Pen Portrait - Heather Lane
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Heather has been writing poetry for as long as she can remember, but only recently considered publishing more than the occasional piece. Born in Cornwall, she lived in the Peak District in her teens, before reading English at Oxford University, specialising in Anglo-Saxon and medieval languages and literatures. A year as a trainee at the British Library was enough to convince her that life in London was not for her. After a further degree in Library and Information Science in Aberystwyth, her first professional post was at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, starting in 1983, and qualifying as a Chartered Librarian shortly afterwards.
She worked for 30 years in Cambridge libraries, archives and museums, latterly as Librarian & Keeper of Collections at the Scott Polar Research Institute. She was part of the Thresholds project, which brought ten poets in residence into the university's museums and collections. In 2015, she moved to the Yorkshire Dales, returning in 2017-18 to oversee the remodelling of the University Museum of Zoology Cambridge. |
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She now lives in Littondale, and runs her own cultural heritage advisory practice, including consultancy for the National Lottery Heritage Fund. She enjoys gardening, theatre and classical music, and is an avid visitor to museums and heritage sites.
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The thing is ...
you come striding in, ambushing life, questioning what it is to be old, defying the mind's age; ordering the helter-skelter scatter of seeing. No craft can steer away from the reefs and shoals of phenomenon, ways of matching, subterranean biology, a thought world in which ambergris and witch-hazel taste the same and relic whalebone is both touchstone and a dream of flying. Seek the world's magic in the toadstone and the taro stone, evidence of unicorn and leviathan, the magnetic tug of each pole, navigating by shadow and constraint. A sigh is catalyst, folding time's coastline, a breath between ages, through contiguous strata; a delicate erosion. The object is resonant with shared thought: silicate fusion, refracting at the boundary. Smooth skinned youth, your fragile sheen an intercessor, bright as the limbs of southern beeches in the winter light; the compass nail conducts both souls and lightning; truth is written on the glass. The thing is ... was exhibited as part of The Polar Muse project at the Polar Museum, University of Cambridge, 2014. |