Pen Portrait - Ann Pilling
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Ann Pilling began her writing life as a distinguished author of children’s fiction. Her first novel in that genre Black Harvest became a Collins Classic. Henry’s Leg won the Guardian Award, was televised and became a Puffin Classic. In recent years she has turned to adult poetry. She won the Smith/Doorstop Competition for Growing Pains in 2007, and three further collections have followed: Home Field in 2008, The Dancing Sailors in 2011 and Ground Cover in 2015. |
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In 2009 she was commissioned by the Swaledale Festival to write a libretto for Semerwater, a musical play which won the Local Hero category in the Ability Media International Awards.
She lives in Hawes and has been a member of Settle Sessions Poetry since the beginning.
She lives in Hawes and has been a member of Settle Sessions Poetry since the beginning.
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Practising
That dent in your pillow is the book which slipped from my fingers when I fell asleep; you were in the next room, coughing your way through the small hours. I am tidier on my own with my clock and my radio my nightly pills, and I have all the bed; if the cat comes I can sleep at a diagonal feel it curl up behind my knees, picture its perfect oval. I’d like a tail of my own to wrap round me, thread under my forepaws, end at an ear. Those in utero scans of babies show perfect enclosures of frog-like shadows slowly firming up to exit as homo sapiens. I’m practising going inwards. But you can’t practise for someone you love dying. I’m glad I’m awake, my dreams last night were too filled with people crying and it’s good that today is not bright, that the house shakes under the wind. I can practise curling up while rain bashes the glass and the sea rules off the horizon with a steel blade. |
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