Poet Profile: Rhian Elizabeth

Known for her witty and unflinchingly raw approach to challenging topics, Rhian Elizabeth is a novelist, poet, and trainee counsellor. She is the author of three poetry collections and, in 2025, won both the Wales Book of the Year Award and the Nation.Cymru People’s Choice Award for girls etc (Broken Sleep Books, 2024).

Here, she is the latest poet to be featured in our Poet Profiles series, in which we pose ten burning questions to writers shaping the literary landscape of Wales.

1. Do you remember what first drew you to poetry?

Attention. I clearly remember this day. I must’ve been about 7 or something and our infants’ school teacher had tasked us with writing a poem for a homework assignment and when I got mine back a few days later, I was somewhat shocked but delighted to be showered with praise. This was new. As a kid who wasn’t used to that sort of thing, I found it completely intoxicating and from then on I just wanted to impress and get that praise again. I craved it and needed it. Perhaps it’s not attention I was seeking but just someone telling me I was good at something, or worthy. I think it’s probably still the case today.

2. Who are some of your favourite living poets, and what resonates with you in their work?

Most of them are dead! But still alive are… Kim Addonizio, Marilyn Hacker, Andrew McMillan, Rita Dove, George Bilgere. I like poetry that I don’t have to spend hours dissecting, poetry that somehow manages to capture life or a feeling and present it to you in a way that is completely beautiful and novel but at the same time totally confounding in its simplicity. Just poetry that gets you in the guts, I guess.

3. Is there a poem by someone else you wish you’d written?

Why are your poems so dark? by Linda Pastan. It’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever read.

4. What have you read recently that excited or surprised you?

This isn’t poetry, sorry, but my friend Ben Wildsmith has penned his memoir (due with Calon Books in February) and I was asked to write a cover quote for it. It amazed me how you can know someone for almost a decade and not really know them at all. It’s a brilliant book, absolutely superb writing but, yeah, it just made me think of all the things we don’t know about the people we think we know, all the questions we don’t ask, all the things we keep to ourselves and all the versions of ourselves we present to the world and those around us. Do we really know each other at all?

5. What inspires you outside of literature?

Everything that is new. New places, new people, new feelings.

6. What projects or poems have you been working on lately?

I’ve been lucky to have a few commissions lately. They’ve been poems for The Shakespeare Birthplace, another commission for an anthology of bilingual writing from Wales from a selection of female poets living with long term health conditions, and there was another thing for a poetry chain of female poets with Yaffle Press. I’ve just started writing a new collection for my sins, and I’ve been (again really luckily) awarded a grant from the Royal Literary Foundation, so I’m looking forward to seeing where that takes me.

7. Do you have any rituals or habits that help you write?

Absolutely none at all. I need some. I won’t write for months on end but then I’ll just have bursts of I guess creativity and I’ll write more in a week than I’ve written in a year. I think I need to be miserable to be able to write. So, if I’m being productive, you know I’m sulking over something. Or someone.

8. What’s one word you wish you could use in a poem but never have?

Precipice is my favourite word, so I should probably try and use it more.

9. If your poems were a type of animal, what would they be and why?

Excellent question! Maybe a swan. I remember when I was really young visiting my brother in London. We were by the Thames, and I saw a swan and went up to it, thinking it was this really pretty looking thing that I wanted to make friends with, and it ended up turning on me and chasing me down the banks of the river. The fucker bit me. To this day my brother still tells this story in fits of laughter. So yeah – maybe mine are poems that on the surface seem funny, or light hearted, but if you get closer, they are really quite dark. Like that murderous swan.

10. One last thing! Would you like to share one of your poems?

This is a poem from my latest collection, maybe i’ll call gillian anderson. 

boxing day night and my daughter drives us back in the fog

it is only now i see it,

as i look across at you 

gripping the steering 

wheel for dear life, that

our roles have reversed,

christmas is done with, 

and i cannot keep you safe

any more than your headlights 

can penetrate the miasma 

of white ahead of us

it’s been a journey, kid

but we did it

we made it home.