When my world started to fall apart, my husband and I facing separation, I grasped at doing something good, and took on voluntary work at Hackney Recovery Service, in affiliation with St Mungo’s, teaching alcoholics in recovery. I cycled there each week as if my life depended on it. I took them this poem, and they loved it so much they printed it out, framed it and hung it on the wall in the waiting area.
“Look at your life,/to your one given garden.”
Sam Willets was a heroin addict for ten years and this collection is full of the pain and contradiction of that state, with the urgency of something that demands to be written. This poem held a lot of resonance for me too, as it felt as if I was also in recovery. I was trying to reclaim myself.
From New Lights for the Old Dark, Cape Poetry, 2010
A Personal Anthology 