BACKGROUND

a little bit about myself

Born in Libya just before Gaddafi took over, and of Italian parents, I was automatically made an Italian citizen at my birth, although I did not get to go to Italy until a few years later, when we had to leave Libya in a hurry. The first time I remember coming to live in England with my parents was when I was five, in the town of Farnborough. Even though we lived abroad from when I was about eight or nine, our base was there until we moved to Scotland when I was in my mid teens.

Ireland came next. My father took my mother and I there for a short holiday while he was working for an Irish company. I fell in love with the sky over Dublin and ended up staying there for about 13 years! It was the longest time I’d stayed in one place. I imagined I was going to be in Ireland for good, especially when I met someone and got married, but when my marriage ended, and with my father’s death soon after, I decided to go and live in Italy in search for my roots.

When my mother was taken ill a few years later in the UK, I went to look after her. That time here made me realise that I felt far more comfortable in England than in Italy, and that yearning to find my home was finally appeased. I have come to accept that while I still feel Italian, I am happiest living in England. This place truly feels like home to me now, so after my mother died, I decided to make the UK my home.

MY POETRY

my inspiration & process

My awakenig to poetry started with an English class project at an American school I attended, when I was still quite young. We were each given the task of writing and making a poetry book. It was a very simple affair, but very satisfying. It made me become aware of poetry itself.

Not too long after that, while still at school, I was introduced to the poets E. E. Cummings and T. S. Eliot which blew my mind wide open! it made me realise that poetry had no limits. You could write a poem in any way and any form you chose. That was it. I had found my essence, my being …although I would not realise that until much later. There are many more poets that have affected me, tantalised, shook and caressed me and will continue to do so, but too many to mention.

I have also always been greatly influenced by art. My mother had been an art teacher, artist, worked in the theatre, and was studying architecture, when she met my father and dropped everything to follow him around the world. Even though she had to leave a lot behind, she always remained an artist, in attitude as well as in action.

I remember her taking me to the Tate Gallery when we first moved to England, and telling me to just look at the painting in front of me, and focus on how it made me feel, rather than pondering on who had done the work, or when, or why. She taught me that after I could choose to study the background of the piece as little or as much as I wanted, but that the most important thing was being open to that art work without preconceptions, allowing it to enter my soul and being open to how it made me feel.

Despite all of these things however, she found the travelling she did with my father the most rewarding. Her way of living that experience taught me not to not simply look ahead, but to also look up, down and all around me and see different prospectives. She believed that the world had so much to offer if you kept an open mind - to look at different points of view equally. I have tried to live like that, though not always successfully!

I write in a visual manner, in fact I visualise my poems, their story, their characters, all becoming real to me, like short films that I see in my mind. Yet I find I enjoy writing in a slightly abstract way just as much, because I was brought up looking at my mothers abstract (to varying degrees) sketches and paintings, and taught to look at art with an inquisitive attitude.

This opened my mind to pushing boundaries with words, seeing how I could create feelings and sensations in more than one way, which then led me to write in different styles and I feel, or rather I hope, that the evolution of my expression with words won’t ever stop.