LEONIE RUSHFORTH has published poems in a range of journals and magazines and won the Keats-Shelley Prize in 2003. She chaired the Forward Poetry Prizes panel in 2012. She is a teacher of English at St Paul’s Girls’ School and lives in London.
It’s appropriate that the first poem in this group, ‘How To Get There’, is a set of directions; writing a poem is usually a process of making my way somewhere I can’t get to using normal navigational instruments like thought or conversation. Most of these poems are linked with specific places: the Freud Museum in Hampstead regularly hosts exhibitions and recently showed the work of Louise Bourgeois – the extraordinary Janus Fleuri was one of the pieces in that show; Fontenay is a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey in Burgundy, intact, much visited; Gorky Park, at the time this poem was written, was still the park planned by the constructivist architect Melnikov in 1928. Two other poems need a brief note: ‘Song for Carmen’ was previously published in the December/January 2003 issue of the London Magazine; ‘You With Work To Do’ is a version of Pushkin’s poem ‘The Prophet’.