CHRISTY DUCKER lives in Northumberland. Her pamphlet Armour (Smith/Doorstop, 2011) was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and is also a Read Regional title for 2012–13. Her poetry commissions include residencies for Port of Tyne and English Heritage. Some of her recent work appears in the collaborative book Tyne View (New Writing North, 2012). She has received the Andrew Waterhouse Prize, and is currently writing a series of poems about Grace Darling, as part of her PhD research at Newcastle University.
These poems address the hidden history of Grace Darling, a nineteenth-century lighthouse-keeper. Overnight, Darling became famous for saving nine lives at sea. The subsequent attention made her ill and she died at the age of twenty-six. Beyond these basic facts, silence. Or so I thought.
Some years ago, I began to read the Darling archive. Her letters challenged the heroic myth, and detailed a strange reality. I was struck by the extremes of her life, how literate she was, how scientifically expert. She broke the mould in ways that went unnoticed, ways I wanted to salvage in poems.
‘Grace Darling’s ABC’ is an abecedary sequence. Eight of the twenty-six poems are included here. Although alphabetical, the sequence is not chronological. There is one poem for every year of Darling’s life – each links an experience to a letter shape. In Darling’s notebooks, she decorates her letters and gives them different attributes. I wanted this to inform my poems, and show how Darling inhabited her own literacy.
There are three further poems here. These introduce ‘Grace Darling’s Journal’, a ten-poem sequence about reluctant fame. The ‘Journal’ shows Darling besieged by fans, her island wrecked by their clamour for souvenirs. As the sequence progresses, lines grow longer, rhyme more insistent, and Darling’s loss of privacy more pronounced.
Together, these poems explore the cross-currents that make a life. My aim is a humanist biography of Darling, alert to her public and private stories. I feel poetry and biography sit well together, as poems and lives are each sustained by breath.