On Being a Poet in Wales: Jemma L. King

Jemma L. King

Wales, for me, always had the potential for mermaids.

I grew up in Shrewsbury, a beautiful Tudor town but with an archetypal  English sensibility that petered out as the road gave way to the foothills of the Welsh Marches.

Wales was yet to be flattened by the cynical glow of modernity. Solitary lights on mountainsides became witch’s houses to me, forests were full of fairies and the seas full of serpents.

For these reasons, as much as I loved my hometown, I always hankered to return to the Welsh coast, to where my mum’s side of the family lived.

For a child, Wales was my own personal blank canvas upon which to project my earliest poems and stories.

Magical backdrop 

In late childhood, I moved to Wales following my parents’ divorce, and for better or worse, my life story began to play itself out against that magical backdrop.

The froth of the Atlantic was my solace. The village my mum grew up in was Llanon, a typical ex-fishing village with one shop, two pubs. The beach, a weft of rock, was never destined to be a tourist hotspot, but I loved sitting on the overlooking lone bench, just beyond the cemetery that holds my grandparents, staring out to the Newton’s Cradle mesmerism of the waves.

The ocean hypnotises me in a primal way – it relaxes my atoms and opens whichever bit of the brain it is that makes me draw or write – so however bleak things got, the watery arms of the sea were always the comfort that I needed.

Later, my teenage years in Aberystwyth were the stuff of dreams. All of my mates had Saturday jobs in the ice cream shops, arcades or chippies so we’d live our lives on the circuits of those establishments, hoovering up free stuff.

The tourists would come, the tourists would go, the students would arrive, we’d all go out underage drinking in The Angel or The Academy or The Inn on the Pier.

Later, I’d end up studying and teaching English in the university that dominates the town. There’s not a part of me that isn’t threaded somehow, throughout the streets of Aberystwyth.

Wales has been good to me. In my late teens, I made it to the finals of Miss Wales, and in my twenties, won the Terry Hetherington Young Welsh Writer of the Year. I’ve been published by Parthian and my books have been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year, and for the internationally prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize.

Idyll

But of course, nowhere is an idyll.

“We have too many hospitals and too many beds”, says former First Minister, Mark Drakeford. I’m not sure which Wales he is living in, but the one I’m living in is currently sending my stepdad to Manchester for the cancer treatment he needs, and a couple of years ago, I found myself experiencing the same utter vacuum of mid-Wales healthcare.

A month prior to my son being born, we found out that he was fighting for his life. The next thing I knew, I was having an emergency C Section before my son was taken to Birmingham Children’s Hospital for a life-saving operation.

Post C Section, I was spilled into the urban sprawl of central Birmingham, trying to navigate the medicalised world I’d inhabit for a good chunk of my son’s first year of life.

I am intensely grateful to every single medical professional that helped us, but I don’t understand how Drakeford can utter such lobotomy-level insights, that we are “overhospitalised” in this nation. A disturbing position indeed.

Politics aside, as a new mum with no baby to hold (he was in an incubator hooked up to millions of wires) and too many feelings going on, I started working on my third poetry collection Moon Base One.

Questions

I was asking a lot of questions of the universe at that point – what happens before we begin, what happens when we die, what happens if we run at life at five million miles an hour, what’s the point of it all?

I explored the above in relation to motherhood, but also in relation to others – those who have lived their lives on the frontiers – those whose strength I could draw strength from.

I wrote about Frida Kahlo, Apsley Cherry-Garrard of the Scott Expedition, Joan of Arc, Andy Warhol, Alexander McQueen, the Salem Witches, Percy Byshhe Shelley. I interrogated all of them, explored their ice fields, drowned villages and lunar surfaces to try to understand what it is to be alive. The whole process insulated me somewhat, from the rawest and most dangerous feelings that a person can experience.

I developed an affection for Birmingham in my time there. But I still remember the ache that I felt to unhitch him from all of his pinging and blaring machines, to wrap him up and return him home to the world I intended him to emerge into – the one where the cliffs fall away to the Atlantic froth. The one where those foothills begin to grow to the misty stomping grounds of giants and wizards.

Wales, the home that courses through his blood, in the same way that it does in mine.

Jemma L. King’s third poetry collection Moon Base One is available from Parthian Books. Tickets to the collection’s launch, at The Poetry Pharmacy Lab in Bishop’s Castle, are available here. 

Jemma L. King won the Terry Hetherington Young Welsh Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Wales Book of the Year Prize and the Sundress Prize for her haunting debut poetry collection, The Shape of a Forest. Her breathtaking second collection, The Undressed, was inspired by a cache of antique nude photographs of women, returning voices to those previously lost to history. The first prize winner of the 2024 International Cambrian Mountains poetry competition, Jemma’s latest work has been published by magazines including Acumen, Littoral, and Seaside Gothic. Moon Base One is her third collection. Jemma lives with her husband, son and dog in the Welsh countryside.