So You Want to be a Potter? – close reading by Michael Laskey
 
** 2009: pamphlet collection, Window on the Square ** £3 from SoundsWrite Press.
All profit from the sale of this pamphlet will be donated to Hamlin Fistula UK.
 

Biography, last reviewed by Alice Beer in 2010:
 
I was born and educated in Vienna, where I studied Psychology with English as my second subject. I also acquired a diploma as a Kindergarten teacher, which proved very useful. After my second year at University I went to England to improve my spoken English and never went back to live in Vienna or get my degree.
 
Writing came to me rather late in my life. My first poem was written – out of the blue – after a spiritual experience on a holiday in the Roussillion and the Rhone Valley. It just came and demanded to be written down. Not long afterwards, also on a holiday in France, where we saw WW1 battlefields and cemeteries near Arras, I could not get any sleep until I had dealt with this experience in a poem, this time not so easily.
 
I began attending writing courses – the local University extra mural college, and Arvon, amongst others. Since then, my poetry has been published in Smith Knoll, Seam, Poetry Monthly, Envoi, The Rialto and Time Haiku, and in several anthologies, including Images of Women, Arrowhead Press (2006) and soundswrite, SoundsWrite Press (2005).
 
My first booklet collection, Facing Forward Looking Back, was published by Poetry Monthly Press in 1999 and in 2005, poetry p f published Talking of Pots, People & Points of View, (the first publication from the poetry p f imprint). Window on the Square, a pamphlet collection from SoundsWrite Press was published in 2009.
 
Huw Watkins said of the 1999 collection:
 

Her writing is simple, direct and easy to understand. The poems are quiet in tone and pace, sometimes wryly humorous or laconic … but the quiet simplicity of her writing is deceptive. Whatever the subject of the poem… even abstract subjects like Time or God – they have substance; something interesting and important to say.

 

and, comments on Talking of Pots, People & Points of View:
 

Alice Beer’s humour and wisdom are like a rich seam… Her language is direct and spare, suited to the complete faithfulness to experience which characterises her work. I am delighted that she will now be read and enjoyed by a wider audience.

 

Carole Satyamurti

 
 

The strength of Alice Beer’s poems is in their directness and a deceptive simplicity. Often they come to you with a sharpness that takes you by surprise. Her wry observations … will make the reader feel from time to time as if he/she, too, is being observed.

 

Huw Watkins

 
 

Leicester Poetry Society offers its Members weekly workshops and once a month readings by more established poets. I also participate in a fortnightly Women’s poetry group.
 
I have always been interested in people, music and languages and was an avid reader of all kinds of literature, novels, plays and poetry in both languages but I have never written a poem in German.