Pat Earnshaw (     – 2012)

From my earliest years I was addicted to writing, fascinated by the jigsaw nature of words that could be slotted together in so many different ways to create a huge variety of meanings, sounds, harmonies, innuendos. During my adolescence – pre-graduation, pre-career, pre all the domestic bit, I was so obsessed every moment not spent writing was wasted. Wherever there was a seat or a surface to rest on I would write, often in pencil using a stub chewed for its cedar-wood flavour – on holiday with an aunt and uncle in Ashdown Forest, perched on the lid of the horses’ corn bin in the farm stables while my brother and uncle went off to cut chaff, on the window-sill of my room by candle-light, sitting on the step outside the wood-shed tormented by midges when it was too dark to see indoors, the lamp not yet lit…
 
Nevertheless an intense curiosity and a fascination with research led me to graduate in biology rather than literature, and for a number of years I taught First MB and Human Biology at technical colleges in and around London. During this time I wrote a botany text-book The Systematics of Flowering Plants (Methuen), and also enrolled for a BA in philosophy at Birkbeck College, though I had first to add A levels in English, Latin and Ethics to my scientific ones. Maddeningly, after little more than a year my husband’s work moved outside London and it became impossible to travel regularly to lectures.
 
My interest in antique laces developed entirely by chance but it was totally absorbing, and over nearly two decades produced fifteen reference books on all aspects of the subject, and invitations to give lecture tours lecture tours throughout the USA, Australia, and continental Europe (including a workshop for the Abegg Foundation in Switzerland). In the UK I was a panel lecturer for the Victoria and Albert Museum, and also lectured for the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies.
 
All this stuff is not irrelevant, it fed into a pool of knowledge and interests that I frequently draw on in my poetry.
 
Poetry had been an important part of the English literature classes at school so I was already familiar with the various forms, rhymes and other jugglings (strictly formal rhyme and rhythm were in fashion at that time) so that when finally, in 1995, I had exhausted my researches into antique laces, it was poetry I turned to, and I was suddenly impatient to take up again my childhood passion for creative writing, and stung now by what seemed a very late start, I was in a hurry to show the world whatever I wrote so that by 2000 I had published three poetry collections and, in that year, added a book of prose poems, My Cat Vince.
 
A selection of thirteen tales from Vince won first prize in the Scintilla Open Poetry Competition, 2000, and was published in Scintilla 4.
 
Meanwhile I had been awarded an Arts Council of England grant to work on a series of poems about my childhood. A selection of these poems was published as a pamphlet, Virtual Eden, in 2008. So far so good, but then Writer’s Block struck, bringing depression. It lasted three years and was finally cured (partially) by a hypno-therapist – only partially because I emerged wanting to write prose rather than poetry. And that is the present situation.
 
Lots more on the web (Google Search).
 
Extracts from reviews                    Reviews:
 
on Virtual Eden, Pat Earnshaw. ISBN 978 09524113 8 5. 32-page pamphlet. 22 poems. Paperback. Price £4.50. Gorse Publications.

 

Someone whose name I can’t recall said reading Chekov was reading about yourself. That’s the feeling I got as I started to read Virtual Eden … Many of these poems are as intricately crafted as her other passion, antique laces. They weave their way through school, her father’s suicide, time spent in hospital. They have an understated honesty that I really liked.

 

Sue Butler, Happenstance
 

 

… one needs to put aside a few grown-up attitudes about imagery. An eight-year old child knows that inanimate objects like tombstones and dark rooms actually can and do talk to us … The memories are as beautiful as they are painful. My favourite poem, ‘Dredging for Memories’ prepares the reader for what is to come: “Lost in a wilderness of fantasy./ mismatched with memory / I tuck myself into a crevice / underneath the torrent of a waterfall, and safe from ambush / am content to watch the world … / … blurred.

 

Harold S Webster, Pulsar
 

 

I am shaken by these poems. They pierce with power, poignancy, pain and passion. Pat Earnshaw does not stand in anyone’s shadow. These 22 poems, memories and reflections of a traumatised childhood, have a classical leaning. Most of all they stand shoulder to shoulder with Anna Akhmatova, a believer in clarity and a sort of neoclassicism. Compare her line ‘the window glass is as black as an ice-hole’ with these of Earnshaw:
 
                     The undeveloped finger-tips of birds
                    drop leaves of thought
                    that melt away
                    from hands that snatch them
                    as they fall to earth.
                    They will not stay…                              (from ‘Lost’)
 
This is an astonishing and moving collection. The poet spent three months in hospital aged 8 with a mastoid abscess. Her poems deriving from this terrible experience – Hospital Doll along with Banished – are unforgettable and some of the finest poems of childhood I have ever read.

 

Richard Cutler, The Writer, Society of Medical Writers Vol.7 No.1, Summer 2008.

 

and on Gothic Tales, Pat Earnshaw. ISBN: 09524113 7 7 32-page pamphlet. 24 poems. Paperback. Price £4.50. Gorse Publications, P.O.Box 214, Shamley Green, Guildford GU5 0SW.
 
In Autumn 2005 Gothic Tales was recommended in the Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin: “ …tense sometimes nightmarish poems, many of which stay. in the mind long after they have been read.”

 

The pamphlet has a splendid cover: a dead Pierrot hangs from the curtain rail … ‘Story-telling’ introduces a Mervyn-Peake-type character handling a traditional narrative … Pat Earnshaw shows herself to be sure-footed, a person who can turn a tidy metrical ankle when she wants to.

 

Helena Nelson, Ambit 183.

 

The sound flows rhythmically with internal rhyme, alliteration and simile. Some poems involve horror images ‘the dew that drips down from the gallows gives sight to eyes blinded by torture’. ‘Trapped’ ends with a beautiful imagery of bells: ‘in bird-jewelled air / their overpowering songs / racing away like white-hot dust of stars…’, ‘Red Planet’ is a prize-winner ‘canyons open their mouths wide as a child’s first cry…’

 

Fay Eagle, South 33.

 

a fine poet with an original voice, a sense of the macabre, a gift for imagery, and talent verging on greatness … there is no over-the-top gothicness; this is not something to be taken in jest. The poems are disturbing, and ring with echoes of suffering and decay. And the language is masterful … In another country, another time, Pat Earnshaw would be famous. As it is, she has in her wallet the Oyster card of the underworld that the three Fates spinning, a lace round her life, have allowed her to travel with – to Zone 6.

 

Richard Cutler, The Writer, Winter 2006, Society of Medical Writers.