half-built skyscraper, "like the old cartoon/ where a skeleton drinks champagne" – might be one of Disinformation’s finest moments. Meanwhile, "the mops and pans/ a woman once persuaded me to sell/ door to door" are by contrast mundane, but that’s the point, and it’s a reminder that poets are ordinary people – it’s what they create that ought to be extraordinary.

Midsummer Loop and The Eclipse take us further down a road more personal and experiential than intellectual, proving that although Leviston can be difficult ("I don’t believe the reader is king," she tells me later), she is not trying to be clever. The former poem, for example, is a piece about rabbits that is literally about rabbits – indeed she was inspired to write about them while on a break from a particularly stuffy seminar. The Eclipse, meanwhile, observes an otherworldly event through the prism of everyday family dynamics.

She closes with A Shrunken Head, which she describes as her Oxford poem (even poets can be crowd-pleasers sometimes) because it takes as its subject one of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s infamous artefacts. The head itself is the piece’s narrator, describing in rich detail the oddities alongside which it finds itself collected: "lizard bones … dyed feathers … the leather-thonged, moth-kissed/ costume of an Eskimo … huge birds fighting each other".

The poem is also an example of Leviston’s penchant for the kind of rhymes and half-rhymes that reveal themselves only after close observation, thus rewarding the effort: "and I’d seem to drop/ towards a far ocean,/ armless, footless, a seed-head blown/ without will or hope/ or wishing-upon/ through the middle of a crown".

Leviston is a fine speaker and, when she reads, one senses that she knows exactly what her poetry’s strengths are.

But does she enjoy it? "I usually do. It depends how excited I’m feeling about my material, and at the moment it feels quite fresh."

And she certainly enjoys it when the roles are reversed: "I like seeing a poet, testing their self-presentation against how I perceive them. You get the frisson of seeing the poet, seeing how they read, which can be interesting." At the same time, however, she admits to mistrusting readings. Why is that? "I like what Robert Graves said, which is that we have an outward ear and an inward ear – and the inward ear is less easily deceived. There are effects that you may be seduced by in a reading, but then they don’t come across on the page…"

I suggest that the reader-listener relationship is ultimately a two-way street, to which she replies, "Yes – but it’s one where someone on the left has to give way to traffic on the right." Make of that what you will.

We begin to discuss poetry more broadly, whereupon her work as teacher and literary critic comes through. "One of the reasons we keep talking about the great poems," she observes, "is that we keep remaking them for our times. And they can survive many interpretations, can survive people saying, 'Actually, I think this is rubbish, it’s overrated' – and the poems thrive on those discussions… People think poetry is fragile, but it’s not – it’s this sturdy, tough thing that can shrug you off." That’s certainly true of Leviston’s work.