On Being a Poet in Wales: Christina Thatcher

Christina Thatcher 

My Mom had a habit of bringing wounded animals home: the orange cat who swallowed poison berries, the baby rabbit whose mother was eaten by rats, the goose who threw his head back to catch the rain and almost drowned.

It would be no surprise to walk through the front door and find her wrapping the foot of an injured pig or stretching the wings of a Rhode Island Red.

My childhood revolved around these animals and the horses on the farm—the clockwork of feeding, watering, mucking, tending. There was always work to be done. 

Whenever I worked on the farm as a teen, I daydreamed.

I conjured conversations with a local boy I had a crush on; scripted witty exchanges with bullies; pictured boarding a plane for the first time, walking down the aisle, settling into a window seat (the destination ever-changing).

These daydreams could be darker too. Perhaps they might now be called ‘anxiety’ or ‘ruminations’ but, whatever the name, I was sometimes haunted.

These darker daydreams saw me being abandoned by my girlfriend, my best friend, anyone I loved; saw my mother beaten; my brother crying and alone; my father dead from an overdose (this one came true, sadly).

Either way, whenever my hands were busy, my mind was dreaming.

‘From a daydream’

As often as I imagined myself flying to the UK, I never thought I would be a poet in Wales.

I never thought I would be a poet, period.

When I won a scholarship and moved to Cardiff nearly 16 years ago, I was convinced all my best daydreams were coming true.

I was escaping an unhappy relationship, moving abroad to a country I’d longed to visit, and was going to write a memoir. 

But, the MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University gave me more.

I fell in love with the department, the course, the city. I also fell in love with poetry.

In his book, Poetics of Space, the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, says that ‘poetry comes naturally from a daydream’.

Before arriving in Cardiff, I’d never connected these two things. I do now. 

While taking the MA, I also fell in love with a man from Swansea.

In 2016, we got married at the King Arthur in Reynoldston and—to our surprise and delight—a small herd of Gower ponies came to bless our wedding.

Guests said they could hear the flurry of hooves before they appeared on the hill.

These ponies are wild and hardy, can exist on brambles and gorse.

At night, you can hear them cry out for each other across the vast peninsula.

They stare down the sea and rarely drown.

I have always thought of these ponies as brave.

How skilfully they pick their way through pebbles, inch closer to reach the tufts of whitlow hanging from the edge of cliffs, their death only a slip away as they kneel, stretch their necks over the rockface to reach the blades—so tender and so sweet.

Breaking a Mare

My next poetry collection, Breaking a Mare, is about to be published with Parthian Books.

It is the third in a set of confessional collections which, together, could be read as a kind of poetic memoir that examines my childhood, my family, my marriage and what it means to exist between two homes at once: America and Wales.  

I have been working on this collection for nearly eight years.

Among other things, it asks what it means to be a girl on a farm, a woman in a rodeo arena.

If I did not live in Wales, I’m not sure I could have ever written it.

In particular, Cardiff—and the people I love here—have given me the physical and emotional distance I needed to safely return to troubled places. I am so grateful. I could not dream up a better and more steadfast home than the one I have here in Wales. 

Every horse is a time machine now. I often see them grazing outside a local riding school in Bute Park.

If a horse is close enough to the fence for me to touch, I do.

And then, I am transported back to girlhood in a dusty barn: daylight trickling through wooden windows, the gasp of hay being thrown on concrete, the hooves and wheelbarrows and confused rooster crowing in the late afternoon.

One electric touch and it is me and my pony, my mother and her mother, my grandfather clanging with his farrier tools, my father’s shadow building stalls in the background. 

And then, before I know it, I am back. In Cardiff, alongside the Taff, about to walk home again.

The horse’s soft exhale its own kind of magic.  

Christina Thatcher’s third collection Breaking a Mare is published by Parthian Books. https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/pre-order/products/breaking-a-mare