Writing about grief and loss with Matt Bryden
And a decisive winner in moon vs sea
Dear beloved subscriber of A Poet’s Work,
I hope this finds you just in from a bracing walk, with a hot chocolate waiting for you.
A few months ago, I sent out a call for subscribers who would like to be interviewed in A Poet’s Work. Please welcome the second of our subscriber interviews (Cathi was our first) - Matt Bryden.
Matt shares his experience of writing from difficult personal life events. I think poets often find themselves writing about the bad things that happen to them and around them so I hope you find this an interesting read.
As ever, let me know if you enjoyed it and forward on to other poets at work.
Rachel x
P.S. If you haven’t already…
Matt Bryden is a father and teacher living in Devon. His pamphlet Night Porter won the 2010 Templar pamphlet prize and was followed by his first collection Boxing the Compass in 2013. More recently, The Glassblower’s House, winner of the 2023 Live Canon pamphlet competition, is an exploration of fatherhood against a background of personal catastrophe. Phantoms, a sister volume seen through a classical lens, is forthcoming from Live Canon. Matt is co-host of Exeter's Uncut Poets series and Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Exeter. www.mattbrydenpoetry.co.uk.
Rachel: You’ve been writing poetry about grief, loss and a story that’s very personal to you. Tell me more about that experience.
Matt: I’m a member of the Fire River Poets, a poetry stanza in Somerset. One evening, Fiona Benson was reading for us and I had a slot at the open mic. I read a couple of poems about my daughter, who was three or four months old at the time. For my own sanity, I thought I needed to get out into the world again. So I read these poems and at the end Fiona gracefully said it was really good to hear a man speak about fatherhood because there aren’t enough poems or poets that do that.
Now we have Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music and Jack Underwood’s A Year in the New Life. But this was seven years ago, and the only related book I was aware of was Hollie McNish’s Nobody Told Me. Men weren’t writing poetry about fatherhood.
I was really encouraged by Fiona’s words and I kept writing on this subject. But my life took a different turn when my marriage collapsed suddenly a couple of years later and I had to regroup. Poetry then seemed like a way of understanding what had happened, a way of getting to the bottom of it. So the book I ended up writing, The Glassblower’s House, starts with pregnancy and birth, followed by the pressures that puts on a relationship, and then a separation and a new start.
This all happened at a really strange time as well. It was during lockdown and a really sunny summer. I actually spent some time living with my daughter in a holiday cottage in the Quantocks, which was so beautiful, and at the same time I couldn’t understand what was happening to me – or to us.
How did you find writing about this very personal story?
Two of the poems in The Glassblower’s House relate to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In that film, a retired detective investigates a woman who sits for hours each day staring at a portrait in a gallery – it’s a film about obsession. But the closer he gets to really understanding her, the further she is just going into character, because it turns out that she has been hired to play a part. I realised from writing the book that there was no unpicking my obsession with what had happened in the past. The healthy thing to do was just be present in my new life and with my daughter. The poet MacGillivray wrote, “there’s a sunniness to it all: something like love, it must be, irradiates from the pages” – and I think that’s true. There is so much love and so much pain in this book and they go hand in hand.
Did you feel you had to write about what happened or did you plan to?
I do feel you should write to explore – you shouldn’t know exactly where you’re going when you start. But the experience was circling in my head and writing the book gave it structure and a narrative arc. It snapped me out of the vertigo swirl I was lost in. There were lots of poems that I wrote that weren’t included in the final version. When it was finished, I felt like I could hear the click of the clasp of the box. I felt like I was done, like I’d recorded that experience for me.
Once, when I was talking about the book I was working on, someone asked me, in quite a harsh way, “It’s important to you to write this book, but why is it important for other people to read this book?” They wanted to know, “Which is more important to you? Is this a book you need to write or is this a book you need people to read?” And I want to ask you the same question, hopefully in a more caring way – what was more important to you in this process? When you were making it, did you just feel “I have to make it” or was it also essential to you that it ended up in the world?
The main reason I wrote it was because it would have helped me and it didn’t exist. To give an example, when I asked my daughter’s school for advice on how to shield her from the worst of the separation, they recommended a book called Two Homes by Claire Masurel. It starts with a boy or girl saying, “Hi, my name is Alex, I have two homes – I have one home with my mum and one home with my dad.” Both homes look brilliant by the way! And after a few months of reading this with Amelia, she was going up to people and saying, “Hi I’m Amelia, I have two homes.” So she was able to talk about it. Good Lord, the debt I owe that book! Without being self-aggrandising, I thought it was important to write this story that didn’t seem to have been written in this way before.
Writing it for an audience gave me discipline as well because I could have gone on and on forever otherwise. If you’ve got one poem in the book that is deeply sad about an aspect of the break-up, you don’t necessarily need another one.
So it was important to you to get the book out into the world because that forces you to aim for a higher standard, which is helpful and also fun. And then also because you felt it was something you experienced but hadn’t read about. You felt “I think I would like to add to what’s out there.” Is that right?
Yes, exactly. I’ve also written a sister book called Phantoms. Phantoms is in part about how in retrospect you realise wonderful things have happened to you. Like when I was staying with Amelia in the Quantocks or sleeping on the floors of people I barely knew, people who took me in – incredible kindnesses. And you realise someone was helping you through.
What advice would you share with someone who wanted to write about a personal experience that was difficult for them?
Look after yourself. When I gave the London launch of The Glassblower’s House, it was like a gut punch because I was sharing extremely personal feelings in public for the first time. But at least afterwards I had friends and a bottle of wine and company. After the online launch the following month, I found myself alone in a flat, emotionally exhausted with nobody around. I hadn’t expected it. It’s almost as if by writing about these things and telling them in your own way you can imagine that you’re above them, that you’ve mastered them.
But not really. They’re still alive.
Yes, exactly. And especially when you relax. So I would say look after yourself. And work on your resilience and support networks, and read books by people who have gone through similar things, and Samaritans is always there too.
And as we always wrap up by asking, what’s one thing readers can do to support your work?
Buy a copy of my book here from Live Canon.
P.S. If you’ve been wondering…
“I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar